ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!
Quick housekeeping note: I was supposed to publish this closer to Valentine’s Day, but because I have mom brain, I accidentally scheduled it for the same day as another post. To give Sonja’s book the air it deserves, I thought I’d re-up it today.
I’ve had phases of my life where I knew and interacted with hundreds more people than I do now, yet I nevertheless felt a lot lonelier.
High school is one example: Every day, I was surrounded by more than 2,000 people who I could have technically been best friends with. But—because our prefrontal cortexes were still mushy, and because I wasn’t great at social interaction, and because no one else really was either—I was actually close with very few people.
I knew a lot of people, but I wasn’t known. I felt like I mostly was trying to shape-shift my way into being accepted by people who I barely understood. What do they want me to say? What do they want me to do? I often felt like the people who tried to “get to know the real me” were actually just trying to convert me to Christianity. (Some of them were successful! At least in the short term.) It felt like one big reporting trip, where I was gathering material for some unwritten book by observing what everyone else was doing, but not actually engaging in the world around me. As a result, I have very few friends from high school. I keep in touch with literally two people (shout-out to Lauren and Caitlin!).
Lots of people feel like this at various stages of their lives. Maybe it’s not high school; maybe it’s middle school. Maybe it’s a sorority that it seemed like a great idea to rush but turned into a viper pit. Maybe it’s a job where everyone was treated “like family” but which actually meant that everyone was treated like shit. Hell, maybe it’s a monogamous, romantic relationship where you felt like you could never really drop the first-date manners and just be yourself. The point is that simply having lots of people in your life is no guarantee that you’ll feel seen, heard, and, well, known. In order to do that, you have to really get to know the real people around you, and they have to get to know the real you.
For this week’s podcast, I sat down with Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at UC Riverside who, in the forthcoming book she co-authored with Harry Reis, How to Feel Loved, explains that it’s not simply physically being around people that makes us happy, it’s having people in our lives who accept us as we are, because we accept them as they are. In our conversation, we talked about how to see people as their whole selves, so that they can see us that way, too. And so that we can feel loved.
The full conversation is above on video and in your podcast apps, but an edited excerpt is below:
Olga: I’ve followed your work for a long time, and I interviewed you for my own book. You're like the OG happiness researcher, so I'm very excited for this conversation.
My first question might sound obvious, but it’s key to everything that follows: Why is it important to our well-being to feel loved?
Sonja: I’ve been studying happiness for 36 years, and it took me a long time to realize—although it sounds cliché—that the key to happiness is feeling connected and loved.
If I back up for a moment: My lab has been developing what we call happiness interventions since 1998. These are essentially clinical trials where we prompt people to practice happiness strategies, such as expressing gratitude, doing acts of kindness, or acting more extroverted. Under the right conditions, these practices reliably make people happier.
A few years ago, it hit me that almost all the interventions that work do so because they make people feel more connected to and loved by others. Writing a gratitude letter to my mom makes me feel more loved by her. Doing an act of kindness for a friend or colleague makes me feel closer to them.
I then talked to Harry Reis, my co-author and a prominent relationship scientist. And I asked him, what does he think is the secret to happiness? And he said, “I don't really know, but I know that the difference between people who are really happy and who are unhappy is that happy people feel loved.”
Olga: I’ve noticed that too. Every time there’s a book about the longest-living, happiest, healthiest people, it turns out they have huge families, tons of friends, and they socialize a lot.
Something important to note is that you can have many friends and still not feel loved.
Sonja: Yes—relationships. But something important to note is that you can have tons of friends and you can actually be loved, but not actually feel loved. So that's why our book is really about how to feel loved. Because most people, when we ask, “is there a relationship in your life right now where you don't feel as loved as you'd like to be?” The majority of people say, yes, there's at least one relationship like that. And that's really the key, because you can be lonely, surrounded by people
Olga: Can you elaborate on that? I liked a line early in your book: “When you actively show another person that they are seen, valued, and cared for, you initiate a cycle that naturally leads you to feel more known and cared for yourself.” Can you talk about the science of feeling loved versus just knowing a lot of people?
Sonja: We argue that to feel loved, you need to be known—and you also need to make the other person feel loved. If you want to feel more loved, you often have to start by making the other person feel loved.
We all walk around with walls. Those walls protect us, but if they’re too high, no one can really know us. Because I’ll always wonder, “if they really knew me, and they knew all about my strengths and weaknesses and faults, then they wouldn't really love me.”
And so the key is really to be known and then to become known, you need to share, you need to listen. And so a lot of our book is about how to get to really know the other person, and the idea is that they will reciprocate and try to get to know you.
Olga: You use a compelling metaphor in the book: the relationship “seasaw”—spelled S-E-A. Can you explain it?
Sonja: The “sea” is because we’re submerged in water. Imagine a seesaw partially underwater, with you and me on opposite ends. Most of us are submerged—we only show the tip of ourselves, often our positive qualities. Because often when we're interacting with other people, we want to impress each other, right? We tend to hide our shortcomings and our contradictions and our weaknesses.
And then the idea is if I really truly pay attention to you and I show genuine curiosity in you, and I ask you questions about your inner life and the details of your day and what is really going on with you, that that's gonna make you feel safe, and you’re gonna trust me and you're gonna be motivated to sort of open up a little bit. I'm pressing down on the seesaw and I'm lifting you up a little bit out of the water and so you're able to show a little bit more of yourself.
And then you reciprocate. Reciprocity is very, powerful. It’s very hard for us to do something and then not reciprocate. And then you will hopefully reciprocate and then show that genuine curiosity in me and ask me questions and truly listen and show warmth and acceptance towards me. So then you lift me up in the water. So we're lifting each other up out of the water.
Olga: The water being the cold water of small talk?
Sonja: Or you can think of it as tip of the iceberg is the part we're showing. Underneath is the part that we're not really showing to each other.
Olga: You write a little bit about chemistry, and I thought that was interesting because a lot of times people say you have it or you don't with someone, kind of like “we didn't have any chemistry” or “the chemistry wasn't there,” usually in the dating context. How can you actually create chemistry or responsiveness with another person?
Sonja: Sometimes there really isn’t chemistry, and that’s okay. But often it grows from responsiveness. Harry Reis’s partner responsiveness theory shows that relationships thrive when people make each other feel understood, valued, and cared for.
That comes from truly listening, following up, and showing genuine interest. It’s surprisingly rare. That dynamic when you’re truly curious and listening to each other and asking questions and also showing warmth and care. I think that that’s where you can build chemistry.
Olga: I’m later gonna rag on myself, so I’m gonna brag a little bit. I am a good question asker because of my job, and I often find that people don’t ask me good questions in return. Is that because we just don’t ever really learn how to ask questions unless you literally have to do it professionally? Why is it that this skill seems to vary so much?
Sonja: I’ve been on dates where I’m asking like questions, the guy doesn’t ask a single question. I’ll even call it out sometimes. I’m like, “do you realize the last 45 minutes you haven’t asked me a single question?” Sometimes that ends the date, which may be good riddance, right? But yeah, I guess we don’t learn. I mean, I tell my kids, “if you want to make friends, show interest in them and ask them a lot of questions.”
Of course, if you’re only asking questions, then it’s sort of asymmetric. You have to kind of ask the right question at the right time, right? If it’s too probing right away, then people are going to, the walls are going to come right back up again. Maybe you sort of start small, but I think we all have to remember that we all want to be seen and heard. And we would love for people to show interest in us.
Olga: In addition to being good at asking questions, I am also awkward. And so I’m gonna ask some questions for the awkward among us. So one of the things that you talk about is disclosure, and this concept that you can’t just hide your cards completely, you have to share a little bit about yourself to the person you’re trying to bond with and be a little bit vulnerable.
I guess I’m wondering how to apply this in various situations. For example, you talk about choosing topics that are likely to foster connection or match your disclosures to the situation. And that’s one I really have trouble with. I’ll tell my birth story in the grocery checkout line. And I’m just a huge oversharer, but other people are not. What’s a way to disclose without being TMI or just too much.
Sonja: That’s where that emotional attunement comes in, right? Small talk is a little social lubricant at the beginning. Start a little small/medium, and then you really watch the person. Do they seem interested? Do they seem a little awkward? Is it a little uncomfortable for them? And then if it’s uncomfortable, then you don’t want to go farther at that point.
So it’s maybe something like if they ask, “how are you?” Instead of saying, “I’m fine,” you might say, “well, I’m kind of struggling today” or “I had a rough day today.”
Watch for people’s reactions. Are they like looking away because they’re they’re not listening? Are they following up? And then maybe sometimes you ask them a question so that you can see if maybe they want to share a little bit. It needs to be a back and forth. I know of friendships that actually have ended when one person shares, the other person never shares, and then it’s just so asymmetric that they just can’t continue the friendship.
Olga: Do you think it’s because we’re both Russian that we don’t like small talk?
Sonja: That’s so funny. Yeah, I came to the US from Russia when I was 10 years old. It’s interesting, that might be part of it. I just feel like life is too short for small talk.
It depends what you mean by small talk. If you’re really into basketball and that’s your passion, talking about basketball is not small talk. By deep talk, I don’t mean sharing your deepest secrets or traumas. It’s just sort of having a conversation about something that you care about. It could be a book or movie that you just saw or read.
I have gotten pretty good at breaking that. I was on a date not long ago where we had actually a really good conversation. We actually were talking about the war in Gaza, of all things. It was kind of an intense conversation. It was really interesting, but I just still felt like we weren’t really connecting.
So I said to the guy, “you’re a little intimidating.” And he’s kind of an intellectual powerhouse. And he’s like, “really?” And that kind of broke through. We sort of talked about that a little bit. Suddenly the conversation went to another level.
Olga: You also write about listening more attentively and listening better, for lack of a better word. This is something I struggled with also while was reporting my book, because one of my things that I did was try to have better conversations and to listen better.
But I have a lot of people in my life who I don’t agree with about really important things. Just like huge matters of importance in the country, and I’m wondering how you show a lot of warmth and attentiveness when someone’s saying something you completely don’t agree with, like, “I don’t think you should vaccinate your kids.”
Sonja: I hear you. So, well, this has to do with one of the mindsets that we talk about in our book, which is called the multiplicity mindset, which is this idea that we’re all a quilt of both positive and negative qualities. I can be loyal and kind sometimes. And sometimes I’m selfish and narcissistic. We all have that. And so the idea is that we see both ourselves and other people in all of their messy complexity.
You can make someone feel understood and heard without agreeing with them. And you can think about a therapist talking to say, a severely depressed patient who feels they’re worthless and hates themselves. They don’t agree that that person is worthless, right? But they respond in a way that makes them feel understood. Like they understand why they’re feeling that way and what’s going through their mind.
So the idea is that you listen and you show curiosity. And actually curiosity is almost like the balm, like the salve to so many things. Where imagine during a fight, like you’re fighting with your spouse and they’re really angry, and instead of being angry back at them you actually show curiosity. You’re like, wow, “I wonder why they’re so angry like that.” You’re really curious. Same with the friend who doesn’t agree with you on something. Why do they believe that? Try to make them feel like, “I understand where you’re coming from but I don’t agree with you.”
