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

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

My motto is that if I ever meet anyone I think is really cool, I’m going to follow up with them and ask them to meet up again.

Shame is the sense that our secrets make us unworthy of human connection. It’s why, when we’re vulnerable, it doesn’t just feel like our secrets are at stake, but our entire being.

Achieving regularity will make it more likely that others will feel positively toward you. On the other hand, mere exposure means that to make friends, you have to show up again and again. But mere exposure alone doesn’t build relationships; initiation does. I suggest building up “spontaneous communication” with other regulars over time and seeing

Initiate, unapologetically, and then do it again and again.

covert avoidance looks like showing up physically but checking out mentally. It is getting to the event but failing to engage with others, not making eye contact, talking really fast, messing with your phone, petting the dog, playing thumb war with the dog, and winning unjustly because the poor creature has no opposable thumbs. Initiative requires

Research finds, for example, that secure people modulate their disclosures depending on whether the other person reciprocates, whereas anxious people disclose, no matter the response of the other party.

“anomie,” a disjuncture between the norms of society and what people need to thrive.

Clive ended up connecting with two people from the networking event, a number that would have been zero if he hadn’t initiated. Clive’s story also reveals that initiative doesn’t mean just showing up. It requires more than that. You must engage with people when you get there, sometimes multiple people. Persistence, it seems, pays off. If you are pe

Mere exposure is justification for the value of persistence. Instead of committing to a single happy hour to make friends, commit to a group for at least three months before dropping out, otherwise you’ll foil mere exposure.