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

by Marisa G. Franco

We hope that in suppressing our feelings, they evaporate. But the rebound effect reveals this isn’t true. Our feelings survive in the cold backyard we leave them in, eventually prying open the back door to get into the house.

That the surest way to be consumed by our thoughts is to try to suppress them. Avoidance may have more mileage with suppression, but when it gets to be too much, avoidants are more susceptible to stress than the rest of us—because they not only have to deal with the stress but also with their self-imposed flagellation about being too weak to suppress it. For them, suppression may work for smaller, passing issues, but not for intense or prolonged stress.

“We are at our most powerful the moment we no longer need to be powerful.”

Suppression also deteriorates our mental health. Self-concealment, the tendency to withhold negative information about ourselves, is related to psychological distress and even suicidality for younger adults. Our invulnerability exacts a hefty toll on our bodies. All the energy we spend thinking about what we’re hiding means that, as research finds, secret-keeping makes us feel more isolated and fatigued. When people go through traumatic experiences and don’t share them, they experience more health problems. Another study found that when people experienced the death of a spouse, the less they talked about it, the less healthy they were in the year following the death.

Bruk’s research builds off other studies with similar findings: when we’re vulnerable, people don’t judge us as much as we think. And in fact, they may perceive us positively—as authentic and honest.

This research suggests that while we often think of vulnerability as burdening our friendships, it can instead ignite or deepen them. That’s because, as much of the research suggests, we’re often cherished rather than devalued for our vulnerability.

respond to increasingly intimate questions like “When did you last cry in front of another person?” and “How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?”

Overall, despite the risks of vulnerability, which are real, Bruk and I agree that vulnerability is worth the risk. Its rewards are even more real. It makes us feel better mentally and physically, deepens our friendships, and helps us better understand ourselves. 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.”

To practice self-compassion, next time you look in the mirror and want to criticize your stomach, tell yourself: I know I’m feeling critical. It’s okay that I’m not feeling great about my body today. Most people feel bad about their bodies from time to time. Or if you feel upset that your child didn’t call on your birthday, say: I’m feeling upset. It’s understandable that I feel that way. A lot of parents struggle with their kids.

To get yourself to be vulnerable, it’ll help if you remember that you’re not practicing it because it’s comfortable; you’re doing so because it aligns with your values. If you value connection, well-being, intimacy, meaning, honesty, self-care, showing up in the world as your truest self, then being vulnerable expresses your values. You succeed, no matter the response, because in being vulnerable, you advocated for yourself and honored your values.

“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.”

That experience also made me realize that part of practicing healthy vulnerability is also being comfortable with not being vulnerable. Sometimes, I’ve felt like some crisis is consuming me so much that if I don’t share, it’ll make me an imposter—a friend will be able to sniff it out and know I’m lying. But people are apparently really bad at knowing when we’re lying, according to one meta-analysis. You’re free to conceal things from people who you don’t trust.

When we act or think in all-or-nothing ways—like never or always being vulnerable—our rigidity hides deeper scars. I hear these scars from friends who say things like, “You can’t trust anyone,” or “Everyone is going to let you down at the end of the day.” If we assume one thing is always true, we aren’t evaluating the situation to determine whether a behavior will or won’t work; we’re projecting. It’s discernment, attention to the present moment and to the openness of the ears in front of us, that will allow us to carve out nourishing spaces for our vulnerability.

Without this discernment, we risk offering our vulnerability to the people who hurt us the most. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” We return to the site of our pain for our healing because what’s more validating than validation from the person who hurt us?

Society is starting to attend to the lacking state of Western men’s friendships and the horrible effects this lack has on men’s health, both mental and physical. Men’s friendship crisis was explored in an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast called “The Lonely American Man”; in a Harper’s Bazaar article, “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden”; and in the book The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, where husband-and-wife authors Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz highlight how men are intimate only with romantic partners while neglecting friends.

An Atlantic article, “Games Boys Play,” describes how men include a third object in their friendships to avoid the vulnerability that might otherwise bob up among idle friends: “When you’re hunting, or working on a car, or shooting free throws, you can look together at the deer, or the transmission, or the basket, and talk. The common objective gives you something to talk about, and not having to face each other means you don’t have to lay the full weight of your emotions on each other.”

But if men aren’t vulnerable in close relationships, where does their vulnerability go? An adage we learned in graduate school is “women internalize; men externalize.” In broad strokes (and with exceptions), this means that when upset, women go inward, blaming themselves and feeling guilty and depressed. But men, instead, express their upset through how they interact with the world. This is evidenced by a study that found that women are more likely to suppress their anger, whereas men are more likely to act aggressively. They might yell, bully, punch a wall.

Vulnerability and dominance cannot co-exist. Vulnerability says explicitly, “I acknowledge you have power over me, and I’m hoping you’ll use it kindly.” Dominance says, “You have no power over me. I have power over you.”

Dr. Skyler Jackson added, “For almost every aspect of well-being, social support is a critical part of what makes us endure and survive hardship.” The only way we truly become strong is through being deeply supported by others.

In his lecture on the self-made man in 1872, Frederick Douglass disclaimed, “It must in truth be said, though it may not accord well with self-conscious individuality and self-conceit, that no possible native force of character, and no depth of wealth and originality, can lift a man into absolute independence of his fellowmen.” The French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville feared that American individualism would lead to a situation where “each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

“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.”

“Owning one’s personal experiences, be they thoughts, emotions, needs, wants, preferences, or beliefs” and “acting in accord with the true self, expressing oneself in ways that are consistent with inner thoughts and feelings.”

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.

Instead of admitting we yearn for a friend who abandoned us, we say we don’t care that they left. Instead of sharing that we feel hurt by a friend’s teasing, we tell ourselves we’re being too sensitive. Instead of admitting we’ve outgrown a friend, we tell ourselves everything is fine. We contort our natural feelings and instead justify, rationalize, or dismiss. Authenticity, however, involves allowing ourselves to feel rejected by the friend who abandoned us, hurt by our friend’s taunts, or incompatible with our childhood friend. It’s a state of internal honesty. It’s who we are underneath these defense mechanisms we’ve constructed for our self-protection.[*] And when we dislodge these defenses, we find we are loving creatures who value connection.

I’ve argued that authenticity summons our kindest and highest self, which makes it a worthy goal for us as we seek to make and keep friends. Gillath’s study suggests that security activates this authentic self. If security breeds authenticity and authenticity springs kindness, then is security the secret to being kind? Yes.

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.

Only a relatively secure person can easily perceive others not only as sources of security and support but also as suffering human beings who have important needs and therefore deserve support.” In other words, secure people, less consumed by their pain, are better at considering others.

Unlocking authenticity is about becoming more secure. And authentic people, in feeling this bedrock of security, unearth the empathy and consideration that lie within us all.

But I would retort that accommodating others is not inauthentic. Authenticity doesn’t mean always doing what we want or expressing what we think or feel (that’s rawness). It means we are responsive, rather than reactive, intentional rather than primal. It’s choosing behaviors that express who we are rather than being triggered to act in ways that don’t. Doing so requires us to give ourselves the space to decide whether we want to accommodate others or ourselves, depending on the circumstance.

Adamma’s ability to perspective take, to value Victoria’s needs, even when they reflected negatively on her, is admirable. 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.

Like a hunger craving, when we feel an emotion, we don’t have to respond. We should pause, breathe, and drop down into our bodies to feel where the trigger manifests.

“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?”

Projection occurs when we assume our feelings mean something about the person who provoked them, rather than reflecting our own psyche. On a vacation with a close friend, I spend an hour organizing the toiletries while my friend hangs out on the balcony, gazing at the ocean. I feel overworked, so she must be lazy. Or my roommate tells me, “Please wash the dishes.” I feel condescended to, so she must be condescending. Another friend leaves my party early because he needs to finish up some work. I feel disregarded, so he must be uncaring. Projection muddles our feelings with our evaluation of the other person. Avoiding it requires us to own our feelings instead of shaping them into character judgments.

And out of this, she realized that there needed to be a way to survive, as her relationships came and went like the moon. “I consciously made the decision that I am not going to let my relationship with people prevent me from living for myself,” she said. “Relationships sever, and that has to be okay. If I can come out of this death and be full and capable, there’s no relationship loss that I can’t survive.” With so many relationships ending in ways that had nothing to do with her, she came to see loss not as a condemnation of her but as an inevitable part of life.

This research reveals that when we’re authentic, rejection isn’t as piercing. Adamma’s insights reveal that we can achieve this resilience by decoupling rejection from its baggage of self-condemnation. Don’t take it personally. When our friend brings up an issue, when we invite a new friend out and they turn us down, when we haven’t heard from a friend in a while, it doesn’t mean that we’re unworthy, wrong, or unlovable. As Adamma puts it, “I don’t take a lot of things personally. I take people’s opinions or critiques or feedback as valid, so I can do something about it, but I try hard not to let that make me feel bad about myself.”

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

People are going to reject us. We can crook ourselves into a pretzel to avoid it, but it’ll happen anyway. We can wear a mask, but it’ll happen anyway. And then we will have labored in inauthenticity for nothing. If instead of focusing our energy on an impossibility—avoiding rejection through inauthenticity—we focus our energy on softening rejection’s bitterness, then we can access authenticity alongside connection. We can even reframe rejection as a symbol of pride, a collateral for us making every effort to curate the life and the relationships we truly want. It’s a ticket to a life lived without regret.

In other words, I practiced some of the three V’s around Paula. The three V’s comprise components of healthy and intimate relationships across levels of privilege: vet, vulnerability, and voice. Vetting involves choosing friends who believe in the worth and dignity of the disadvantaged group you identify with; vulnerability involves bringing your full self to the friendship, which includes freely expressing your experiences related to being a member of a disadvantaged group; and voicing involves expressing concerns related to your group as they arise in friendship.

I used to think authenticity was about rawness, boldly sharing whatever is on your mind. But now I see that it’s about listening, listening to yourself, not being afraid to experience what’s going on inside you, to acknowledge what you truly think and feel and fear and love, without covering it up with defenses. It’s not just about having the bravery to admit your opinions to others, but in having the bravery to admit them within. It’s only in this listening that we can sense which friends feel most safe for our authenticity and share our truest internal world. Because when we do this internal work, we don’t ask others to do it for us.

View rejection as something you can bounce back from, an instant rather than an eternity.

People with privilege can welcome the authenticity of their friends from disadvantaged groups by practicing adjusted mutuality: recognizing they need to compensate for the inherent power dynamic within their friendship by actively taking their friend’s perspective. Instead of disagreeing, counterattacking, playing devil’s advocate, or justifying, listen more, repeat back what your friend says, and ask questions rather than make assumptions.

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, just like Laura did when she said, “Where was you, Mummy? Where was you?”

In friendship too we can choose to confront issues instead of letting them fester until they’re beyond repair. The problem is we too often dismiss gripes with friends, hoping we’ll get over them instead. We think we’re too sensitive or making a hubbub out of nothing. But the only litmus test for whether an issue is worthy of being addressed is if it continues to bother you. You can tell a friend you’re upset about anything—their being chronically late, or mispronouncing your name, or making an offhand comment. There are no objective criteria for whether something is worth bringing up aside from that it upsets you.

If friends are angry at us, often they express it indirectly, through distancing.

To be clear, ignoring our upset isn’t always bad. If it’s a passing issue, we can let it go. When it’s chronic, or we can’t get over it, or when the friendship starts to droop, then we must face the problem.

We may feel exhausted after talking to them, perhaps because they never showed any interest in us, or we fear their judgment if we share. Overall, our friendships should make us feel more good than bad.

My experience with Billy taught me that there are some things we don’t get over unless we talk about them and that acknowledging anger can lead to a conversation that allows for the release of the residue of past hurts that haunt our otherwise beloved friendship. Anger can spur positive change in our friendships, but only if we know how to use it.

Insecure people become overwhelmed by emotion during conflict because they confuse it with combat instead of reconciliation.

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.

beneficial conflict resolution tactics of the secure, which include sharing feelings and needs without blaming, assuming the other has positive intent, taking their perspective, and admitting one’s role in the problem.