Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

by Marisa G. Franco

Friendship is worth it.

when we feel accepted and loved, it helps us develop certain qualities that lead us to continue to connect better

Initiative ignites friendship, while authenticity, productive anger, and vulnerability all sustain it by permitting us to show up as our full selves. Generosity and affection deepen friendships by verifying to friends just how much we love them. These practices strike a balance by allowing us to express our inner truth, while we create space to welcome our friend’s.

This is how we make friends as an adult. We grow—we become braver, more empathic, kinder, more honest, more expressive.

“For our life to feel significant, we crave someone to witness it, to verify its importance.

without friendship, “No one would choose to live.”

These days, we typically see platonic love as somehow lacking—like romantic love with the screws of sex and passion missing. But this interpretation strays from the term’s original meaning. When Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino coined the term “platonic love” in the fifteenth century, the word reflected Plato’s vision of a love so powerful it transcended the physical. Platonic love was not romantic love undergoing subtraction. It was a purer form of love, one for someone’s soul, as Ficino writes, “For it does not desire this or that body, but desires the splendor of the divine light shining through bodies.” Platonic love was viewed as superior to romance.

Scientists have found that of 106 factors that influence depression, having someone to confide in is the strongest preventor. The impact of loneliness on our mortality is akin to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. One study found the most pronounced difference between happy and unhappy people was not how attractive or religious they were or how many good things happened to them. It was their level of social connection.

Of course, friends too can sink into what friendship-memoirists Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow call “the intimately mundane.” Friendship can be a relationship of grocery shopping, chores, and shared retirements. As people unbundle sex, romance, and life companionship, they see that friends can make marvelous significant others.

A key source of joy in friendship is in how unlimited it is: you can have many friends, whereas other core relationships are finite—a couple of caregivers, one spouse (for the monogamous among us), 2.5 children.

Through friendship, we can self-select into some of the most affirming, safe, and sacred relationships of our lives, not because of pressures from society to do so, but because we elect to do so.

British author C. S. Lewis once said, “Eros [romantic passion] will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”

When choosing friends, we are freer to prioritize the truest markers of intimacy, such as shared values, trust, admiration of each other’s character, or feelings of ease around each other.

What I am trying to convey is that, counter to how our culture treats friendship, it is as meaningful as the other relationship Goliaths. And yet, if you deeply value friendship, you’ve likely experienced your platonic love being relegated to second-class.

If two people aren’t romantically involved, then they’re not friends—they’re just friends. If they want to become romantic, they’ll say, “Let’s be more than friends.” People with friendship at the center of their relationships are unfairly cast as lonely, unappealing, or unfulfilled, spinsters with a choir of cats, or bachelors who never quite matured. This happens when, all the while, research finds that friendship is what gives romantic love its strength and endurance, rather than the other way around.

finding that as we get older, friends matter even more for our health and well-being.

How do we feel human again? Through friendship, according to Sullivan. When we confide our shame, and friends accept us or even identify with us, we learn our disappointments don’t make us unhuman. They make us deeply human. Our friends permit us to accept our flaws, to allow them to be a piece of who we are rather than our scarlet letters.

“Anything unspeakable to you is affecting you.” That’s why we don’t heal shame by hiding it. When we share it, and our friends love and accept us, we are released from the labor of guarding our shame. Whatever alleged flaw triggered our shame becomes a part of who we are, not the entirety of who we are. This is how the empathy we receive from friends makes us whole.

Friends are good candidates for providing us with empathy because friendship provokes empathy. In fact, friendship, according to Sullivan, is how we become empathic. In his theory of chumships, he argues that around the ages of eight to ten, friendship radically alters how we relate to others. It’s the first relationship where we value another’s welfare as much as our own. As kids, when it comes to parents, we take. When it comes to teachers, we obey. But when it comes to friends, we feel for and with.

“People think all the time about competition and survival of the fittest, but really it’s survival of the friendliest. Friendship is the key to us living long and happy lives.”

Despite connection being a fundamental value of our species, it is not a fundamental value of Western society.

The exaltation of romantic relationships over friendship is a by-product of our larger cultural sphere. Prioritizing friendships requires unlearning this cultural message. We can relearn an important truth, one that is based on the science of friends and romance: having close friends betters our romantic relationships. Conflict with our spouse, one study finds, makes us secrete an unhealthy pattern of stress hormones, but only if we lack quality friendship outside the marriage. Studies have found that even for men who feel as if they have found their romantic soul mates, good friendship is still linked to better self-esteem. This research, combined with another study that finds that people are more resilient to negative events within their romantic relationship when they have friends (particularly for women who tend to have stronger friendships), suggests that maintaining friendships while in a romantic relationship is a part of what healthy romance looks like, one that isn’t crushed by the weight of each partner having to be everything to the other. Studies like these are evidence that making friends will help our romantic relationships thrive, and that one person can never complete us or fulfill us so deeply that we do not need or benefit from friendship.

Research into romantic couples suggests that the more positively we feel about ourselves, the more likely we are to assume others like us. And the more unworthy we feel, the more likely we are to underestimate how much others like us. How people thought their romantic partner viewed them, the study found, was less a reflection of how their romantic partner actually viewed them and more of a reflection of how they viewed themselves. People say, “You have to love yourself before someone can love you,” because if you don’t love yourself, you won’t notice when they do.

“if people expect acceptance, they will behave warmly, which in turn will lead other people to accept them; if they expect rejection, they will behave coldly, which will lead to less acceptance.”

You’ll likely think others are judging, and when it comes to human psychology, thinking others are judging you has the same effect on you as others actually judging you. Our thoughts often hurt us more than our bullies do. The truth is, no one cares about your social clumsiness as much as you do. They’re too busy worrying about their own.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage,” Brown said in her book Rising Strong. It takes bravery to reveal secrets. It takes trust and optimism to assume that others won’t cast you off. People who are vulnerable know they matter and are worth others’ time and attention. So yes, there is strength in vulnerability.

Transparency, honesty, and open communication win.

Giving our friends the opportunity to help us, research finds, improves their mental and physical health and adds meaning to their lives. One study found that when we share our secrets, it does burden others because they ruminate on our secrets, but they also feel closer to us.

In times of crisis, our greatest fear may be burdening others, yet when we don’t reach out, the biggest burden we place on our friends is often our silence.

Without vulnerability, “there’s a ceiling you reach in friendship that you can’t exceed,” Dr. Jackson said. And while vulnerability may give people the power to hurt us more deeply, it also gives them the power to love us more deeply. As Dr. Jackson shared, “If you’re not vulnerable, all of your friends’ love, support, and attention is not about all of you, as you know it. Their affirmation doesn’t land in the same way. When you’re vulnerable, and they really know you, it feels like you can trust their love for you more fully, because they are showing love for who you really are.”

Self-compassion has three components: Self-kindness: being kind and understanding toward oneself (It’s okay that you failed that test. It was really hard.) Mindfulness: having a balanced reaction to painful thoughts and feelings, not underreacting or overreacting (I notice I’m feeling sad right now.) Common humanity: seeing one’s experience as part of the larger human experience (Everyone fails from time to time.)

“Let go of expectations of getting the response you want. We will always come from a more solid place if we speak to preserve our own well-being and integrity and refuse to be silenced by fear.”

The core of attachment theory, supported by thousands of studies, is that we become secure only through being supported by our most foundational relationships.

“The goal of independence is not to be completely autonomous, but to recognize when you need somebody, and know how to reach out to them to get what you need.”

This research reveals what authenticity is and what it is not. It’s not a knee-jerk reaction we indulge when we feel bruised. It’s not wildly expressing our thoughts and feelings with wanton disregard for everyone else. Blaming, putting down, or attacking—these behaviors are more raw than they are authentic. Instead, authenticity flourishes in safety. It is a state of presence we access when we aren’t hijacked by our defense mechanisms. We’re not authentic when we’re distracted, multitasking, or saying things on autopilot, like compulsively responding “Fine” to a “How are you?” Authenticity occurs when we access feelings of safety—when we don’t feel the need to activate our defenses—even in the face of threat, judgment, rejection, or neglect, among other things. It’s who we are when we aren’t triggered, when we can make intentional, rather than reactive, decisions about how we want to show up in the world.

Our behaviors in relationships often lie on a continuum, from those that protect us on one side and those that protect the relationship on the other. To protect ourselves from rejection or harm, we withdraw, devalue the relationship (It wasn’t so great anyway), or act competitive or dominant, but in doing so, we injure the relationship. To protect the relationship, we accommodate the other person’s needs, do things for them, or affirm them, but in doing so, we are left more vulnerable to exploitation or rejection. When we’re in self-protection mode, we’re in anti-relationship mode. When we’re in relationship mode, we’re defenseless. Insecure people hover in “self-protection” mode, which is why they struggle in relationships. When triggered, they’re thinking about themselves and not the other person.

When we aren’t controlled by our defenses, when we’re responsive rather than reactive, we develop more flexibility to adjust to other people, which is why authenticity helps us care for ourselves and others.

This style of relating, characterized by zooming out to consider others’ needs alongside our own, is called mutuality, and it is a telltale sign of ego strength, secure attachment, and, thus, authenticity. One study found, for example, that when handling conflict, authenticity is linked to greater mutuality. Another study found that when people reported on their most authentic moments, these moments were high in both independence and connectedness to others,

For secure people, mutuality comes naturally. But for the insecure and triggered, my advice for accessing this authentic way of relating is to—plot twist—restrain from indulging in what comes most naturally, because it is likely a defense mechanism, and authenticity is who we are without defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms are strategies we use to reduce our awareness of and distance ourselves from something we find threatening.

“rather than attempting to change or control anyone’s experience in any way, we are asking how much can I get to know and appreciate this experience of being [with] you in this very moment?”

The anxiously attached come in too close, their sense of themselves crushed when others don’t accept them. Avoidants pull away too far, unaffected by others’ judgments but also by their love. Tapping into security and authenticity doesn’t mean you’ll never be rejected; it just means there’s enough distance between your self-worth and others’ judgments so that it won’t sting so bad. Authenticity, then, isn’t about avoiding rejection. It’s about lightening its weight.

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

bringing up pain points around identity in friendship isn’t a way to attack, beat down, or reduce the friendship. It’s a way to save it. It creates space for healing and, hopefully, precludes the problem from happening again.

Anger of despair is the destructive force we typically associate with anger. Anger of hope, however, is a healing force that can deepen friendships, one that we should embrace. Psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner distinguishes between two types of safety in relationships: “the flaccid safety of permanent coziness,” which is maintained by ignoring anger and conflict and pretending problems don’t exist, and the “dynamic safety whose robustness is established via . . . risk-taking and its resolution—the never-ending cycle of breakdown and repair, separation and reunion.” Dynamic safety, Goldner suggests, invites trust and fosters true intimacy. Anger of hope can bring dynamic safety to our friendships.

“Many people think, Oh, it’s a friend, it doesn’t matter. Who gets in fights with your friends? But I feel very able to be hurt by friends, and not because things are super egregious—just because friendships are just another type of relationship.”

Secure people are collaborative, approaching conflict as a way to get both parties’ needs met. They don’t yell or blame but instead acknowledge their anger as signaling a need and voice the need conveyed by the emotion.

You’re not creating problems in the friendship by talking about them because whatever hurts you hurts your friendship because you’re a participant in it. You’re opening up dialogue, then, to address your hurt, but also to make the friendship better. Before you approach your friend, you should ask yourself these questions: What do I hope to achieve through this conflict? What’s my role in this problem, and what’s my friend’s? Do I see the conflict as a way to make the friendship better? Can I calmly approach my friend? Am I ready to balance sharing my perspective with taking my friend’s?

but then she realized “that I have to treat people how they want to be treated and not how I want to be treated, because we’re not the same. So, if I’m friends with somebody and they want this thing of me and it’s not over the top, then why not do it?”

our truest selves are not revealed during conflict. Often our most triggered selves are.

regulation is a privilege since dysregulation often comes from trauma. Thinking of regulation this way helps me to have more compassion for myself and my friends when conflict escalates.