The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it

All my blog posts…

  • Events are hard

    I made a video! I’m not sure if this is a better format than blog? This is a reformat of some stuff from previous posts. Don’t worry, it’s only 4 minutes. If you have opinions, leave a comment below. Read more

  • Why do you keep talking about events?

    Someone asked me why I keep chattering on about events in these posts. It’s a great question! It’s because I’m looking at friendship from a behavioral perspective first. In order to make and keep friends, there has to be reciprocal interactions that both people experience. There have been times when I wonder why I’m lonely Read more

  • Experience maps 4: looking at the levels

    If you’ll remember from the previous posts, we looked at an experience over time, labeled the axes with feelings, and marked on horizontal lines all the time we spent at that feeling or more positive. The next step is to look at the feeling bands individually and analyze the event experience. So, did I have Read more

  • Practice makes perfect(ly) fine

    My brother and I are both interruptors. There’s two ways this usually happens: The thing about interruptions is that, regardless of intent, the output can seem very rude. And it remains rude until you can develop a rapport with someone enough that they power through it, or you create a social contract where you state Read more

  • Event post-mortem: the meetup that wasn’t

    Also known as: the Saturday in which I ignore everything that I’ve written in this blog and try to force myself to do exactly the wrong thing and then feel bad about it…for the 8,000th time. For your entertainment, I have put my my behavioral missteps and thought errors in all caps. So, what happened? Read more

  • Experience maps 3: experience through time

    So, the next thing to look at with the experience map is to view it through time. So, we took the map, and then separated it into bands. Next, we take those bands and on each level we show the total time spent at that number or higher. So, if I am looking at the Read more