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

People with anxious attachment try to merge with people they’re close to, building relationships of such closeness that their sense of self dissolves. Such intimacy soothes their fears of abandonment while making them vulnerable to an unhealthy friendship dynamic

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

Avoidants, like Jared, push others away, perceiving relationships not for the joy and fulfillment they bring but for their pressures and responsibilities.

when we downplay our feelings, we invite misunderstanding.

Our friends advertise the kaleidoscope of ways we can live. They expose us to new ways of being in the world, showing us another life is possible. As

when it comes to human psychology, thinking others are judging you has the same effect on you as others actually judging you.

“We choose people for relationships because we want to become like them, after all,” he shared. “It’s a way for us to enrich who we are.”

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

if you are lonely, or push people away, or use humor to hide uncomfortable feelings, or try to be strong all the time, or think everyone will reject you, or keep hurting those who love you, or are overcome with jealousy, or don’t feel truly seen, or don’t feel like enough, then stagnancy is its own agony.