Hi I'm Mary, I'm a psychologist and I research how our social relationships are affected by us facing a transition in life and also how mindfulness is making a positive difference to us First of all always choosing low stakes so connecting over something that is kind of a small thing so whether it's sharing some memes or anything funny or an article that you come across, whether it's just liking posts of that other person, those are all sort of small hurdle ways to just remind the other person of your existence. Where it's unlikely to be extremely harmful if for some reason they don't respond. If you like someone's picture you might not even expect them to respond, right? So the stakes are extremely low. If you send them something and they don't respond, we might reflect on ourselves and know that sometimes we get sent something and we don't have the time or we simply forget and it might not necessarily reflect anything about the relationship whatsoever. There's also something about some people talking about friendships where they feel like they're doing a lot of the investment and they are constantly reaching out to the other person and it doesn't feel like it's being reciprocated. In those situations, if it feels like it's possible, it might actually be really worth to bring it up, Because there is a potential for a genuine mismatch of how much interaction we need. So there might be someone who is really socially motivated and would just love to connect with all of their friends all the time and that's quite normal to them and so with their inner circle, they're in touch multiple times a day. And there might be another individual who equally values the relationship that they have with this person, but who are actually not so driven to connect every single day. And for them it might make sense to once a week sort of check in, right? If it's possible to just see if there's a sort
of mismatch that might be helpful to all involved, because the person that's been reaching out all the time and not hearing much back may have been devastated and felt as if they were just not important and that maybe the the relationship was quite unbalanced, when in fact, it's just a testament to different social strategies. And so they might feel a bit more at
peace knowing 'oh you know my best friend actually doesn't communicate that often with with people that are very important to them'. So it's not a reflection of our bond,
it's just who they are and what they're like.
