[aninhumer]

And I think this is exactly the problem.

People who are already socially confident don't think about these processes because they just happen naturally for them. You meet someone, chat with them, and then sometimes you become friends. So when someone comes along and outlines the process, it seems clinical and detached, and thus kinda creepy.

Certainly it was my reaction when I first started seeing things like this. "If you're thinking about it, you don't really care about the people. Real relationships just happen naturally!"

But of course, for some people they don't just happen, and these kinds of outlines can be very helpful.

[Mz]

Actually, I think and read about these processes a lot. I have taken intro to psychology, social psychology and a class on negotiation and conflict management. I find social stuff fascinating and I love to study it.

But it takes 15 to 20 hours a week to establish and maintain a genuinely close relationship. Forty five minutes is barely a down payment on that.

I have known "players" and how they operate. They are good at creating an illusion of closeness, often based on outright lies. Their goal is sex, and her welfare be damned.

Forty five minutes is also not enough time to verify if what they are telling you is something genuine. It can take weeks to learn that what he shared day one to make you feel all squishy is all made up BS.

So 45 minutes may be enough to create certain feelings, but if you think that is genuinely a close friend that you can trust, you have a lot to learn about how relationships work.

[aninhumer]

I think I misunderstood your comment. I read "talking for 45mins isn't a big deal" to mean it's not that hard so people should just do it rather than planning it, but it sounds like you meant it doesn't mean much in terms of friendship. (And based on other replies to you, it seems like a lot of people made a similar mistake.)

I don't disagree with that, and I do agree that some people seem way too interested in getting to sex rather than actually forming friendships. But my point is that some people really do struggle with the social interaction involved in forming relationships (even platonic) and we shouldn't write off articles like this as inherently about manipulation. (Especially since there are plenty of articles that are overtly about that.)

[Mz]

Someone said to me about me "Sounds like you have a thing..." I rebutted that by saying, no, I have a long history of close relationships. Forty five minutes is not a big flipping deal.

And now there are down votes and all kinds of assumptions about me and what I intended. I don't know why that is. Given the context of my remark, it should be obvious that my only intent was to rebut someone basically talking trash about me.

It isn't manipulative to spend 45 minutes talking to someone because you are lonely or you are genuinely interested in them or they happened to say "hi" and you happen to be a chatty sort. But the world would be a vastly better place if this were not routinely mistaken for being more than it is. People routinely act like "It engendered feelings in me, so this must be True Love (or you must be my new BFF)!" And that tends to go bad places because neither person knows the other well enough for it to actually be the basis for a serious relationship. Then folks get married or pregnant or start imposing expectations on the other party that the other party did not expect and does not want and the result is usually some kind of drama.

Healthy relationships take some time to feel out. Jumping into things tends to go bad places.

Pick up artists know that many people are not that socially and emotionally savvy and they take advantage of it. I know that many people are not that socially and emotionally savvy and I try to educate people in hopes of seeing a down tick of general drama in the world at large.

[aninhumer]

>And now there are down votes and all kinds of assumptions about me and what I intended. I don't know why that is.

FWIW, I'll try to explain my reading: I didn't read "I have a long history of close relationships" as a riposte to "Sounds like you have a problem with planning making friends", because it didn't seem to me like a direct contradiction. One can have relatively long close relationships without planning to have them. In fact in that context it kind of sounded to me more like "Well I have real friends, not planned ones".

So then I read "talking to someone for 45mins isn't a big deal" as reasoning for the objection to planning (i.e. "don't plan, just talk to people") rather than a contradiction ("45mins isn't long enough to form a friendship").

[Mz]

Let me respectfully suggest that when an individual says something personal about the person they are speaking to, you take into consideration that this is almost always a form of personal attack and people get defensive when attacked personally. I do not understand why everyone here seems to have no problem with someone saying something about me personally -- because the comment* was not downvoted to hell, flagged to death nor shot down by other people -- that is basically an ugly personal attack, but many people feel compelled to pile on and add additional attacks against me.

This is a major failing of reading context on the part of the people continuing to try to tell me I am somehow doing something wrong. Remarks here are supposed to be about the subject under discussion, not about individual members. Multiple people here cannot seem to get that right and it is all coming down on my head when I have done absolutely nothing to deserve so much flak.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733051

[joshlemer]

Sorry, my comment probably did come off a bit strong, I should have worded it as "This just sounds like a position against explicitly planning the process of making friends in general."

[pbhjpbhj]

How do you propose starting a 20 hour a week relationship. Currently my interactions outside the family are limited to online or 5-10 minutes face to face. 45 minutes seems like a good first meeting to me - do you just jump in and spend a long weekend with someone you've never met ... can you see that might not work for everyone?

[Mz]

I am not proposing anything. I am just telling you that 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there won't create a close relationship. That's just a fact. It is not some kind of personal agenda on my end.

[pbhjpbhj]

But it can _start_ [what quickly becomes] a close relationship, first time I met my partner of multiple decades was for 2 minutes, you have to start somewhere!?

[Mz]

Why are you busting my chops? You have a partner of multiple decades. You don't actually need any advice on how to start a close relationship.