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

by Marisa G. Franco

If anger harms us when it balls itself into a rage, as well as when it lulls itself into silence, then what should we do with it? How can we best get the need met that’s nestled within our anger? And is there a way to express anger that doesn’t harm our friendships or ourselves?

Anger of hope energizes us, indicating that we need to heal an issue wedged between us to be close again. It is less of an overpowering emotion and more of a signal that something needs to change. It primes us to reflect on what our unmet needs are and how to act to fulfill them. It admits that we care for the other, even while we’re upset, and thus preserves the inherent worth of the other. We don’t punish or blame, but instead reveal our unmet need and ask for change,

Anger of despair, however, occurs when we have lost hope of healing a relationship. It confuses conflict with combat and sets out to defend, offend, punish, destroy, or incite revenge. Whereas anger of hope drives a pause for reflection on deeper needs and values, anger of despair blindly impinges. It’s impulsive, highlighting, according to researchers, “insufficiently processed emotions.” Anger of despair masquerades as protecting the self but is also about damning the other,

People who are good at conflict (e.g., by listening, admitting fault, de-escalating, and taking the other person’s perspective), another study found, were more popular and less depressed and lonely.

In a 2005 study, conducted by Dr. Catherine A. Sanderson and her colleagues at Amherst College, researchers sought to examine how people who value intimate friendships work through conflict. Do they stay silent, or do they discuss their issues? She gave a survey to college students that assessed how much they valued intimacy in friendships, how they handled conflict, and how happy they were with their friendships. Results indicated that these kinds of friends voice their concerns constructively instead of avoiding issues or simply ending the relationship, which led to their friendships being more satisfying.

something we should embrace, as it allows us to illuminate each other on how to be better for each other, forever enhancing a friendship. Sharing anger conveys that we’re trustworthy enough to be up front and invested enough to confront. Conflict with friends can restore and even deepen our friendships.

“There are a lot of stories society tells us about marriage being hard and full of conflict. Are there any stories about friendship being hard and full of conflict? No. We hear friends are supposed to make you feel good, to lift you up. So when we’re mad at each other, we don’t know how to handle it.”

According to Dr. Jackson, in friendship, we too often choose to “endure a lifelong ache rather than getting surgery, dealing with four weeks of recovery, and moving on, being happier, and getting your life back.

as Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, put it, “Connection is threatened as much by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict.” We need to express our anger, because after socking it away for too long, we may awake with the powerful urge to leave even the best of friendships. If we had allowed ourselves anger earlier, we’d have noticed the junctures where we could have acted so it wouldn’t have come to this. If we had allowed our anger, we would experience an opening to repair and recalibrate the friendship and it could achieve new depths of dynamic safety.

If I lounged on Freud’s couch and he asked me to reveal my unconscious associations with conflict, I’d say attacks, accusations, raised voices, fists clenched, burst arteries, Monopoly games toppled. Anger and conflict, based on what I knew at the time, destroyed rather than cured.

Her words also suggest that she assumed Harriet, rather than being oblivious, had malicious intent, which is an assumption insecure people make.

Dr. Paula Pietromonaco, a psychology professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies relationship dynamics, told me, “We live in a very individualistic, a very competitive, society. We bring that to our relationships so arguments become about winning, but that is not good in the long run for a friendship. A focus on winning is a red flag.”

Trauma makes it exponentially tougher to manage our triggers, forget about another person’s. It may be more of a long-term goal to embrace co-regulation rather than something we can enact immediately, and that’s okay.

Even while co-regulating, secure people don’t back down from their needs. They don’t apologize for something they shouldn’t, as anxious people might. If a friend says, “You’re being too sensitive,” they might say, “No. This is important to me.” They advocate for themselves, while also considering the other’s perspective. They embrace mutuality, asking themselves, If we are a team, and both our needs are equally important, how do we solve this problem in a way that honors both our needs?

Relationships (sans abusive ones) are often a dance—no one person is to blame, but each person’s behavior ricochets off each other’s until a larger problem materializes. If you think their rebuttal is fair, take accountability and apologize. If it’s unfair, then don’t.

yourself splitting into two selves during conflict, one to experience yourself and the other to observe yourself. You can experience your urge to fight and observe it and wonder if your boxing gloves are helpful. You may feel the urge to get defensive or lash out, but realizing this won’t solve the issue, you choose an approach that will. You can’t neglect the urge either, though, because it contains a message—that there is something inside you that you need to protect. You acknowledge the anger in the cockpit, respond to it over the intercom, while your highest self pilots the plane.

Put the conflict in front of you instead of between you.

Admit when they have a point. Conflict escalates when we ignore what we agree on and zero in on where we disagree.

Ask questions. When our friend gets defensive, instead of drilling our point until they listen, pause and ask about their perspective.

Take a break.

Friendship breakups can be especially isolating because there’s no space to breathe through the grief. As we minimize the significance of friends, we minimize the grief of losing them.

but as an enlightenment opportunity, we can respond to their concern by appreciating their feedback, taking responsibility, and growing. Practically, this looks like being responsive when our friend is upset. Many studies find that responsiveness improves relationships. It has three parts: showing understanding (rephrasing what our friend said back to them), validation (telling them their concern is valid and understandable), and care (sharing what we will do to improve).

Being responsive requires us to normalize screwing up. Just because you’ve done wrong doesn’t mean you are wrong as a person. If you fuse your mistakes with your worth, then you’ll never admit fault. Doing so will feel too much like throwing yourself in the garbage. To blunder is human. When one of my colleagues erred multiple times in a day, missing meetings and deadlines, she described herself as having a “human day.” We all have human days.

When you’re used to being brutally honest, being deliberate sounds exhausting. And it is.

We have this sense that people’s truest selves are revealed during conflict. When endings are explosive, we rewrite the friendship, see it as perpetually defunct, our friend as treacherous all along, ourselves as naïve parties. This tendency is driven by a negativity bias, our tendency to weigh negative information more heavily than positive. I caution against this because, building off what I shared in the authenticity chapter, our truest selves are not revealed during conflict. Often our most triggered selves are.

We can remember what Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry remind us of in their book, What Happened to You?, that regulation is a privilege since dysregulation often comes from trauma.

Not every friend has to be a best friend. Maybe we expect less from them, share less of ourselves, and compartmentalize the friendship to what feels most fulfilling about it.

Even if the conflict didn’t bring you the intimacy and healing you dreamed of, you still did right. Sleep easy knowing you acted within your integrity, instead of ghosting or gossiping, and that you can access the personal growth that comes with tough conversation, no matter how your friend responded.

If we can confess our anger instead of suppressing it, it’ll convey vital information that reveals how we define fair treatment.

And if conflict escalates, perhaps it tells us something about our triggers or our friends’. Perhaps we better understand our expectations and how they can be honored. Perhaps we reflect on what was missing to access something surer about what we want from friends to come. Then, no matter what happens during conflict, we gain a clearer picture of ourselves.

You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar,

In his New York Times article “We Need to Talk About ‘The Giving Tree,’ ” Adam Grant, who wrote Give and Take, and his wife, Allison Sweet Grant, point out that the popular children’s book The Giving Tree valorizes martyrdom rather than healthy generosity.

When the giving tree is our paragon of generosity, we learn the right way to give is to give to the brink of ruin. We feel bad, morally bankrupt even, when we erect boundaries. When we eke out a no, we are racked with guilt and shame, wondering whether we’re defective because our will to give is finite. When boundaries trigger this guilt-trodden monsoon, it feels easier to just say yes. Anything is better than the agony of guilt.

As these extreme forms of generosity have left us burnt out and resentful, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.

New age generosity conflates generosity not with selflessness but with being taken advantage of.

Fay Bound Alberti, in A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, argues the internet has given us relationships built on shared interests without accountability to one another.

According to trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk, “Being treated by family members as irrelevant . . . creates another kind of psychological pattern. People’s identity is formed around questions like ‘What did I do wrong?’ or ‘What could I have done differently?’ That becomes the central preoccupation of their lives.” Wounds lead us to believe we can control people, change them, if only we contort ourselves just right—it’s a problem of mistaken omnipotence. We’ve heard of fight, flight, or freeze reactions in response to trauma, but the last response is fawn: try to get people to like you so they’ll stop harming you. We also call it people pleasing.

When we fawn, we often give to people we don’t even like but who we want to like us.

Secure people give because they care about people. Anxious people do too, but they also often give because they want people to care about them, research finds. Anxious attachment is related to something called “egoistic giving,” giving not because of pure altruism or love for the other person but because you have an ulterior motive.

The urge to earn love from those who mistreat you doesn’t materialize from thin air. It likely helped you survive in the environment you grew up in, just like it did for Melody. But now, you don’t just need to survive. You need to thrive. Thriving means you don’t invite destructive people into your life because they give you the opportunity to earn love. It means people who love you freely are no longer suspicious and those who withhold are no longer motivating. It means you are generous because you love someone and want to show it, not because someone doesn’t love you and you want to change that. When someone withholds love, you thrive when you walk away instead of working harder. Because it’s not your fault they don’t love you and it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. You deserve relationships of mutual generosity, but for Melody to realize this, “I had to let go of this identity as a broken person. I had to realize I could change my life.”

To live a virtuous life, the researchers of the study concluded, our goal should not be selflessness, but “enlightened self-interest,” where our “own interests become aligned with the interests of others.”

These selfless individuals, these sweet little giving trees, are more stressed and depressed, studies find. And their behavior costs—rather than benefits—their relationships.

The only way the self-sacrificer can solve their problem is by understanding what they are trying to run away from through sacrifice.

When we ask for things too, it refuels us and plucks out any weeds of resentment, so we can give more.

When we don’t just give but also ask and receive, we protect ourselves from burning out, so that we can give more in the long term.

The most generous people give themselves permission to ask for what they need because doing so refuels them, allowing them to be more generous in the long run.

In our friends’ times of need, new age friendship boundaries default to the all-or-none of “Given my current state, I can’t offer you anything,” whereas communal boundaries require us to ask ourselves, “Given my current state, what can I offer?”

Outside of crises, communal boundaries do not mean we always show up exactly how our friend wants, because attending to our needs too is in the service of the friendship.

For mutuality to work, we must be clear with our close friends when we have an important need because in the words of author Neil Strauss, “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.” How can our friend know that now is a time to prioritize us if we don’t say, “Hey, this is really important for me”?

Being understood isn’t just about the other person putting in the time and effort to get us. It’s also about us making ourselves understandable.