Connection: What Can We Realistically Hope For?

Image: Two women thinking, oh thank fuck, someone else is actually navigating.

Last week's connections filled me up to the brim. Friends who energised my space, and I'm so used to having less in my space, this is significant. Dinner with new mates over an appreciation of Greece's truly excellent cuisine. Old loves who drop in from the sky and suddenly I'm flirting again, except now we both know what we're doing, appreciating what made our connection special. Romance isn't dead, it's just significantly more honest and ends in a good night's sleep.

I've spent this month thinking about connection. I've worked out it needs conscious curation rather than social drift. I've accepted that work can't provide the depth I'm after because the structure won't allow it. I’ve experienced that you’re at times fulfilled from the graceful periphery rather than at the centre of things. I'm willing to show up, be vulnerable, do repair work when needed, and invest properly in relationships that matter. I really am Brené.

But I'm also brutally aware that connection is a craft requiring two people who both get that. And most people never explicitly consider this. Nothing teaches us that connection is something you consciously learn, practice, and refine throughout your entire life.

Once I started learning the patterns that made relationships work I was again furious that no one ever teaches us this stuff. Not in families, where conflict usually looked like shouting or barging out of the room. Not in schools where “is it kind, is it true, is it necessary?” was the sum of emotional education. And certainly not in workplaces, where we learn how to manage tasks, not how to tend one another.

In a world that treats conflict as failure, emotional precision as “too much,” and friendship as something that just happens, it’s no wonder so many of us move through connection half-blind, repeating the same mistakes in slightly older packaging.

So in all the information I’ve absorbed about how relationships actually work, I have held onto six capacities.  Think of them as muscles you build if you pay attention.

Patterns I Needed to Understand

The first is bidirectional vulnerability. Brené Brown says vulnerability creates connection, and I’ll happily wave that flag, but the bit that people forget to quote out loud is reciprocity. You show me your complexity, I’ll show you mine. Gradually, in rhythm. No need for a trauma dump on the first meeting, but we’re also not performing “It’s fine” for three years either. If one person excavates their psychological complexities while the other sits in platitudes, that’s amateur therapy and I’m not convinced.

Then there’s emotional granularity. For years my vocabulary was “I’m fine” and “a bit stressed,” (it still is with some people) and then I wondered why my friendships felt like checkout counter exchanges. Research on emotional granularity (Barrett, 2017) explains why this matters: once you can differentiate between “anxious,” “depleted,” or “overwhelmed,” you give people somewhere precise to meet you. You can learn it, hooray, though it does require admitting you have more than three emotions.  Back to the emotions wheel. 

Repair is the next muscle. I was a runner. When things went wrong, I fled. The friendships that died for me rarely collapsed in a single explosion; they bled out from small, repeated injuries that never got named. Successful relationships are never conflict-free. What separates them is repair competence. The ability to say "I was a dickhead, I'm sorry" and actually mean it matters more than never being a dickhead, which is impossible anyway. But repair is a two-person lift. You need someone willing to acknowledge they've fucked up, and someone willing to catch that acknowledgment without lobbing it back later. Both sides matter. You can't repair alone.

Tolerance for different operational styles was such an obvious and practical lesson. Some people need daily texts, others thrive on monthly deep dives. I used to assume mismatched values when it was really mismatched styles. She likes 20-minute catch-ups; I need much more time for the interaction to feel valuable. Neither wrong; just incompatible without explicit conversation about needs.

Nervous system compatibility is bodily philosophy. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory names it, but what I mean is simple: some people settle you, others leave you drained. You can try to be charming, persuasive, kind — and your body still knows whether a person is settling or fraying you. Trusting that sensation saves you from sitting in the wrong dynamics. We should use it.  

Finally, shared evolution. The relationships that stick are the ones that allow both people to change without shame. Curiosity outweighs defensiveness. We don’t try to freeze each other into neat versions of the past. New versions get to exist and get cherished more than the preexisting ones.

Myths to Ignore

Culture loves promoting connection myths. "You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with." If this were true, I'd currently be part baker, part doctor, part therapist, which would make for very confusing gatherings.

We're not passive sponges. We're compositions. “Old love” sparks my political curiosity, friend Deborah popping in enables emotional precision, the new dinner friends invite my Epicurean mode. The relationships that matter aren't those you spend most time with, but those that activate parts of yourself you want to develop.

Then there's "just put yourself out there" and "be yourself." Advice that misses the mechanics entirely. Be which self? I've got several, and some are terrible socially. Put myself where? Network how? More chats with more people that I really don't dig? This feels like instructing someone to 'just run a marathon' without months of training, no shoes, or knowing you'll be plugging away for at least five hours as a novice and will probably lose a toenail.

If we can understand what connection actually requires, we can ignore these myths designed for I’m not sure which relational game. 

What Can We Hope For?

Connection as craft is genuinely rare. Most people will never consider that emotional granularity is learnable, repair is essential, or vulnerability requires reciprocity. The realistic hope is finding a handful, genuinely just a few, people who either already understand this or are equally curious. Not dozens. Not a whole community. Brené Brown talks about the "Square Squad," a one-inch square piece of paper that can only fit a handful of names. Three to five people over a lifetime who possess both the capacities and willingness to build something real.

This sounds bleak until you experience one genuinely reciprocal, repair-capable, emotionally literate friendship. One person you can be genuinely yourself with sustains more than fifty people you're performing for.

How to Actually Navigate This

If connection requires capacities most people don't have, those of us who do need to signal what we're playing for and recognise it quickly when we find it.

Signal early. Not by announcing "I seek emotionally granular friendships" (terrifying for both parties), but being willing to go deep early enough that people who can't match it select themselves out. My first conversation with Deborah involved discussing the devastation of partnerships ending. Someone content with surface interactions would have found that alarming. Someone equally interested in depth recognises the signal and reciprocates.

Recognise capacity fast. Does this person toggle in conversation or monologue? When something feels off, do they avoid or address it? Can they differentiate emotional states? When they mess up, can they acknowledge it? Understanding the mechanics helps you identify early who has capacity and who doesn't. We're not judging them, just being clear about what's possible.

Know when you're the mismatch. Depressingly, I'm often the one who can't meet someone's needs. Don't ask me for daily check-ins – I find that suffocating. When burnt out, I don't reply for weeks. I've also performed "fine" when I didn't trust someone yet. For someone seeking depth, I would have seemed exactly like the surface-level person I now find frustrating. Incompatibility runs both ways.

Accept different depths. The Greek friendship group where I exist on the graceful periphery. Spiridoula the baker providing regular, predictable contact. Deborah with the conversations I need. Expecting the baker to provide therapeutic depth is absurd. Expecting Deborah to offer me bread wastes her capacities.

Tend what you find. Most people won't develop these capacities because nothing teaches them to. The realistic hope isn't finding depth everywhere. It's finding it somewhere. With someone. And tending to it properly when you do.

Where This Lands For Me

Operating this way is occasionally lonely. You go three levels deeper and watch someone's eyes glaze over. You spot friendships heading toward slow death and can't fix it alone. You meet interesting people who vanish after the first minor friction. After a while, you're just tired.

Sometimes you wonder if you're overthinking it. If people who don't analyse this carefully are having more fun. Maybe they are. But you can't unknow what you know now.

And then last week happened. Friends who energised my space in ways I'd forgotten were possible. Dinner with new people who matched my appetite for depth without explanation. Old loves dropping in, both of us knowing how to do this better now.

When you find even one person who operates at this level, the relief is extraordinary. None of us is perfect. What matters is they're trying and so are you. When something goes wrong, you both repair it. You can say "I'm depleted" without them taking it personally. You call each other on bullshit without the friendship imploding.

That's what makes the scarcity bearable. One genuinely reciprocal friendship sustains me more than fifty where I’m performing. Those few awesome connections make accumulation feel exhausting by comparison.

If you're thinking about connection this way, you're already rare. You're playing a different game than most people. The question becomes: are you willing to keep looking? To signal clearly enough that the rare others can find you? To appreciate profoundly when you do find genuine connection, because you understand how genuinely rare it is?

Connection of this calibre doesn't happen by accident. It's two people stumbling through the dark with torches, finally spotting each other's light and thinking "oh thank fuck, someone else is actually navigating." That recognition is what you're looking for.