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

by Marisa G. Franco

connection affects who we are, and who we are affects how we connect. When we have felt connected, we’ve grown. We’ve become more open, more empathic, bolder. When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection.

when we feel accepted and loved, it helps us develop certain qualities that lead us to continue to connect better (the rich get richer, as they say).

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.

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

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.

Friendship, then, is a rediscovery of an ancient truth we’ve long buried: it takes an entire community for us to feel whole.

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.

Fear of rejection impedes initiation of new friendships

Develops shallow friendships

When friends are out of sight, they are forgotten

Overly generous to the point of self-depletion

Ignores issues, and then blows up over issues

Feels “weak” whenever vulnerable; avoids vulnerability

Friends know only their positive or strong side

Fears asking for support will make them look weak

Comfortable providing support

When triggered, prioritizes own needs over those of others. Otherwise, prioritizes others’ needs over own needs

When admits fault, overly self-critical; otherwise denies fault or responsibility; sees the other party as at fault

Inauthentic to avoid uncomfortable feelings; often sarcastic or humorous when serious topics arise

Jealous of friends’ success; feels they are more deserving

Lets others dominate them

Lack of communication; ghosts or withdraws

Assumes if others show they like or care for them, they have ulterior motives; mistrusting

The “hedgehog’s dilemma” is an apt metaphor that can shed light on attachment. Created by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the dilemma describes a group of hedgehogs shivering in the cold. They huddle together for warmth, but their quills prick one another, so they retreat: avoidant hedgehogs. But when they’re cold again, they huddle too close: anxious hedgehogs. It’s Schopenhauer’s metaphor for the perils of intimacy—we’re out in the cold without it but injured with it. But intimacy isn’t so perilous for every hedgehog. The secure have learned to strike the right balance of safety and warmth.

Avoidants, like Jared, push others away, perceiving relationships not for the joy and fulfillment they bring but for their pressures and responsibilities.

But work isn’t the only way avoidants maintain their distance. They also erect rigid boundaries around friendships. They tend to be uninterested in mixing friends from different circles or migrating friends from one context to another, like inviting a work friend to their home for a potluck. As Gillath put it in one of his articles, “By allowing each friend to fulfill only one or a smaller number of functions than nonavoidant individuals, avoidant individuals reduce their dependence on each specific friend. This potentially reduces their concerns regarding trust and reliance.”

Avoidants also distance themselves by simply ending friendships, even ones with friends they’ve known awhile. Discomfort with emotions makes it tough for avoidants to work through conflict successfully. Research finds avoidants are more likely to end friendships. And because breakups can surface powerful emotions, avoidants, according to research, prefer to eject using indirect routes, like ghosting.

But “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” according to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

People with anxious attachment try to merge with people they’re close to, building relationships of such closeness that their sense of self dissolves. Such intimacy soothes their fears of abandonment while making them vulnerable to an unhealthy friendship dynamic like Carolina and Zoe’s.

Anxious people are so vigilant for rejection that they register cues of it while ignoring signals of their acceptance.

I was assuming friendships should happen “naturally” (which looked like Lauri initiating with me). And the reason I thought this way was so I wouldn’t have to face my fears of being disliked or rejected. But friendships require initiative, and that means we must confront our gravest fears.

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.

many of us are attached to the misconception that we need to be someone else to be liked. This is the implicit message in the mega-bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. The author, Dale Carnegie, encourages us to ingratiate. Smile at people, use their name, get people to talk about themselves, make them feel important. This isn’t bad advice per se, but it is manipulative. Instead of ingratiating, we must do the internal work of building security so warm behaviors flow from us naturally.

having to adjust to friends across differences might be worth it if their privileged friends are great listeners, or share a unique interest they can’t express elsewhere, like painting mini-figurines or foraging for fungi.

To stave off social anxiety that impedes authenticity, focus on the person in front of you instead of yourself.

This martyring of self takes a toll on us, as Virginia Woolf described in her speech to the National Society for Women’s Service on January 12, 1931: She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others . . . I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.

Promoting high self-esteem without accountability to others has been a recipe for narcissism, which has been ascending for decades, according to a meta-analysis. As Roy Baumeister, a researcher who studies self-esteem, put it: “Hitler had very high self-esteem and plenty of initiative, too, but those were hardly guarantees of ethical behavior,” and “the costs of high self-esteem are born by other people.”

“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.”