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Loneliness

He who has a why can

tolerate almost any how.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

There are no mirrors in Sartre’s play No Exit. This theatrical conceit is meant to force the audience to squirm with the realization that “hell is other people.” Now, like all the existential writers, Sartre was doing his best to raise the consciousness of the ennui zeitgeist of his time, but focusing on one end of a continuum – even in an educative effort – always leaves out half a truth. And when half a truth is missing what you are left with could be considered a lie.

Other people are also heaven. Speaking less poetically, human beings thrive in community, cocooned in social capital that protects them from being too alone as they are buffeted by Fate.

The whole truth then is that other people can be both hell and heaven, and disregarding either side of this truth renders your thinking inaccurate.

Where does this can’t-live-with-them-can’t-live-without-them hyphenate leave us? Smack dab in the reality that we all need to put some serious thought into the state of our social world. This thinking tends to be something we do only when we feel overburdened with social obligations or when we feel lonely. Folks with too many friends might want to check this out. The folks I am interested in addressing here are those who have been unable to gather comrades around them of sufficient quality and quantity to keep the loneliness wolves at bay.

While episodes of loneliness are unavoidable for us all and many of us cherish our alone time, none of us want to spend too much time isolated from the attachments that power our lives.

How does it happen?

There are, unfortunately, many ways people can find themselves without community support. Here are a few of those:

• People with a great need for solitude may unwittingly withdraw too completely from society. What was once a moat to protect them from over stimulation becomes a barrier to reentering the social world.

• Neuroses can go untreated for too long and create such a chaotic version of ourselves that we drive people away. One such neurosis is indulgence in the drama of isolation. If we get too enamored of our martyr status of aloneness we can find ourselves trapped there.

• Illness or tragedy visited upon us can make it very difficult for untrained people to know how to behave around us, and they retreat, leaving us both afflicted and isolated.

• Death of a spouse, divorce or a breakup can also rip away a previously supportive community.

• A vicious partner can overtly drive away anyone who would be a friend. This tragic state of affairs is way too common.

• Being extremely intelligent (especially in all three domains of intelligence – cognitive, emotional and existential) and/or being a polymath can intimidate many people and interfere with the relationship-building process. It can also be difficult for bright people to tolerate the chitchat needed to form the basis of a relationship.

• If we are too shy or too insecure we may be unable to push ourselves out into the world to find and develop friendships.

• Naïveté about the way social communities are built and maintained will also hamper our ability to form secure attachments.

• We are currently an extremely mobile society, which means we are often relocating and leaving our constructed social support systems behind. And when we arrive somewhere new, it can be extremely difficult to break into social systems that are well established.

• Sometimes we run across someone who we greatly desire but who is not available to us. The pain-caused bitterness we feel when we can’t have the intimacy we want so badly can cause us to lose interest in forming other relationships.

• Similarly, a significant heartbreak can wound us into a habit of isolating ourselves in self-protective retreat.

• Pornography and prostitution, two very complex sociopolitical aspects of human life, can contribute mightily to loneliness by distorting reality in terms of true intimacy. In addition to the grievous harm these activities can do to the souls of women, they set up many barriers to healthy interpersonal relationships in the minds of men.

We can also, of course, experience terrible loneliness while standing in the middle of an excellent group of friends.

• We can be out of sync with our peeps for lots of developmental reasons. (They’re having kids and we’re not.)

• We can be experiencing a series of unfortunate events that make us difficult to relate to at the present time or too bitter to want to engage with others. (We’re trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant.)

• We can harbor deep shame about ourselves that prevents us from letting these excellent people around us get to know and like us better.

• We can be clinically depressed resulting in barely having the will to communicate with others let alone work to form a friendship. (If this rings true for you, please seek a professional assessment.)

None of these reasons for loneliness are irreparable. None of these reasons for loneliness suggest that a person is unlikable. All of these reasons point to solutions for the state of our loneliness.

When we are alone

What happens to us, then, when we run out of that vital social capital?

No matter the cause, when we find ourselves with an insufficient community we will also find ourselves vulnerable to the hollow feelings of alienation. The emotional depletion that occurs when we have too few and too low-quality interactions with others is called loneliness. Distinct from solitude, this unwelcome state is the result of a pattern of unlucky social realities such as those listed above. Like the proverbial and blighted frog in the pot of water on the stove, most of us fail to recognize the danger of a growing depletion in our community until we find ourselves so isolated and de-energized we cannot easily remedy the situation. What starts as a gradual decline then becomes an abrupt plunge into a dark hole.

Loneliness tells us we are living our lives without the security and provisioning of an interpersonal base camp. Because human interactions are our greatest source of energy, empathy, stipulation, assistance, fun and so on, an absence of a fairly reliable influx of intimacy will leave us undersupplied with these ingredients necessary for a well-fed and flavorful life.

Although described in detail elsewhere on the website, let’s look at the energizing aspects of relationships between human beings.

• An I-Thou connection: This is the gold standard of intimacy in that it represents the closest any two people can get due to the existential truth that we are all minds trapped within skulls. In an I-Thou interaction, the most subjective, unguarded and genuine personas of two individuals meet. The encounter can be between complete strangers (fans at a soccer game cheering a tie-breaking goal) or long-coupled adults (grandparents presiding over a family dinner.) It can be as brief as a knowing glance or as long as an all-night conversation. The earnest sharing is bilateral, egalitarian and sweet. As a result, both participants emerge from the encounter with more energy for having been well met. The ability to engage in this type of interaction improves over time within healthy relationships due to increased overlap of experiences, emotional vocabulary, values, transparency and so on.

• A recipient of our daily press conference: Intimacy increases with immediacy. The more someone knows about our minute-by-minute existence, the greater will be their ability to care for us. We all need an array of folks who, more or less, know what’s going on in our lives. To that end, we curate information for them and present it as often as they will allow. These moments of “catching up” with another person provide a zing of recognition energy. If there’s no one around to hear our press conference, we will gradually cease gathering up our understanding of our day. When this becomes a pervasive disconnect from our own lives, we become can even become disengaged from ourselves – the deepest kind of loneliness.

• External feedback: As I alluded to in the first paragraph of this article, mirrors are devices we use to get to know ourselves. It could be argued that the most important mirror we utilize is how we are reflected back by other people. No one should be unclear on how critical such reflection is in parenting. Kids need frequent reassurance about how they’re doing in their attempts to get good at life. This need to receive ontological feedback from our human world never ceases. Close your eyes for a moment and picture someone attending to you closely enough to provide you with sensitive mirroring. Can’t you feel your heartbeat speed up just a little? Attention from without makes us just a little self-conscious which heightens our limbic state, releasing energy into our cells. Positive reflections will clearly fill us with satisfying self-consciousness and a positive energy surge. Absent reflection from others, it can be hard to track and validate our successes, to celebrate our improvements, and to recapitulate our daily progress. It can also, BTW, be hard to detect when there is spinach stuck between the teeth of our efforts without the helpful critical feedback of caring others encouraging us to try a bit harder.

• Pressure from others: If we are too much alone, we also forfeit the challenge of those boundary situations that enhance our growth. When we are invited to meet someone at the line that divides our life from their life, on the other hand, we are given the opportunity to stretch ourselves in reaction to them. That expansion can feel quite exhilarating. But when no one in our life is close enough to bring out something new in us, we will have to constantly fight the “So what?” verbiage in our heads. In other words, with no one close by who matters to us, we may lack the energy to successfully fight off the temptation to abdicate our existential responsibilities. As a result, we may struggle in the fight against either shrinking or calcifying our sense of self.

• Admiration motivation: One of the nicest aspects of having people in your life who matter to you is the external motivation we get when our admiration for another drives our striving to impress them. It’s a giddy gift indeed to receive mentorship that stimulates this seemingly effortless risk taking. Apologies to Billy Joel, but it is easier to hit the high notes when you play for Christie Lee. And, let’s be honest, a little competitive goose to our efforts can also have a positive effect on our day. All external motivation is energizing because it takes the place of our willpower, meaning we can save that limited resource for other things.

• Biochemistry of attachment: When you are standing close to someone who captivates you, even if you are not touching, their proximity causes changes in the chemistry in your brain. Being next to an exciting person raises your epinephrine levels, and when someone you like turns and moves intentionally closer to you, a squirt of the happy juice GABA can calm you. And, of course, positive interpersonal touch releases oxytocin which bathes the brain in a sense of trust and relaxation. And that’s just the tip of the neurotransmitter iceberg of attachment. The research has been clear for decades on this truth – failure to be attached leads biochemically to a failure to thrive. Intimacy allows us to flourish by, in part, helping to make our brain happy. A happy brain is a brain replete with energy.

The heavenly side of connecting with other people, then, is that attachments provide a reliable source of oomph. Without meaningful interpersonal connections, we lose one of our major sources of psychological energy. And when detachment is ongoing and the energy drain continuous, at some point we will find ourselves spent. There is a deadly aftermath to that state.

All the tropes of loneliness start to rattle around in our head taunting us with the possibility that we are unremarkable, perhaps awful and certainly unlovable. Or maybe we start to feel that we are doomed to never find anyone who can appreciate our quirky allure. Whatever the cause of our loneliness, we feel empty, hollow, dark, outcast, lost. These rattling loneliness clichés are clichés because they are so very common, making us feel like a cliché when they start to dominate our feelings. If this dismay is left too long unattended, we can actually reach a stage where, despite our loneliness, we are weary of company. We cannot bestir ourselves to take a step outdoors or to invite anyone in. Worse yet, often the things that should bring us comfort and joy just seem to deepen the sense of having no one with whom to share. Poignancy can feel almost fatal. It’s all we can do to breathe when all we want to do is sigh.

The Everest of psychological efforts

Of all the self-uplifting endeavors, pulling yourself up and out of the abyss of loneliness requires extraordinary courage, patience and effort. People in this state deserve some help. If your situation is temporary – you have just been assigned to monitor the air quality in the middle of a wilderness area – you may just need to learn to be lonely. If that is not your situation, however, I hope you can come to believe that there are people out in the world who will be interested in you, eager to get to know you and willing to co-create a bond that will support the both of you. If you cannot imagine these things to be true, please consider finding an effective therapist to help you free up the belief that you are not unlovable.

If you are confident that you have the wherewithal to try once again to venture out into the interpersonal world, what follows is a tutorial on the art of friendship formation.

Because you are not sitting in my office, I have no way of knowing what you know and what you don’t know about the ins and outs of creating social capital. Therefore, I have to try to cover all the aspects that I think are involved in this process.

As I am wont to do on this website, I have gathered here basic information about friendships and some strategies to kick-start the emerging process necessary for escaping loneliness. You probably will have tried many of them. You may need to try them again. And hopefully there are new strategies or new understanding of old strategies that can support you as you try once more to step out into the social world.

What this means for you is that much of the material below will feel elementary and obvious. Your job is to skim through it in order to find those aspects of socialization that you didn’t know that you didn’t know. And if you can think of things I’ve left out or not covered well, please let me know.

Two goals for the remainder of this article: First, to foster the understanding that relationships involve complicated understandings and, as such, are difficult, time consuming and effortful with little margin for coasting but that relationships are worth it. And second, it’s not about changing yourself into something nicer, sweeter or more compliant so that you can win friends. It’s about thinking about this endeavor in terms of finding the people who can match with you in ways that create the spark to ignite a friendship. This means working to manipulate the odds that you will often find yourself in environments where people who fit with you are available. It will require being able to discard mismatches and to tolerate being discarded without it being personal or destructive. So, even though finding each special person involves a lot of luck, you can increase your chances by getting to know yourself and your social styles, developing the confidence to be available for the encounter and designing your interpersonal world.

Myths

Let’s start by eliminating the silly stories about friendship that pervade our culture.

• You have to be a nice person to have friends. There are gentle qualities that are important in friendship, but a pervasive niceness isn’t critical. That, of course, is great news for those of us who don’t have an easygoing personality. Feisty, direct people can make great friends.

• Unconditional love is the key to great friendships. No. Limits are critical in a relationship. Unconditional love can be aspirational, but only as a very distal goal. If pursued directly it can set up such unrealistic expectations for self and other that the resulting disappointments can overwhelm an otherwise good relationship. In other words, there may be moments of unquestioning love, but none of us are able to exist there for long periods of time. This truth is covered more completely here.

• Relationships are natural and therefore should simply spring forth simply and naïvely. This myth suggests we all know instinctively how to make friends. I hope this long article is sufficiently written to disavow you of this fallacy.

• Jealousy is unnatural and a sign of characterological weakness or poor mental health. That sound you hear is me gritting my teeth as I try to stop myself from going on a rant here. This and other “sinful” aspects of being a human being are addressed here, but let me make a few comments now. Jealousy is a feeling and all feelings are simply data about our current state as an organism. Data simply are. They cannot be wrong. What feelings of jealousy tell us is that we believe ourselves to be in a state of danger relative to something to which we are attached. Uncomfortable as these feelings may be, they can serve as a warning to us to address the source of the danger. That is not weak. That is smart. And let me add this, people who say “I’m not the jealous type.” are telling me that they are not the attaching type. Danger here.

• We need to remake ourselves before we are friend material. Sometimes a series of unfortunate events can leave us such a truncated version of ourselves that we have little to offer in terms of friendship. But, two truths here need to be incorporated into our thinking. Reaching out in need can be both a powerful and legitimate way to initiate a relationship. As long as it is time limited, most of us feel very tender toward those who ask us for help. And when we feel troubled, a relationship provides a living workshop within which we can work to recalibrate and retool ourselves. So, while taking time for yourself to heal from an emotional trauma isn’t a bad idea, a broken heart doesn’t preclude you from starting friendships. If one of these friendships turns out to be a romantic one, that’s doable, too.

• You need to have lots of friends. This tendency to crowd-source the ego tends to ease up as we mature out of the affiliative stage of early adulthood. We naturally come to realize that we can only have superficial relationships if we are trying to attach to too many people and that a collection of superficial relationships is self-limiting.

• Friends are completely honest with each other. Ack. I don’t know about you, but I need to believe that I have the right to determine what information is out there in the world about me. I know inside what sloppy, ill-considered moves I’ve made, which people I’ve hurt terribly and how many times I’ve backed away from courageous endeavors. I can share a few of these with close attachments in order for the other person to see my icky side without cataloging all my injudicious behaviors. Plus, schadenfreude aside, who wants to be the recipient of all those miserable narratives? And, finally, if I believe that I have to share all my missteps with my close friends, might I not start to limit my risks in order to limit my missteps? Just saying. It’s likely that “We tell each other everything” sets a dicey precedent.

• Modesty is critical in a friend. We will discuss below how paramount transparency is to friendship, but let me say here that the level of modesty enforced by many cultures can result in our transparency being out of balance – with too much self-critical information being shared. Being transparent means that we can and should share our successes and our glee with others.

• You can tell right away that someone is trustworthy. Nope. Not possible. Trust is only created through shared adversity. You can trust people only when you have seen them in action during a dilemma. Otherwise, all you have is their word. Trust-building is a complicated process, so please see the article describing how it is created.

In sum, when the myths about relationships are corrected, we are left with the more accurate perception – namely I don’t have to be someone else entirely to be friendship material – though I will want to work within my friendships to be a higher quality version of myself.

Learned helplessness

When circumstance doesn’t facilitate our friendship pool in quite the same way as our school years did and we find it harder to find friends, we can start to fear we aren’t friendship material. Rather than assess our pool of potential friends, we assess our basic likeability. That can lead to a vicious circle that starts with a lack of confidence leading to awkward interpersonal behavior or social withdrawal leading to lack of relationships leading back to lack of confidence. It is key to understand two things. First, we must understand that the make-up of our social environment directly affects our ability to find friends. Second, we have to remember that because we had such an easy time making friends as youngsters, we tend to not learn the ingredients that go into making friendships.

So, before we start to build up a library of friendship skills, let’s clarify a few of the truths about relationships.

• Target rich environments. If you were sitting in my office talking to me about how lonely you are, the first thing I’d want to check would be your level of education with respect to the formation of friendships. Most of us spend our first 18-21 years marinated in a target rich environment in terms of potential attachments, namely a fairly homogeneous group of people in our age bracket and with a similar SES – namely our local schools. This leads us to the grossly mistaken belief that making friends is easy. When the natural structures that provide social capital (schools, teams, churches, unions, associations, clubs) are absent from a person’s life, the routine interpersonal juxtaposition that those structures create will also be missing. With juxtaposition comes exposure and with exposure we experience cooperation and mutual sympathy. These sharing contexts, common jargon and abundance of behavioral empathy naturally glue people together making it easier to find a few special friendships. Once out of school settings our environment is much less rich in compatible people. And because juxtaposition is the single most important factor in creating connection, we have to take responsibility for righting this wrong-place-at-the-right-time situation. Hence the first item in the strategy section below.

• Quality moments in quantity of interactions. Even darling grandchildren are often not wonderful to be around. Everyone has to learn that lovely, bonding moments occur infrequently enough in every relationship that it takes an abundance of exposure for those moments to add up to a close friendship. When you are depleted by loneliness it can be extra difficult to both remember and tolerate this truism. So the thing to keep in mind is this: If there are people around you who are busy living their lives, the chances are very good that if you spend enough time around them your attachment to them will deepen. Even if they are not best friend material, they can often energize you, motivate you and reflect you in helpful ways.

• Know what you want from relationships. Distinct from a primary relationship and from familial relationships, there are things we get from friendships that heighten our enjoyment of life. Try to figure out for yourself what you need friends for so that you can both select good options from the people available to you and also shape the relationships you have to better suit your tastes. For me, if people can make me laugh, teach me something or work with me to discover something together, I’m in.

• Annoyance tolerance. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this website, there are only two realities for humans: they are either alone or annoyed. This is because other people are annoying – not due to their personalities, but due to their separateness. You could clone yourself and live with your self and still be annoyed because your clone will have its own thing going on. Sometimes that “thing” will be annoying to you. In fact, aren’t there times when you are annoyed with yourself? How many times have you asked something of yourself that your right-now self refuses to accommodate? Anyway, if a person has an extraordinarily low tolerance for annoyance due to personality type or habit, allowing for enough time for a relationship to build the emotional equity needed to offset the annoyance factor can be difficult.

Interpersonal skills that foster friendship

If we think of our social life as a tapestry that brings continuity and beauty into our lives, we can imagine how each person contributes uniquely to the fabric of our lives. Some, like family members and childhood friends, serve as the warp of our lives – hopefully staying with us over the length of our life story. Others may come and go as they briefly weft through our days, and some just add a splash of color. Very few of us are intentional, skillful weavers. We ignore or abuse our long-term relationships, we randomly insert people without thinking about it, we ignore holes in our lives where friends are needed and we pull too hard on some of the friendships we do have.

This next section is meant to encourage you to review your capacity to be a good friend by ensuring that you have not let any of the myriad friendships skills atrophy.

Curiosity

Most of us feel so overexposed to information that we have learned to shutter our curiosity down in order to make it through the day without being terminally over stimulated. Unfortunately, robust curiosity is nonnegotiable in developing a relationship, meaning that we may now be too shuttered to form an attachment or maintain affection. Sometimes the freshness of a new relationship will restore our curiosity to its natural high level, but too often our curiosity remains low. In addition to lifestyle stress, our interest in others can be depressed because we are too busy trying to think of ways to be impressive. Rather than attend to our friend, we may be busy inside our minds writing a press release. If we can take a deep breath and remember that half our job in a relationship is to “get” the other person, we can make some space for our curiosity to reassert. We can just be quiet, in other words, and listen.

Sometimes our early years trained curiosity out of us with shaming words for our inquisitiveness (nosiness, snooping, prying), with taunting for being ignorant when we asked questions or with rules about being hyper polite. Personal questions are considered rude by some cultures and some families, meaning there was no modeling of the overt getting-to-know-you process. Finally, in families that had to organize around lies because the truth was simply unbearable (incest, violence, substance abuse, etc.), curiosity would be nearly eradicated by the adults who needed everyone to keep secrets. We need to reclaim our childlike ability to be curious because it is a sine qua non of relationship.

Curiosity reflects the belief that there is something valuable to be learned from another and urges us to explore what the other knows, has done, experienced and thinks. And if we pay close attention, we can move beyond the demographics and factoids of our friends’ lives to witness their process of living. We get to see their quests up close and personally as they share with us their ambitions and achievements. If we are very lucky, we get to see a few of their missteps as well, allowing us to compare the insides of ourselves with a little of the insides of our friends. Our deep curiosity will allow us, you can see, access to another view of reality. Such a shift in perspective expands our way of thinking, strengthens our ability to differentiate and can open up a new uncertainty within which we can play.

Because what interests us is completely individual, our curiosity about others will be uniquely suited to us. We can think of our personal curiosity, then, as a divining rod of intimacy, helping us discover those folks who will likely provide us with a compelling relationship. If you are not very curious about another person, why would you want to start a relationship with them? This may seem like an odd question, but, really. And, because curiosity cuts both ways in a relationship, the inverse is also true. Why would you want to befriend someone who feels no curiosity about you? Clues suggesting a general lack of curiosity between two people would be a pattern of perfunctory, polite inquiry or endless prattle or a tendency for bilateral, competitive bloviating. Behaviors like these clearly demonstrate a limited interest in the other person. We experience this many times a day when someone asks “How are you?” then nods politely with a glazed gaze, clearly waiting for us to stop talking.

Curiosity about our people should be everlasting. As described in the article on the work of relationships, we are at our best as friends if we can hold onto the idea that our buddy is slightly different than they were last time we saw them. When we ask, “What’s new?” we should mean it.

But it does take energy to be curious, which brings us to curiosity in established relationships. In ongoing relationships, a lack of curiosity suggests a tune-up might be in order. A dead zone in an old relationship is usually caused by a pattern of stagnated resentment leading to withholding. The cure is not to force curiosity but to heal the resentment. The entirety of Section V can help with that process.

I feel the need to add a few thoughts here about curiosity and gender. One major cause of resentment in relationships – both new and old – is caused by the gender difference between men and women with regard to curiosity. Most women are equally curious about men and women. Most stereotypically masculine men aren’t. These men have been taught that women aren’t interesting, that their lives are silly, trivial, domestic and inconsequential. Even the lives of professional women are considered derivative and thus less compelling than are the lives of professional men. This is the hierarchy of difference that I address in the article on feminism. Let me just say here that, like all “isms,” the sexism inherent in this curiosity divide runs deep in everyone. It is simply up to every man to think honestly about this and wonder about why he has very little interest in the feminine world. And it is up to every woman to think honestly about how this hierarchy of bias reverberates in her life.

Awareness of and interest in the other creates an encounter heightened with intensity. This can be a great part of the fun and excitement of a new relationship, feeling the joy of being the focus of someone else’s curiosity and getting in return the delight of pursuing our own curiosity. It can also be a great part of a maturing relationship as the years spent in friendship polish our humanity to a fine shine.

If you want to make and keep friends, then, make sure that dust hasn’t been accumulating on your curiosity.

Listening Skills

As a psychologist I can tell you, truly listening to someone is very hard work. Every part of your brain must be focused on hearing the other, seeing the other and making sense of what you are receiving. There are three entire articles about this one topic, but let me just address the ingredients of active listening briefly here.

First, settle in and decide you’re going to be the one who is listening. Operative words here being: decide, settle and listen. You cannot even begin to effectively hear someone unless you are choosing to hear, you are comfortably settled and you are committed to being the receiver. Those three words reflect a willingness to be curious, respectful and open to a new experience. They also indicate that you are prepared to eliminate distractions and will agree to concentrate – not half-heartedly, but whole-heartedly.

Second, you have to bracket back the part of your brain that is eager to form a response to whatever the other person is currently saying. It can take some practice to gently shush the inner erudite pundit who is oh-so eager to contribute to the conversation. But if you are truly listening, your mind should be focused on understanding not replying. And this prohibition absolutely applies to donating any solutions that may pop into your head.

Third, you have to remind yourself who is doing the talking. To the best of your ability, you have to think about where the individual speaking is coming from in terms of their patterns, vocabulary, values, etc. Is this the kind of person, for example, who lightly throws around curse words, or is the atypical stream of profanity coming at you from your friend an indication of a high level of distress? And if this is a new person you are listening to, remember to assume very little.

Fourth, you have to figure that you are going to jump to conclusions. Therefore, when you reach a conclusion about what you think they are communicating, you need to check it out with them. Use some variation on the old bromide from the 60s: “What I hear you saying is…” Never underestimate how respectful that reflection can be.

Fifth, let the other person supervise your listening. If you query them with your sense of what they are saying and they correct you – believe them.

There tends to be a gender difference here as there is with curiosity. Men have lots of experience absorbing concrete information which makes them good listeners for fact-based discussions. When the focus of a conversation switches to either emotional topics or process-oriented heart-to-hearts, many men have a hard time keeping up and so will often tune out. Again, the articles in Section V of the website are designed to help ameliorate this gender gap in listening skill.

Empathy

Empathy is a communication loop that involves sustained attention filtered through emotional intelligence. The loop requires listening intently and hearing something in what the person is saying with which you think you can identify, then retreating back into your own head to try to understand how you are identifying with them and then transmitting that identification back to them.

Rather than trying to briefly address this multi-step looping process here, I urge you to read the article on empathy if you have not already done so. I cannot imagine being able to have a very genuine friendship without an evolved ability to behave empathically toward each other.

Authenticity and transparency

Authenticity and transparency are difficult to tease apart in terms of creating deep attachment, so I’m going to look at how they work together to enhance intimacy.

Authenticity is an honest representation – to yourself and to others – of who you are moment by moment. It requires accuracy in terms of knowing as well as transmitting who you are. Coherent disclosure allows others to understand you and to trust you because the data stream coming from you provides them with a consistent and reliable picture of what you’re about. And if you are authentic, your disclosures will align with your ongoing behavior.

Authenticity is both difficult and dangerous. It is tricky to genuinely report what is going on within us because it has to be done in real time in an encounter between two individuals who are simultaneously becoming themselves at a point in history that is just now unfolding. That last sentence deserves a little thought-filled pause. How often do we think about how risky it is to earnestly report who we actually are under those circumstances, unrehearsed and adlibbed? The potential for humiliation looms large when we spontaneously self-disclose. Truth be told, few of us have successfully shed the knee-jerk gut-wrench that happens when we fear we have been too earnest in an interaction with someone who is determined to look sophisticated by being aloof.

Transparency quantifies how deep we are willing to go in terms of sharing our authentic selves. The depth finding between any two people requires some thought, finesse and cooperation. That is to say, there needs to be agreement on how much to share, when to share it and how to share it.

The more willing each person is to share authentically and transparently, the greater will be the trust that grows between them. But these two skills put pressure on a relationship because they both demand reciprocity. Some people will want a very deep relationship with little artifice between them. Others will want a more superficial, less intimate relationship. If the level of comfort with sharing doesn’t match between the two people, the friendship will likely founder then sink. (Or it becomes a donationship with one person contributing a braver personal narrative and the other person withholding.)

One of the true payoffs, maybe the whole point of friendships, is the process that happens when someone shows you some of their insides and you show them some of yours and nobody blanches and withdraws. We see their humanness and we still like them, they see our insides and still like us, and since those two experiences are lived truth for us, we can like ourselves a little better. That last sentence may require a think or two. Let me put it this way: if I can like you better when I see your flawed humanity, maybe I can work toward liking my flawed humanity a little more.

But, again, the dyad needs to agree on the balance between sharing and personal privacy. We need to transmit authenticity at a level that is appropriate for the strength and age of the relationship.

Too much self-disclosure can be seen as malignant narcissism at work. It reflects a lack of empathy when you don’t stop to think about what it feels like to receive inappropriate self-disclosure. I’m sure you know people like this – who expect you to be interested in every detail of their lives, even the repellent ones. People who over share are also ignoring the pressure it puts on the other person to either set stronger limits on sharing or push to self-disclose more than they might want to. Healthy narcissism, on the other hand, allows for an individual to feel confident enough to share a few warts while remaining empathic enough to hold the self-disclosure to agreed-upon levels. (More on the crucial role of narcissism in friendship below.)

Too little self-disclosure can be seen as stoic withholding. The loneliness of being in a relationship with someone who won’t be transparent can be soul-crushing. Emotional stinginess is a mean-spirited trap. If a partner won’t share their authentic insides, the other person is stuck in two ways. She will never get to know him and she will never feel comfortable sharing her authentic insides. If we can’t share frankly who we are, we get stuck with the following question: If you aren’t liked for who you are, are you liked?

As the pronouns in the above paragraph imply, there is once again a common gender difference that can create tension when a man and a woman try to be friends. In inter-gender relationships, the female is often more experienced in and comfortable with being transparent, but feels blocked out by the male’s tendency to be guarded and self-protective. This can set up a situation where the relationship either stalls or becomes hierarchical. Because humans tend to project perfection onto silence, when hyper-masculine men are reluctant to share themselves deeply (including their flaws and their works in progress), they will appear superior to the women who are sharing. There are many cultural causes of this gender imbalance in transparency, so once more, it is incumbent on each individual to explore and probably modify the stoic/transparent values they have inherited from their forebears.

A genuine encounter can be quite exhausting, but you don’t have to aspire to have this be a constant state of authentic transparency. (This is one of the reasons therapy sessions tend to be only one hour.) Again, a normal relationship will have quantity time with quality time embedded in it.

When the correct balance of authentic transparency is reached, we can achieve that slow dance of intimacy where we share ourselves in a manner that allows both of us to feel known, endorsed and loveable. Further, if authenticity is by definition the truth signified, we will also be the beneficiaries of multiple worldviews brought to us by the authenticity of our friends.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is something that people don’t tend to think about when they think of critical components in friendship, but we all need safe places to talk about things that we won’t want to share with everyone. If someone is indiscriminately sharing your information with others, you then enter into a level of intimacy with people you neither expected nor desired. You deserve to be the one who determines with whom you want to be transparent.

Most of us are sloppy at best with this concept. This is also one of the reasons people can be so deeply affected by a relationship with a therapist – because it feels so good to be able to talk freely where confidences are rigorously protected.

Confidentiality is a very difficult skill to master. Even people who don’t consider themselves enamored of the thrill of gossip will inadvertently pass on personal information. Sometimes this is done in the simple enthusiasm of sharing. Other times it’s just forgetting to be careful. It takes practice to categorize the information we have in our minds into appropriate ownership groupings so we know what information can be shared with others and what can’t. It also takes practice to strengthen the guard on our tongues. We need to pledge within our minds to protect our friendships by demonstrating the ability to hold confidences. It’s important to remember that it takes time to prove that we have created an environment of trust because the absence of an act is hard to spot. This is especially true in terms of confidentiality. We can’t exactly brag to a friend that we haven’t spilled the beans on their face plant at the gym. Plus, all it takes to lose ground is to slip up once. Oops.

We all know how to keep our mouths shut. We all need to choose to remind ourselves to do so in order to provide a place where our friends can process things in a fairly unedited fashion, where their experiential trials and errors won’t be passed on to others.

And, given that people become more and more open and vulnerable over time in a relationship, we need to ratchet up our ability to keep their confidences privately held the longer we know someone.

Vision of friendship

Whether we are aware of it or not, we all have a vision of what friendship is in general and what specific type of friendship we want with the various people in our lives. Our general sense of friendship can range from the belief that each one is precious and deserving of our wholehearted, consistent effort to the belief that friendship is just something that happens easily and friends come and go somewhat randomly. What we want from a person specifically has to do with needs we have that we believe they can fill. We may want them to be a tennis partner, a carpool friend or a best friend. Or we may need them to fill a specific developmental niche – a mentor, a sidekick, a co-explorer, etc.

There is no right or wrong to these visions of friendship. Some friendships endure and thrive with a small overlap, such as simply being across-the-street neighbors. Other friendships involve many, many facets in common resulting in lots of shared time and activities. But you can see how a mismatch between the desires of two people for a certain level of intimacy could set up some problems.

Even though it is very helpful if these visions align, it’s rare indeed for two new acquaintances to sit and discuss their philosophy on friendship during the first meeting – or ever. In fact, we have neither a vocabulary nor a protocol for a discussion about where and how we want someone to fit into our lives. Picture meeting someone and saying the following: “Hi. So glad to meet you. Hey, I’m aware that I am liking what I am seeing with you right now and would like to audition you for a role in my life. I have an opening for a walking buddy and someone to go wine tasting with occasionally. Interested?” We also lack a manner of setting limits with people when we want less than they do. Again, picture saying: “Hey, Marilyn. I like you but not enough to meet with you too often. Would you be interested in getting together maybe once every few months?”

Absent any models or words to help us clarify our vision of a specific friendship, we leave the evolution of a friendship to the unfolding, implicit process created by time spent together. We obscurely transmit that we want to engage with someone with invitations and we ghost people with whom we don’t click. A sadly primitive process. But, with no vocabulary for communicating about the desires we have for another, we are left with only hints and flirtations, snubs and withdrawals.

Probably a good place to start to remedy this situation would be to ponder our overall vision of friendships and to review the portfolio of our social world from time to time. There is probably a minimum size and complexity of friendships needed for each of us to function optimally. We may need a selection of friends that include some older, wiser voices, some younger, challenging ones, some quiet, receptive folks and some wild, crazy ones. We probably would all benefit from at least a few people in our lives who have known us over decades and watched us tackle challenge after challenge. Sadly, with so much mobility, stress and over-stimulation in our daily lives, few of us stop to think about our social situations. You might ask yourself: what would it look like if I listed my friends in the following four categories: long-time close friends, long-time lost friends, daily close friends and intermittent friends? What if you wonder to yourself: Who knows me well? Who do I know well? How much time, thought, effort do I put into my social world in an average month? Remember, there is no right answer. There are only answers that are more right for you than not.

Resource balance

As I stated previously, interpersonal relationships are our greatest sources of ontological energy. The epigraph of the article addresses this truth. If we have enough people in our lives who matter (our why), we can put up with almost anything (the how). But the energy exchange between two people needs to be balanced.

The sources of the energy that flows between people – power and narcissism – are two greatly misperceived psychological constructs. Let me define them once again just to make sure you aren’t misunderstanding how I use these words on this website.

Power is the ability to do. Just that. Too often power is thought of as the authority to force others to do what we want. While power may lead to the ability to control others (for good or ill), that influence is secondary to personal potency. It’s important to note here that we each have some innate power (gifts and traits) and some acquired power (socio-political intelligence). Even though a healthy life existentially speaking is one in which the person optimizes both types of power, we don’t need to strive to be a super power. In other words, mastery of our gifts and traits (the potential for the innate power) and the ability to be a coherent and skillful participant in a community (acquired power) is all we need to achieve.

Narcissism, when healthy, is a willingness to put yourself out into the world and try to shine – to yoke your innate and acquired powers as it were – without trampling on others when you do. It represents a donation of your gifts in their current state to the community around you. As such, healthy narcissism is generous and always entertaining. Is it ever not diverting to watch someone display their prowess? In the mature adult, narcissism needs to be balanced with empathic sensitivity resulting in enlightened self interest rather than insatiable attention-seeking.

People vary in their personal power and their healthy narcissism, which means people vary in their ability to provide energy in a relationship. If there isn’t a sense of being an equal resource for one another, the relationship will have a difficult time being maintained because the imbalance will tend to increase over time. (Some friendships are based on a mentoring model, which is actually balanced in terms of someone who needs to teach and someone who needs to learn. Still, this unusual type of friendship exists within a limited scope.)

With the exception of the leader/sidekick relationship, what gets unpleasantly out of balance in a dyad is the pecking order. When a relationship becomes hierarchical, one person is driving the relationship. That’s a lot of work. After a while, the extra work of being in charge of the dyad and providing the leadership energy will start to create resentment. Plus the one-up person also has to fight the understandable allure of becoming a bit despotic, and that constant need for self-restraint is also tiring.

When a relationship becomes hierarchical, the one-down person is being driven. That’s demoralizing. After a while, that weaker position within the dyad will start to chafe. Already less able to feel narcissistically entitled to their own power, the disenfranchised person will often struggle even more to believe that their strengths are interesting enough to share. They will be even less inclined to present themselves or participate in the running of the relationship. As they take up less and less time in the partnerships they will start to exist only as an echo of their former selves.

Each of us needs to be entertained by someone who is a partner in a relationship. What this all means is that we have to learn how to like being seen if we are going to allow others to get to know us and be delighted with us – that is, we all need healthy narcissism. If that ability has been misplaced during the growing-up phase, we need to reclaim it. We also need similar levels of personal power which we have each created by implementing our essence in all the domains of our life. A relationship with long-term potential, then, is one where each member of the dyad has about the same level of narcissism and power, which will combine to bring bilateral energy into the partnership.

Courage

When we extend our heart toward someone in an effort to forge a bond, we are putting ourselves at risk for singing the blues. We reach out toward someone understanding that we will be affected, but we don’t know to what degree and in what direction. Will they like us? Will they match us in narcissism and power? Do they have room for us in their lives? Will we continue to be intrigued by them? We develop genuine crush-like feelings for the people we seek to become friends with and to not have that returned (or returned and then rejected) is very painful.

Unfortunately, once past the initial thumbs-up/thumbs-down stage of a relationship, our tender little hearts get even more vulnerable. A deepening friendship will absorb our time and energy as we invest in fashioning a satisfying attachment. So, you guessed it, as someone’s importance to us goes up, so goes the risk.

Friends can hurt your feelings better than anyone because they know you and they matter to you. And because closeness means being deeper inside someone’s defenses, even small transgressions or mild criticism can be experienced as hurtful. And because it is just as painful to be the one who ends a relationship as to be the one who gets dumped, the uncertainty of the other person being “a keeper” is also a relationship hazard. No one wants to hear the phrase “We need to talk.” but no one wants to utter it, either.

There are always life changes (relocations, a new person entering the scene or an unbalancing windfall) and tragedies (reversal of luck, disease or death) that can end a relationship. When an upheaval occurs we can intentionally increase our commitment to being a good partner as we offer our support to the other person to bolster their staying power. But Fate is a powerful adversary. Many relationships will crash on the shoals of bad luck.

Switching focus a bit, it’s also important to recognize the loss of autonomy that accompanies all forms of attachment. In order for a relationship to grow there must be trust, and that trust can only exist when someone can depend on you to step up as needed. You have to be willing to be of service to others, acts that limit your autonomy. If you are unwilling to pay into the relational equity, you are signaling your unwillingness to be a friend. You are saying, in essence, that you privilege your freedom to be self-contained over being yoked in the responsibilities of friendship. If you do agree to pay into the building of trust, you must keep it up.

Also, while it’s true that a complete apology and forgiveness are two powerful antidotes to missteps in a friendships, there will be pain in all relationships. We have all been bruised by sloppy behavior from our friends, and all of us know how deeply uncomfortable it is when we let our friends down. So if we want to befriend another, we lose some freedom to move independently through our world, and we gain the daunting reality of experiencing pain and discomfort from time to time.

It is also scary to set limits with people who over invest in a relationship and expect you to appreciate their over involvement in your life. It can be difficult to not resent their need to live through you.

Finally, when the people closest to us growing up were so wounded that they were unable to form a healthy attachment to us, we must gather a tremendous level of courage to even attempt to develop friends. Our upbringing may have led us to fear that we will never be somebody’s somebody, but we can only disprove that if we try. People in this position deserve tremendous respect when they venture out into the social world.

To sum up this section on interpersonal skills that foster attachment, friendship is a choice to extend ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable. We need to heed psychologist Rollo May who describes this social reality as: “The courage to invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand increasing openness.” You don‘t want to enter into closeness lightly. You may not want to extend yourself in too many directions at once. You may want to be selective about who you pursue as a friend.

Reality characteristics that foster friendship

Alluded to throughout this article are the three basic situations that lead to the friendships that can end our loneliness: juxtaposition, timing and magic. I know you know probably 99% of the information in this section, but maybe that 1% new material will be helpful. At least give it a skim.

1) Juxtaposition: To know all is to love all. Psychopaths aside, the more we know about a person, the more reasons we have to like them. What helps us gather this crucial data on other people is proximity.

As adults, we tend to have two major pools of people to immerse ourselves in – our work and our social life. If our work world supplies us with enough people in our area of expertise and in our age bracket, we can more easily find people to befriend. If we are the lone accountant in the firm or the only senior person in the building, our pool can be severely limited. And socially, too much of the time people simply go to the places where people congregate rather than go to places that would create a better social environment. So you hear the ubiquitous lament “I can’t meet people,” but when you ask the people where they are going to meet people they often describe locales or activities that don’t represent them. It reminds me of the story of the man wandering around a lamppost at night looking for his keys. When someone offered to help him and discovered that the keys had been lost somewhere in the distant dark alley, the first man explained his odd searching behavior with “But under the lamppost is where the light is.” We need to start thinking about where we are looking for friends.

As obvious as this may sound, the best way to create fertile social soil is to go where you want to go and do what you want to do and then build from there. If you like meeting lots of people in a rowdy environment, go to a bar. If you don’t enjoy that, don’t expect to go there and meet other people who don’t like it either. When you go do something you enjoy there will be others there doing it also. Some of these people will be at your stage of life and will be looking for new friends. And they will have friends you can meet who might fit you, too.

An equally obvious statement is this one: you won’t meet new potential friends in your living room. Unless you’re an oenophile hosting a monthly wine tasting, compatible people aren’t going to come to you. You may have to force yourself out to take that scuba diving course, join a local writers’ group, sing in a choir or go on a hash run, but you have to put yourself near others in order for convenience to allow for closeness. Specificity is crucial in creating a rich social environment because you are seeking to engineer a pool of fairly similar people doing activities that are satisfying to you. It’s a statistical process of putting yourself repeatedly around people who fit certain facets of your personality.

Juxtaposition leads to common shared experiences which lead to a sense of community. Once you have a sense of community – maybe as small as a cooking class – then you need to start exploring other aspects of friendship with which to guide your choice of specific friend material – to bring your environment into focus to decide which relationships are viable.

So proximity is necessary but not sufficient. And that brings us to the next nonnegotiable aspect of building friends – timing.

2) Timing: Many, many things compete for our time. Friends are one of those things. When we meet someone new, there must be room in their life for us and in our life for them. This will be less of an issue if there is high compatibility in terms of stage of life such that your lives can be efficiently folded together. For example, if you and a new other are both parents of youngsters who can go to the park to play, you can both create time for the friendship by doing two things at once…visiting and watching the kids. If one of you has young children and the other has kids in junior high, there may be an incompatibility in terms of available activity overlap even if you are the same age. If you can’t fit friendship into the small cracks of time in your life, e.g. lunch with coworkers, walking partners, soccer parents, etc. you have to make the deliberate decision to commit some your existentially limited and precious time to being a friend. Once a relationship is launched, it can often survive on a limited time budget, but, as I’ve said repeatedly, because quality time in human interactions always happens within the quantity of time, most relationships need a significant time allotment initially. This is part of why juxtaposition is so important – it creates time easily spent together.

Ideally we need to have a collection of friendships that can supply us with a few deeply intimate friends, some more simple friendships that meet one or two facets of ourselves, a handful of long term friends that we may not even see all that often and some new friends who are introducing us to new things. We just won’t have enough time for all of them all the time.

3) Magic:

As Kermit the Frog was fond of singing: There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met. It would be nice to have a word for that sense we get when we just click with someone.

There are many reasons we find ourselves disliking a person, but there’s only one reason that we like someone and that is how they make us feel when we are around them. When we like someone there is an idiosyncratic match between how they make us feel and our need to feel that way. We feel more alive, more like ourselves, more engaged. But the mystery is how they do that – make us feel so great.

I have a theory. If we use a house as a metaphor for the self, we each – at any point in time – have an ego structure that has taken us some time and much effort to build. There will be parts that we are quite proud of, parts that we could use a little help on and some parts that aren’t ready for prime time yet. When we meet someone who notices the parts we are proud of and/or helps with the parts that are underdeveloped, we feel good. But that interest in our project-to-date needs to be augmented with what I call empathing – remaining tethered to another through an empathic attentiveness over time and across distance. There’s nothing better than being liked by someone you like who is paying attention to you fairly consistently even when they’re not with you. This is the kind of friend who reaches out to you when there are big events happening. They remember to ask if you’ve gotten your biopsy results, your college acceptance or your house sold. But this is also the kind of friend who remembers that peonies are your favorite flower, that you are anxious when you go to the dentist or that you are uncomfortable around people who swear. They remember these things and they act on them.

But what it is that creates a mutual ability to be interested in and tethered to each other remains a mystery to me. If you are going to get any interpersonal verve in your life, you have to trust in the magic that makes us want to spend extra time being intrigued and intriguing.

Strategies

In preparation to move back into the social world, I recommend that you first double check two major contributors to loneliness. 1) Are you alienated from yourself, full of self-loathing and unable to self-forgive? If so, please read these articles: here, here and here. 2) Have you addressed the possibility that you are clinically depressed? If you believe this may be a possibility, please consult with a professional.

If you feel ready to try once again to create a vitalizing social support system, here are a few last tips that might just jump-start that endeavor.

• Broadcast on your most accurate and specific frequency. Once we have an idea of what we’re looking for in a friend, we need to advertise. We do this by trying to be as coherently and authentically ourselves out in the world as we can be. You can see that by avoiding image management or overplaying your hand, people who will be actually interested in who you actually are will be better able to recognize you as a potential match. The obvious example here is to present yourself clearly and honestly on a dating app.

• Be a sleuth. The reverse of the previous strategy is also true. Enter social situations determined to keep your head up and your mind focused. You want to watch for likely friendship targets. For me, I look for people standing alone and watching, for people who laugh at the same things I do and for people who listen well. Whatever your particulars, just watch for people broadcasting on your frequency. And then work your way over to them and engage. “Come here often?”

• Bystander habit. That said, be alert to a tendency within yourself to park on the sidelines of life and refuse to play. Many people believe it’s the outgoing razzle-dazzle that wins friends. If they believe they’re not capable of charisma, they resign themselves to being observers of the social scene or homebodies who talk mainly to their virtual assistant. The reality is that charisma wins followers not friends. What starts the friendship ball rolling is actually unfolding reciprocity. I see you, you see me. I smile at you, you smile at me. I say something, you say something. We proceed all the way to getting to know each other.

• You don’t have to be beautiful. You look like you. If someone decides that they like you, when they see you they will see someone they like. They won’t parse out their affection based on how you look. It takes courage to accept the fact that we are acceptable. But once we can imagine that we are worthwhile, our every nonverbal message will transmit positive, attractive energy. But even if we are considered unlovely by some arbitrary standards, we will find attachments because, as my grandmother used to say, “For every old sock there’s an old shoe.” I found that very soothing on days I felt like an old sock.

• Think like a hummingbird. When our social well has dried up, we may need to gather little bits of social energy to prime a bigger effort to find attachments. This need to sip when we are too depleted by loneliness to venture very far into the social world may seem insufficient until you remember that the human brain is poised to energize off of human interactions. The biochemistry that results from even the briefest of interactions can start a cascade of neurological events that can get us moving. Sometimes just going for a walk where there are people to smile at or into the shops to interact briefly with others is all we can manage. This trickle-charger method is both more reliable and more accessible than our petulant side may want to acknowledge. Social media can also provide a little boost to get us out the door. The trick is to use the Internet as a catalyst and not a replacement for in-person social environments and activities.

• Watch the fantasies. We often romanticize the idea of a best friend. Although enviable, a life-long closeness may not be in the cards for most of us. Try to tolerate the role Fate has had in your social life in order to both appreciate and foster the friendships you do have. You don’t have to stop looking for a soulful friendship, but keep your energy up in the meantime by not rejecting the less-than-soul-mate folks from your dance card.

• Also watch the opposite – cynicism. If you cocoon yourself within the spun beliefs that attachments don’t really matter all that much, you are entering a very dangerous reality. Because cynical people need company in order to establish their cynicism, they will venture out into the social world but then alienate people with their mocking, sarcastic schtick. That dynamic then justifies their tendency toward misanthropic thinking and the self-created con is set. Don’t do this to yourself.

• Books work. People can find themselves without community, but to some extend that can be remediated by participating in the world of literature. The books in the FAWBOT are there for further reference but can also serve to remind you that there are minds out there thinking interesting things. You can then take that insight a step further and acknowledge that there are likely minds close by for you to connect with. Books can also give us fictional communities that soothe and enliven us when our actual communities may be a bit on the slim side. Lastly, reading the work of a talented writer is an actual connection with another person and, as such, can provide us with real biochemical energy. When you’re awake in the still of the night you can reach for a good book and touch the mind of the writer.

Conclusion

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking of loneliness as grey. Our inner world can look to us like a post-apocalyptic landscape without color or fresh air. In order to tolerate loneliness, we try to shut down feelings in general, we seek comfort in possibly destructive ways or we may start to flail in our pursuit of mastery. If these compensatory behaviors become entrenched, we are on the road to depression.

We can only bring the Technicolor back into our life if we can gather enough courage and strength to venture out of the house.

Let me add this last thought to help urge you out the door.

I love this quote from the curmudgeon Nietzsche: “We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.” You can extrapolate from this quote to the realization that, without loving attachments, it’s very hard to love life.