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

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

School settings provided him with the ingredients sociologists consider essential for connection: continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.

sharing a statement or insight and asking a question to follow up.

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.

If we want to make and keep friends, we need to swim against the tides of disconnection that have been gradually contaminating us for centuries.

When others reject or leave them, the loneliness feels omnipresent and unbearable.

Our thoughts often hurt us more than our bullies do.

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

the collapsing of time, the superimposition of the past onto the present.