Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends

I rationalized my behavior by assuming “we just don’t vibe,” but the truth is, I felt threatened by all the new people, worried they wouldn’t like me, so I didn’t give us a chance to connect.

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

Maybe villains are more like us than we think. Maybe if we felt loved and accepted, we, like the Grinch, would all be our “real selves,” and our masks would fall to the floor like crunchy leaves from an autumn tree.

One in which giving up a promotion to have free time for the people you love is wasted potential. In which mentioning you’re lonely is still taboo—despite 61 percent of Americans admitting to it behind closed doors.

Authenticity, however, involves allowing ourselves to feel rejected by the friend who abandoned us, hurt by our friend’s taunts, or incompatible with our childhood friend. It’s a state of internal honesty. It’s who we are underneath these defense mechanisms we’ve constructed for our self-protection.* And when we dislodge these defenses, we find we

Rebecca Solnit shared, “To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

Their faith in others also reassures them that they’ll have support when disappointed.

We have to get good at saying hello, introducing ourselves, inviting people out to coffee. We must do it repeatedly too.

Before 1800, there wasn’t even a word for loneliness as we know it today. The word “lonely” described the state of being alone, rather than the exquisite pain of it.

We are left with the sense that these villains need only to confront their scars for their core of goodness to be unleashed.