FEATURES
RIDESHARE RELATIONSHIPS: A NEW KIND OF THERAPY
IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT AT 2 A.M. AND YOU’RE HEADED HOME FROM THE BAR IN THE BACKSEAT OF YOUR UBER.YOU FIND YOURSELF IN DEEP CONVERSATION WITH YOUR DRIVER, TALKING LIKE YOU’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR YEARS. HERE ARE THOSE STORIES. WORDS ASHLEY FLAWS ILLUSTRATION KATE SEGLER
“I
f love is, you go to bed at night, you close your eyes, and you’re thinking about this person, I was in love with him.” Caitlin Langelier sat attentively in her seat, taking in the words of the old man in front of her. If she were a therapist, perhaps she would have been jotting down notes as the man spoke, inserting “and how do you feel about that” as necessary. But she wasn’t a therapist. She was a random passenger in the backseat of some random Lyft driver’s vehicle. And she hadn’t asked him a thing; this confession was entirely of his own free will. It had started with small talk about current events: a serial killer targeting the gay community in Langelier’s home of Toronto had finally been caught. Then, things got personal real quick. “There was something on the radio about the police; people were very upset with the police about the response to the crime, so he started talking about it,” Langelier says. “My defenses kind of went
38
WINTER 2020 | DRAKE MAG
up being like, ‘Oh no, please don’t say something weird…’ I was just like OK, usually the best defense in those situations is to tell people that I’m gay so they start to watch their behavior. So I was like, ‘Oh, well for my community, the gay community, this is how we feel about it.’” Expecting the conversation to come to an abrupt halt or land in more neutral territory, Langelier was shocked when her driver suddenly confessed his crush on a friend from his boyhood. Only two minutes into their drive, she already knew the stranger’s deepest secret, one that had never been shared with anyone else—not even his wife. Langelier’s experience isn’t unique. Harvard Professor of Sociology, Dr. Mario Luis Small, explains that strangers are actually likely confidants. “We found that for recent experiences in a national sample, about half the time [people] confided in somebody, it was somebody they were not close to,” Small says.
The confined nature of an Uber or taxi cab often creates the sense of security people need to reveal their secrets. While definitely not the holiest of places, it somehow still serves as a rolling confessional. Add a priest, and you’re all the way there.
BUMPS IN THE ROAD According to data compiled from SherpaShare, a platform focused on bettering the rideshare community, the national average trip distance in an Uber or Lyft is 6.4 miles. So depending on the driver’s route, passengers can be spending anywhere between five to 20 undisturbed minutes with their drivers on a typical ride. And as Langelier found out, it only takes one minute for someone to open up. But more often than not, it’s not the drivers with loose lips—it’s the passengers. And Small says drivers often just happen to be in the right place at the right time. “One of the ways to think about this is that over the course of our lives, we all have
