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

Category: Events & Doing Things

• Cartoons / Comics Events & Doing Things Social Skills Uncategorized

  When small talk is animal talk

  What if a conversation subtext makes more sense as a nature show soundtrack? Like, when we’re chirping at each other. Or, when we’re just pinging. Maybe we’re trying to prove something. Or share good feelings.

  December 21, 2025
• Event Stages Events & Doing Things Social Skills

  Initiation – Types of asks

  

  I’m going to take a little winding detour to talk about the different types of asks (the first overture said/sent to someone before negotiating the details). Each type of ask means something slightly different. It can be useful to think about what types of asks are best to use in…

  May 5, 2024
• Event Stages Social Skills Uncategorized

  Diagram of an event – Initiation part 2

  This is a continuation of Diagram of an event – Initiation. We’ve discussed what an initiation ask is, now we’re going to discuss the response to the ask. People can either accept or decline the ask, but, as per usual, it’s a little more complicated… I’m going to discuss the following…

  April 14, 2024
• Event Stages Events & Doing Things

  Diagram of an event – Initiation

  I’m finally back to the first stage of the diagram of an event…initiation! What is an “Initiation”? Initiation in this context is when one person asks another person to do something and the request details are explicitly accepted by all parties. It sounds so simple, right? Well, there’s nothing that’s…

  April 7, 2024
• Event Stages

  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.

  March 12, 2023
• Event Stages

  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…

  March 10, 2023
• Event Stages Messy Feelings

  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…

  March 9, 2023
• Events & Doing Things Experience maps

  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…

  February 16, 2023
• Events & Doing Things Experience maps

  Introducing…the experience map!

  Here is a new concept for the next few posts: the experience map. Ta da! Most of the time people think about events in the binary: Did you have fun? Yes or No But, most experiences go more like this: Some parts are good and some parts are bad. And…

  February 14, 2023
• Event Stages

  Diagram of an event – Recall part 4: memory recall

  And here’s where we get to the ‘why’ of all these memory posts. And also, this post may indicate the depths of my neuroticism, but to be fair, this whole blog is like this. What is memory recall? Memory recall is the surfacing of memories in response to stimuli. Recall…

  February 5, 2023