Raina Cohen

And this can be difficult in friendship because I don't think we have the expectation of rejection in the way that it's really built into friendship.

by contrast, romantic relationships that we understand that there's some amount of risk-taking, putting yourself out there and romantic relationships, but the same goes for platonic relationships.

And it sucks to make a bid and have it rejected, you know, to invite someone to dinner or a coffee or an activity.

But I think trying to embolden yourself to make the first move, because otherwise there'll be people who all maybe want to get to know each other, but

Everybody's a little bit afraid.

And then the third thing is, how do you escalate the friendship?

And I think that doing the kind of recurring hangouts that I suggested is one way.

I've sometimes been really explicit with people and told them I have a friend crush on them or that earlier when I moved to DC, where I live,

decide i like told a friend i'm you know deciding to focus on like making a few really close friends as opposed to a wider circle and that she was one of those people and that ended up i think pretty much transforming our friendship um we don't live in the same place but uh i you know officiated her wedding this uh this past year and i think that really articulating that i had that um

I thought so highly of her, and I really wanted to get to know her, made it easier for us to get closer, faster, and spend more time together than we might have otherwise.

I didn't end up focusing that much on the virtual connection piece.

So I don't have specific people to cite other than what I was mentioning before around one of the key ingredients of a very close relationship and attachment relationship does involve physical touch.

And obviously, there's going to be variation across people.

But I would say,

There are ways that you can connect with people virtually, as we are doing now.

But there are things that you don't pick up when you are texting with someone.

As an example, I had a friend who I live with who

was going through something very difficult and some, and someone in the house asked how she was doing and she could not fake it.

She couldn't, you know, she couldn't decide to, if someone had asked her that by text, she might've not answered immediately or, you know, brushed it off.

But when you are in person with, with people, there's body language, there are, there are expressions of