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 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.

Our ancestors lived in tribes, where responsibility for one another was diffused among many. Friendship, then, is a rediscovery of an ancient truth we’ve long buried: it takes an entire community for us to feel whole.

“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.

Our friends advertise the kaleidoscope of ways we can live. They expose us to new ways of being in the world, showing us another life is possible. As Anaïs Nin, the French Cuban writer, puts it, “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

We don’t know ourselves fully until we experience ourselves in another person and recognize that force within us.

When we assume, without clear evidence, that the only reason someone’s reaching out to us is that they’re bored and lonely, attachment is at play. When we wait for the “shoe to drop” in an otherwise happy friendship, attachment is at play. When we feel an overwhelming but mysterious urge to withdraw, attachment is at play. When we assume others will disappoint us, judge us when we’re vulnerable, or turn us down when we need support, attachment is at play. When we assume friends don’t really like us to begin with, attachment is at play. When we allow people to see only our strong side, our “jolly” side, or our sarcastic side, attachment is at play. When we maintain relationships with people who mistreat us, attachment is at play.

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

I recognize how my fears of rejection led me to reject others. But when I was fearful or nervous, I didn’t think about how I was treating others. The stress narrows your focus; that’s the self-centeredness of pain, the obliviousness to how we perpetrate harm when hurt.

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

Overall, this research reveals one of the most important secrets to taking initiative in friendship. Assume people like you.

The truth is, no one cares about your social clumsiness as much as you do. They’re too busy worrying about their own.

You can harness the mere exposure effect by joining a continuous social event rather than a one-off one; it’s choosing book clubs over happy hours, or a language class over a language workshop.

There’s no better opportunity for deep self-acceptance than that which we can practice when we are weak.

Also, like most defense mechanisms, oversharing occurs compulsively, an automatic twitch to reduce our anxiety, whereas true vulnerability occurs deliberately after we discern we are safe with someone.

Our sharing should reflect the safety we feel in a friendship, rather than the lack thereof that we are trying to compensate for.