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

All my blog posts…

  • Making friends means you have something to lose

    Just a few days after we found out my grandma’s cancer is back and aggressive, one of my dogs went into heart failure and ended up in intensive care. They both are fine for the moment, but they won’t be sometime soon. We’ve always got a ticking clock on us, but sometimes that clock gets Read more

  • Changing by degrees – Part 2: “within acceptable parameters”

    Changing by degrees – Part 2: “within acceptable parameters”

    Flexibility is a key component to making and keeping friends. What happens when you’re bad at it? Read more

  • Event post-mortems

    This is an ongoing experiment for me, and I think it helps to narrow down the things that can be tweaked to help me do more behaviors that lead to friendship (I’m a big fan of looking at all this through a behavioral lens). This is an extension of two other posts: Changing by degrees Read more

  • Diagram of an event – breaks

    This is part of a series. Please check out this post for the beginning. Here is the overall event/hangout diagram for reference. This post is going to talk about the breaks between stages (the arrows in the diagram). What is a break? Sure, this seems like a stupid question (many of the questions I ask Read more

  • Changing by Degrees – Part 1: binary and restricted thinking

    In the last month, when writing about loneliness, I kept coming upon this idea of changing by degrees – changing small things and making tweaks instead of making sweeping pronouncements or big changes. For someone who struggles with moderation, changing life by degrees is an alien, but probably life-changing idea. To learn how to change Read more

  • Diagram of an event

    For people that struggle with either attending events or with understanding why other people struggle to attend events, I’d like to pose this stressor model as a useful guide. People tend to use a simplified model to think of going to an event or even something as simple as a hangout* with friends. It’ll often Read more