Platonic, page 10
The lesson we can learn from Clive is that to get good at initiating with others, we don’t just have to get good at getting out of the house. We have to get good at saying hello, introducing ourselves, inviting people out to coffee. We must do it repeatedly too. We have to overcome overt avoidance by showing up and overcome covert avoidance by engaging with people when we get there. To do so, we may have to confront our inner voice telling us we’ll be rejected and instead tell ourselves that others like us, that they’d be happy to connect, that we are likable.
How to Take Initiative
The barriers to taking initiative we’ve explored—focusing too much on romantic partnerships, assuming people will reject you, showing up but not engaging when you get there—are just part of the story. You may have other issues that you’ll have to grapple with to get yourself to a place where you’re ready to initiate.
Maybe you still think you’re too busy—you have your nine-to-five grind and are juggling both your kids (and three to five bowling pins, on account of that juggling class you signed up for at the local community center). You need physical therapy for jugglers’ wrist before you can even think about making friends.
Or perhaps you’re convinced you don’t really need friends, because you are somehow an outlier in the human experience.
Or maybe—far less likely than either of these other scenarios, of course—you’ve recognized that you’ve been passive about making friends and are hoping to do better. You’re ready to put in the work, and you’re wondering, Well, what now?
Let’s talk about what you can expect when you start to put yourself out there, and how you can most effectively navigate initiation.
Picture yourself at a social gathering. You’re at a happy hour for people in your profession and don’t know anybody else attending. At first, you notice a smattering of people who might be there for the networking event and you begin to feel sheepish. Why do I push myself to go to these silly things? you wonder to yourself. The woman standing adjacent to you shoots you a look, and you wonder if you said that out loud. You shoot her a look back, pretending to be confident that those were thoughts and not words. You hope that she doesn’t keep shooting back because your face is out of ammo and you’re starting to feel a bit anxious. Nervousness, reluctance, it’s all to be expected when exposing yourself to a pack of unfamiliar hyenas, er—human beings.
You get a drink at the bar and chew on the plastic red straw to avoid finishing it prematurely. This drink is your liquid covert avoidance, and so is the prattle in your brain that’s going on about how you shouldn’t have used plastic because of the inevitable climate change apocalypse. But if it’s inevitable, then why should you give up the luxury of the straw? You are percolating with discomfort right now; you deserve the damn straw. Ah, sweet, sweet covert avoidance. You have someone to talk to, even if it’s your very own critical mind.
Someone hovers close to you, a rogue networker like yourself, also fascinated by his drink. He’s wearing a gray blazer and some jeans. This is your chance, you think. But what if he rejects you? You make up a story about how he’s probably waiting for someone, how you’re probably the only loser here who didn’t have a friend to bring with you. Self-critical thoughts, you recognize. What did that book say? Oh right! You’re likely assuming others are rejecting you more than they actually are. Now you know that research says that when you’re self-critical, you project that others don’t like you, even though this isn’t necessarily true. You repeat an affirmation to yourself: May I assume that others like me.
The rogue networker next to you probably thinks something’s wrong with you now, a part of your brain whispers, as you continue mumbling your hokey mantra. But another part of you begins to feel more at ease, less threatened. Your shoulders relax, your forehead softens its furrow, and you approach Gray Blazer.
“Hey! I’m [insert your name here, or else the name you made up so people couldn’t search you on social media until you wanted them to]. What brings you here?” you ask.
“Oh, I’m Obi. I work for such-and-such company,” he responds. Such-and-such? Hmm, haven’t heard of them, you ponder. You begin to chat. Luckily, Obi is an easy conversationalist and seems relieved rather than horrified that you approached him. You talk for about five minutes until the conversation begins to peter out, and Obi looks itchy to make his way around the room.
“Well, it was great talking to you,” you offer.
“You as well,” he responds.
Breaking the seal of initiating makes you more confident, and you find yourself approaching a bunch of people that evening. There’s the bubbly woman in the evergreen dress, Keshia, who seems fascinated by you. You like her. There’s the skittish stout man in suspenders who is fairly curt. A few others but you can’t remember their names: one person who lives in your neighborhood, another who showed off pictures of his cute dog—a dalmatian/dachshund mix. How did that even happen?
There are moments when you are left alone, in the purgatory between conversational partners, but the record of non-abysmal interactions that you’re building keeps you at ease. People even begin to approach you. Clark, the host of the networking event, comes by to ask you how you’re enjoying yourself. You answer, but he seems distracted. You aren’t sure what might be distracting him and hope that it’s not your boring answer about wanting to expand your professional network.
You second-guess yourself: Were you supposed to tell him that you’ve been feeling a gnawing sense of loneliness, particularly during the long stretches of weekend, and how it was getting to the point where the pain of the loneliness eclipsed your fear of having to do something about it? Then you remember not to project rejection onto an ambiguous circumstance. Maybe Clark has other things on his mind. You were right, you think, as you peer at the clock, and realize that he was probably distracted because his networking event is ending. He pauses your conversation to make an announcement: “Thank you all so much for coming. This event was a great success, and that is because of all of you. Join us monthly for our happy hour. But before you go, make sure you exchange business cards liberally and link up.”
And now you’re left with a choice. Who exactly should you follow up with? You spent the longest time chatting with Obi, felt a connection with Keshia in the evergreen dress, and feel warmly toward that guy with the cute dog and its impossible mix.
Research has shown that it pays to be strategic about who we follow up with when we initiate. In a study conducted by Michael Sunnafrank from the University of Minnesota and his colleague Artemio Ramirez then at Ohio State, researchers followed college students as they interacted with one another for nine weeks. After their first encounter, the students were asked to predict their likelihood of becoming friends. The researchers found that students’ ratings of each other’s friendship potential after their first meeting predicted whether they were actually friends nine weeks later.
In other words, the spark is real. So trust yourself when you meet someone who feels familiar or comfortable, when there’s chemistry, when you sense you might be experiencing a kindred spirit. Following up with these promising seeds of connection will lift your chances of finding the deep friendships you are looking for. Ding, ding, ding—your first winner is Keshia in the evergreen dress. My motto is that if I ever meet anyone I think is really cool, I’m going to follow up with them and ask them to meet up again. Those sparks are too precious to waste.
Keep Showing Up
An alternative means to get the biggest bang for your buck when you initiate is to rely on what researchers call “propinquity.” Propinquity means that you are likely to build relationships with people to whom you are consistently physically closer. New Yorkers know this is true. When Amazon withdrew from building its headquarters relatively far into the borough of Queens, near JFK Airport in New York, I read a tweet that said, “In all fairness, they’re not the first person who has pulled out after committing to going to Queens.”
Mady Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, discovered the power of propinquity during a study that aimed to predict which police officers would become friends. She found that the secret to friendship was last names. Those cadets with last names that started with the same letter—say, Carlton and Cassidy—had a higher likelihood of becoming friends. It actually wasn’t about the last names, per se, but rather the implications of last names. Cadets were seated alphabetically, and Carltons and Cassidys were likely to sit next to each other. When each cadet was asked to nominate someone else in the academy as a close friend, a whopping 90 percent of cadets listed someone they sat beside.
Propinquity is proof that friendship isn’t magical. It’s overwhelmingly determined by the spaces we find or place ourselves in. If we’re lucky, our job, school, or hobbies will already provide us with ample propinquity with others we might get along with. If we’re not, then we’ll have to create our own. That means that if we stay at home all day and watch television, then we may only ever achieve propinquity with late-night talk shows. It doesn’t matter how many soul mate friends may be out there for us if we never achieve any sort of propinquity with any of them; they won’t slink their way into our lives like fruit flies do to fruits unless we invite them. When we regularly place ourselves in physical proximity with others we can connect to, we are writing our own fate, acknowledging that we have control over our friendships, and upping our chances of connection.
One reason propinquity works so well is that it reduces the costs involved with seeing someone. When potential friends live far away, you have to go out of your way to get in your car or ride the bus to get to them, but when they’re already in your vicinity, seeing each other is easy. According to a small study conducted by Robert Hayes at the University of California, Los Angeles, when you’re building early relationships, costs diminish the likelihood of the relationship progressing. So, if you have to commute an hour to see each other, you may realize that even though you have a budding friendship, the commute isn’t worth the bud.
Later in the relationship, costs are way less correlated with sustaining the relationship, so people will make the commute for the connection, but they won’t just to figure out if they kinda maybe sorta will eventually become friends. That is why so many people have “locationships,” or low-cost friendships that are sustained because friends live in the same location. Returning to our networking event, even if you chatted briefly with that person who lives in your neighborhood and forgot their name, they are someone to follow up with.
Another reason propinquity works is because if we know we might see someone again, we like them more. In an older study, conducted in the 1960s, women were presented with profiles of two women who were similar. They were told they’d be engaging in ongoing discussion groups with the woman in one of the profiles. They reported liking the profile of the woman more whom they’d presumedly see again. When we know we’ll see someone again, we tend to be more invested.
One last reason why propinquity works is that we like people when we are exposed to them more and they become familiar to us. In the psychology world, this is called the “mere exposure effect,” since through merely being exposed to someone continuously, we come to like them. In a study conducted out of the University of Pittsburgh, an experimenter chose four strangers to show up at a large psychology lecture, for a varying number of classes. One stranger infiltrated fifteen classes, another ten, another five, and the last zero. The strangers didn’t interact with anyone in the class, and yet, students reported liking the most the stranger who showed up to the highest number of classes; this stranger was liked about 20 percent more than the stranger who never showed up to any. By and large, the students didn’t even recognize that any of the strangers came to their class, demonstrating that the mere exposure effect happens unconsciously.
Mere exposure means that the people who end up building relationships are those who establish the most face time with the people around them. That is why research in college dorms has found that people who live at the ends of the hall develop fewer friendships than those who live in the dorm’s center. Centrally located rooms offer face time with more of your fellow dorm residents and the gift of mere exposure.
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. Propinquity also tells us to befriend people we already see often, maybe our neighbors, or our co-workers, or someone who lives close by. You can also make both propinquity and mere exposure work in your favor by becoming a regular at your local coffee shop, bar, or gym. Achieving regularity will make it more likely that others will feel positively toward you. On the other hand, mere exposure means that to make friends, you have to show up again and again.
But mere exposure alone doesn’t build relationships; initiation does. I suggest building up “spontaneous communication” with other regulars over time and seeing if these scatters of interactions build the foundation for friendship. Spontaneous communication is unplanned conversation that occurs because two people are in the same place at the same time. It is in fleeting moments of chitchat that relationships are sprouted.
We can initiate a conversation with strangers by using the insight and question method developed by David Hoffeld, CEO and chief sales trainer at Hoffeld Group. This involves simply sharing a statement or insight and asking a question to follow up. We might say, “I really loved the main character in the book we read for book club. What did you think about her?” or “This drink is so sweet and tastes so good. How do you like yours?” or “It’s been so long since I’ve been to the beach and I’m so glad to be here. What do you like about the beach?”
It’s truly scary to talk to strangers, and to do so, I have to rev myself up by reminding myself to assume that people will like me and be open to talking to me—the opposite of what we typically assume, but in fact, an assumption that is closer to the truth. A study by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder at the University of Chicago involved asking people to talk to a stranger on the train. Can you guess how many were shot down? None! According to Epley and Schroeder, “Commuters appeared to think that talking to a stranger posed a meaningful risk of social rejection. As far as we can tell, it posed no risk at all.”
Talking to strangers has helped me turn my neighborhood into my community. As a graduate student, I spent many days at Starbucks at a communal table with strangers, writing and reading research articles. At first, the people around me would fade into the background, human wallpaper, but eventually, through “spontaneous conversation,” as in “I’ve been working for so long. How’s your work coming along?” I started to connect to them. I’d see their familiar faces all around the neighborhood—at the pool, a restaurant, or walking on the street. We’d say hi and the entire neighborhood started feeling far less anonymous. There was something about bumping into people I knew that made me feel like I belonged. Those days at Starbucks turned my neighborhood into my community.
This is how it has gone for me when I have wanted to make friends: I show up at some sort of gathering or meetup. I usually feel clumsy and uncomfortable as a new person showing up to a meetup of people who’ve already built connections, get discouraged, and never return. But mere exposure is my reminder to keep showing up if I’m at a new social club, soccer league, or co-working space and I’m tempted to leave when things feel awkward. It is why you should live out our networking scenario and keep showing up for those monthly events. Mere exposure means not just that people will warm up to you at the social group over time, but also that you’ll come to like them more too. Initiate, unapologetically, and then do it again and again.
Mere exposure is justification for the value of persistence. Instead of committing to a single happy hour to make friends, commit to a group for at least three months before dropping out, otherwise you’ll foil mere exposure. Then, take initiative by inviting your favorite person in the group to get smoothies. Mere exposure also leads us to expect that (1) making friends will be uncomfortable at first—all those unfamiliar faces that we’re programmed to be wary of; and (2) it’ll gradually begin to feel easier the more we show up.
HOW TO MAKE A FRIEND
Find and attend a group that meets regularly.
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Assume people in the group like you.
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Overcome covert avoidance by opening up conversation with others in the group.
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Invite your favorite person(s) in the group to hang out one-on-one.
Be the Friend You Want
The lesson we’ve learned from this chapter is that to make friends, we need to take initiative. But the larger lesson is that to make a friend, we must be a friend. “Be the friend you want to see in the world,” to mangle Gandhi’s wisdom. Instead of waiting for someone to pluck us into their friendship worlds, we must do the plucking. I’ve noticed, and research supports, that insecure people (like me in college, and sometimes still now) often fail to do this. They wonder: Why is no one approaching me? Why did no one invite me? Why didn’t they say hello to me? Why didn’t they check in on me? Don’t they love me? If their answers to these questions aren’t favorable, they’ll leap into denial. Screw them. I didn’t like them anyway. I don’t need anyone but myself and that one dog I liked at the party.
