Connecting with Purpose
When I moved to San Francisco in 2000 the dot com boom was on and there was a huge influx of people arriving daily. It was really hard to find an apartment because they sold so quickly; I’d arrive at an open house 30 minutes after it started and learn that someone had walked in earlier, offered a higher monthly rate and paid the deposit in cash. Even harder than finding an apartment was finding friends. I was fortunate because I had moved out with a friend from Chicago, so I was never completely alone, but it was still a year before I felt like I belonged. We would go out at night to explore the city and lonely straight women would give me their numbers, asking me to call them so we could be friends. Women who had recently moved to the city for exciting, high paying jobs, but hadn’t been able to form connections with friends and were truly desperate for them.
Times have changed, and now people can use Meetup and Facebook to find potential friends. But it seems that having dozens of ways to instantly communicate with people has not fixed the dilemma I saw back in 2000. I decided to start this blog because people keep asking me how to make friends. Many are new to San Francisco but most aren’t, and they are frustrated by their lack of community and feelings of loneliness. This blog is my effort to answer their question.
By explaining the science of attachment through this blog I hope to clarify how healthy relationships are built. Attachment theory offers an abundance of insight and practical steps for building strong ties in many different configurations, including with colleagues, supervisors, classmates and roommates. The theory also explains how communication develops healthy or unhealthy relationships. The buffering power of a relationship is directly tied to the style of communication feeding it; healthy communication leads to secure relationships and insecure relationships are built through unhealthy communication.
As a psychologist I know the most effective prevention for anxiety and depression is having a close friend, mate, sibling or parent. Learning and practicing healthy communication habits gets us exactly the kind of relationships that promote resilience. Our resilience is built up by time spent loving and trusting one another. When bad times come those reserves of affection and support buffer our stress and promote quick recovery.
We can learn to use our smart phones as a tool to enhance the quality of all our relationships, rather than a method of avoiding difficult interactions and uncomfortable proximity to others. We all need to be in the same room with people to get the full benefit of their presence. Using phones and social media wisely can increase the joy and connection we feel when we are together. It just requires awareness of our choices when we communicate, and the potential impact that we may unwittingly have with our actions.
Reflection point: Are your smartphone and social media habits helping to deepen your connection with others or are they making you feel more emotionally distant?
Practice: Send 1 message to a recent acquaintance with a link to a video, article or photo that you think your potential new friend would appreciate, letting them know why it you thought it would be of interest.