The power of one close friend

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I’ve been enjoying Dr. Nicole LePera’s Twitter lately. Today she tweeted about the power of having one emotionally intimate (safe) relationship. As we learned in Loneliness and other reading, humans need emotional connection for survival. Without it, our brains atrophy and our bodies wear out. Loneliness is endemic, self-reinforcing, and as deadly as smoking.

I’ve written before about how to make friends when you have no friends and 7 steps for men who want closer friendships. But in this post I want to go deeper into how I’ve developed emotional intimacy in my friendships.

I think this is important for a few reasons. First, we also learned in Loneliness that people’s need for social connection varies. One close friendship may get you 99% of the way toward being not-lonely.

Second, one close friendship can help pave the way for however much social connection you need to not feel lonely. It can do this in two ways.

1. Forming this connection will require you to practice the skills you need to connect with others.

2. Again, as we’ve discussed, showing up lonely increases the chances a social interaction will go poorly. One close friendship helps you show up to each subsequent social interaction less lonely.

“Emotional intimacy takes relational skills that not all of us are are taught or modeled as children,” Dr. LePera writes. “Childhood trauma disrupts our ability to connect with other people because our attachment system can detect threats from past abandonments, neglect, and betrayals. We develop insecure or anxious attachment patterns. This can be worked through and healed.”

She lists the following emotional intimacy skills:

• Communication skills

• Vulnerability

• Ability to regulate emotions

• Ability to meet our needs (and the needs of others)

• Ability to repair after conflict

Here I want to bring in I post I read recently with career advice:

the first 500 stories mentality

It’s a TechCrunch journalist recounting advice from her journalism professor that her first 500 stories “don’t count.” That is, lower the stakes. Allow yourself to be bad at something until you’re good.

I’d love to see us take this mentality into the task of forming one close, safe, emotionally intimate relationship. The first 500 attempts to improve our communication skills, vulnerability, etc. simply don’t count.

I complained about loneliness when I first started going to therapy, right before the lockdowns in 2020. It’s something I’ve always struggled with. I learned how to network and make friends in my early 20s. But by my mid-30s I had a lot of drinking buddies but very few people I’d feel comfortable asking to drive me home from the hospital after surgery.

I thought friendships just naturally evolved from acquaintances to friends to close friends. After all, I’d never really seen or read about anyone actively, purposefully taking steps to make this kind of transition. It just always seemed to happen, or not.

My therapist gently suggested I consider taking some action to try to get closer to some of the people in my life. It’s one of those things, like making eye contact or asking people about themselves, that’s super obvious in retrospect but had to be explained to me.

Pandemic was such a great time to start this experiment. I wasn’t able to just go out drinking with whoever was around. It forced me to be much more selective and intentional about who I spent time with. So I did an inventory of my mental Rolodex (a paper contacts list for my Gen-Z babies) and selected five or seven people I wanted to try to get closer to.

Most of these people were shockingly down to be closer to me. One of them was not. But even in that, I learned rejection was totally fine. It hurt a little in the moment. But I was quickly able to internalize that it didn’t say anything bad about me as a person that this particular individual didn’t want the kind of closeness with me that I wanted with them. Sometimes the vibe is just off and it doesn’t mean anyone is wrong or bad.

I started small.

Sometimes I get into what may be accurately described as depressions. I feel overwhelmed and negative. I feel like I don’t enjoy my own company and no one else will enjoy it either. My default is to self-isolate. I don’t text anyone back. There’s a great podcast episode which I can’t find (sorry!) about people who fall off the face of the planet. I have like a very mild version of this by default. I feel bad about not responding so I continue to avoid. Then I feel like I’m someone who can’t be relied upon, which makes me feel unwilling to accept any help because I don’t feel confident I can reciprocate. It’s a vicious cycle which I was only really able to fully comprehend in therapy talking it out. It’s funny how much a question like “Why don’t you text them back?” can illuminate when you have the space and safety to think it through.

Seeing this pattern, I started texting one chosen one in particular things along the lines of “I’m not in the best place right now and am not ready to talk about it but I’m okay and will talk to you when I’m feeling better.” And I amply mentally rewarded myself for this change in pattern. I’d say to myself “Yay you! That was hard but you did it!” Because behavior change, especially deeply entrenched patterns, is really hard! And if I could beat myself up with gusto for not responding, I could gas myself up for responding with the same zeal and get better results and have a better time.

Responding with anything when it was hard and rewarding myself for doing it helped me build trust in myself as someone worth being close to. Maybe I can’t immediately leap into being an awesome friend the moment I’m called upon. But I can show up in whatever way I’m capable of at that time and then later come around with more of whatever they needed from me.

Starting to believe I was someone worth being close to was the turning point for me in actually getting closer to my chosen ones. I acted myself into right thinking. By being a better friend I started to see myself as a better friend and it became easier over time to continue to be a better friend.

Today, I continue to practice the skills listed above. For example, I used to never fight with my friends. I’d fight with my partner. But if a friend hurt my feelings I’d just retreat from them. Today I practice being vulnerable enough to tell a friend if I’m hurt and repairing after conflict. Today I’m close enough to a few friends that sometimes they tell me I’ve hurt their feelings and I practice apologizing.

I feel like my romantic relationships are so much better for my efforts. Instead of relying on one person to meet nearly all my need for emotional connection, I show up with a lot of my needs already met. For a securely attached person, this makes me a more attractive partner and makes the relationship smoother.

I do feel like we need more systemic, policy solutions to loneliness since it’s clearly a widespread, systemic problem. But in the meantime, all this has helped me and I hope my story helps some of you, my babies, as well.

Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “surrealist painting of two girls holding hands.”