Matt's Roof Garden

pillars of friendship

Status:: budding

Tags:: writing friendship making friends

I'm not sure about this title review

friendship types?

too broad

{{or: friendship relationship styles | friendship types | pillars of friendship | friendship relatability}}

friendship connection style

want to be talking about how

I've said this before and I'll say it again, the formula for making friends is not complicated. Actually doing it is complicated.

Reach out, make plans, follow through with the plans. Repeat.

when people say "I just don't know how to make friends" or that "people never want to stay friends" very often they're trying to skip one of those steps. What they're actually saying is "people don't want to be friends on my terms and on my timetable" or "I can't find people to be entertaining while I don't put in as much effort"

OK bear with me for for a minute: I've been thinking about this recently in terms of Spontaneous Desire vs Responsive Desire vs Contextual Desire. These are terms thrown around in the study of human sexuality but I think they're still valid when applied to platonic relationships

People move between those 3 types often throughout their lives and disconnect can happen when two (or more) people have different types of engagement

Haven't thought this 100% through yet but I'll give it a runthrough

Spontaneous Desire: Comes out of nowhere, needs no prompting. This is like when you randomly go "Oh man I miss XYZ we should hand out." There's nothing that caused you to think that you just did

Responsive Desire: You are interested when others show interest but it never occurs to you if unprompted. This is the type of friend who is always down to hang out but never initiates.

Contextual Desire: As it sounds it's based on context, your internal circumstances and environmental circumstances. You go visit your parents and there's an old friend who you all of a sudden you want to hang out with

Yeah they're pretty interesting! I do want to clarify though that (especially with responsive and contextual ) it's not that desire/interest isn't there until someone else "creates it" it's more that the other person helps bring forward something that already existed

pillars of friendship