Being the One Who Walks Over
· Connection
Some of the most important people in our lives are still strangers. Connection begins when someone risks the awkwardness and walks over to say hello.
This week reminded me that so much of what shapes our lives, friendship, love, opportunity, and the adventures we never saw coming, begins with one slightly uncomfortable act: walking over and saying hello.
Last week, I did something I had never done before. I officiated a wedding. This week, apparently, life decided we should keep the streak going.
I went to visit a friend who is nearing the end of producing a feature-length film. The plan was pretty simple: spend some time together, catch up on life and talk business, and see what he and an incredible group of people had spent years creating. Through a wonderfully strange combination of circumstances that I will write about someday when I am actually allowed to tell the whole story, I somehow ended up very likely appearing in the film in a small, nonspeaking role.
I really hope I make the movie. Seriously, how fun would that be? But whether I survive the final edit is not actually what I have carried with me from the experience. What has stayed with me is what I saw and heard when the cameras were not rolling. It had very little to do with being in a movie. It had everything to do with how people find one another.
Twenty Years Were Sitting in That Room
At one point during a break, I was sitting with my friend and members of the crew listening to them talk, and I started hearing the history beneath the production. Someone had worked with someone else years ago. Another person came onto this project because somebody they trusted recommended them. Someone had helped someone else's family. Someone else had shown up during a difficult season. Some were working together again after years apart, while others were meeting for the first time but already carried a little trust because of the person who had connected them.
There is something powerful about the sentence, I don't know you yet, but I trust the person who told me about you.
A recommendation is really a form of borrowed trust. You may not know me, but you know someone who does. You trust their judgment, character, experience, or the way they have shown up in your life, and when they say, “You should talk to Justin,” a little of the trust they have earned gets extended to me.
What made this particular experience even more meaningful was hearing about the nearly twenty-year journey it had taken to bring this film into existence. Twenty years of previous projects, setbacks, conversations, introductions, disappointments, persistence, and people continuing to help one another along the way. They had helped careers. They had helped families. They had connected people who had never met simply because they trusted both sides of the introduction.
What looked to me like a film set was really a map of relationships.
Sociologist Mark Granovetter gave us language for part of this more than fifty years ago with his work on the strength of weak ties. His research showed that acquaintances, former coworkers, friends of friends, and people from previous chapters of our lives can connect us to entirely different circles. As Granovetter explains, “Your weak ties connect you to networks that are outside of your own circle.”
That was visible all over this production. Some of the connections in the room were decades old. Some had become deep friendships. Some were rooted in families. Others began with a project years ago and lasted long enough to become part of this one.
Maybe what we casually call “networking” is something much more beautiful when it is done well. Maybe it is a long history of humans helping one another, doing good work, keeping their word, remembering, and eventually being able to say, I know someone.
Sitting there, I felt grateful, lucky, inspired, and, if I am completely honest, a little bit like an imposter. I am not an actor. I had not spent twenty years working in film. I had not earned my way into that room through hundreds of productions. I was there because a relationship had grown into a friendship, we had stayed connected, and life had carried that relationship somewhere neither of us could have planned years ago.
Then I left the film set and went to Iowa.
“Dad, Meeting People Is Hard.”
I headed to Iowa City to spend time with two of my kids and go to the Cy-Hawk game. Go Iowa!
Somewhere during the weekend, our conversation turned toward friendships, dating, relationships, and how genuinely difficult it can feel to meet people right now. Dating apps came up, and my kids described the strange contradiction built into them. They make access to people incredibly easy while actual connection can still feel incredibly hard.
You can see someone's picture, interests, job, school, music tastes, friends, and probably half their travel history before ever saying hello. There are seemingly endless possibilities sitting on a screen, but the experience can also feel incredibly impersonal. You swipe. Someone swipes. Someone doesn't. You message. They disappear. You match with someone while knowing there are hundreds of other possibilities one thumb movement away.
I understand the appeal. Dating apps have connected plenty of people who might never have crossed paths otherwise, and I'm not interested in turning this into an old-guy lecture about how everything used to be better. It wasn't.
Dating when I was their age could be absolutely brutal.
I started telling my kids about seeing someone I thought was attractive and having to make an actual decision: Am I going to walk over there? Sometimes it was one person, which was scary enough. Sometimes it was an entire group, which was spectacular. You would start walking over while simultaneously trying to invent something intelligent to say, regulate your heart rate, and convince yourself that turning around halfway there would probably look worse than continuing.
Sometimes it went well. Other times, someone would turn away, barely answer, roll their eyes, look you up and down and very clearly arrive at a decision, or let the conversation die after about eleven excruciating seconds. Then came the walk back to your friends.
Character building.
I am not romanticizing rejection. Being dismissed hurts. Feeling unwanted can stay with us much longer than we would like it to. But while I was telling those stories, I realized those uncomfortable experiences were also doing something for us. We were getting reps.
Awkwardness Is Part of the Education
We were learning how to approach another person without knowing the outcome. We were learning how to begin a conversation, read body language, recognize interest, respect disinterest, recover from embarrassment, laugh at ourselves, and eventually try again.
We were also learning something far more important: someone else's lack of interest did not have to become a verdict on our worth.
Psychologists have found that our own insecurity often distorts how we think new interactions went. Yale researchers call it the “liking gap.” After meeting someone, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them. Margaret Clark, one of the researchers, explains, “We call this a liking gap, and it can hinder our ability to develop new relationships.”
The researchers found that we become so preoccupied with reviewing our own performance, the weird joke, the pause, the thing we wish we had said differently, that we miss signals from the other person that the conversation actually went well. Clark describes us as being “self-protectively pessimistic,” hesitant to assume someone likes us until we know for certain.
How many friendships never begin because both people assume the other person was not interested? How many dates? How many collaborations? How many conversations in a freshman dorm? How much possibility disappears because two people are standing there being insecure at the same time?
This is where awkwardness may have value. You approach somebody and it goes badly. You survive. You misread a signal and learn from it. Someone is not interested and you learn to respect that. You say something awkward and discover that the earth continues rotating.
Eventually, your brain and body collect evidence that says, I can be uncomfortable and still be okay. Confidence is not always what allows us to have uncomfortable experiences. Very often, confidence is what slowly develops because we have had them.
Social Fitness Needs Reps Too
Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, uses a phrase I love: social fitness. We understand physical fitness instinctively. Nobody goes to the gym once, does twelve spectacular squats, and declares themselves fit for life. Strength requires repetition, maintenance, and attention. Waldinger argues that relationships work much the same way.
“Our social life is a living system, and it needs maintenance too,” he says. “One of the ways you can do it is through tiny actions.”
Those tiny actions can be reaching out to somebody we miss, calling an old friend, introducing ourselves to someone new, joining something we care about, or simply having repeated casual contact with people. Waldinger notes that doing something we enjoy alongside other people creates a natural place for conversations to start and relationships to deepen.
Maybe walking over is a rep. Asking somebody out is a rep. Going to an event alone is a rep. Making a new friend is a rep. Calling the old one is a rep. Staying in touch with someone from a project five years ago is a rep. Sitting beside someone you do not know and resisting the instinct to immediately reach for your phone might be a rep too.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed human lives across generations, beginning in 1938, and its central conclusion is wonderfully uncomplicated. Waldinger summarizes it this way:
“The clearest message is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.”