Last week, I sat across from a colleague at lunch, listening to him talk about his weekend plans with his group of college buddies. They’ve been meeting up monthly for fifteen years. As he scrolled through photos on his phone, showing me their latest camping trip, I felt that familiar tightness in my chest. Not jealousy exactly, but something closer to recognition. Of a pattern I’d been avoiding naming for most of my adult life.
The truth is, at 37, I can count my close friends on one hand with fingers to spare. And for years, I told myself a comfortable story about why: I’m just wired differently. I’m the quieter brother who prefers observation to participation. I’m too intense, too philosophical, too much of an overthinker for most people to handle long-term. Some people are just harder to love, I’d tell myself, and maybe that’s okay.
But sitting there, watching my colleague’s face light up as he talked about inside jokes spanning decades, I finally let myself consider a different possibility. What if the problem wasn’t that I’m hard to love? What if it’s that somewhere along the way, I learned that needing people, really needing them, was dangerous?
The realization hit me with the force of something I’d been circling around for years without ever quite landing on. Because when I really think about it, when I trace back through my relationships, there’s this consistent thread: I excel at the beginning stages. I’m great at making connections, at those first few months of friendship where everything feels exciting and new. But somewhere around the six-month mark, when things start to deepen, when the other person begins to matter in a way that feels irreversible, I find reasons to pull back. A text goes unanswered for too long. Plans get canceled. The friendship doesn’t explode; it just slowly deflates until we’re acquaintances who used to be close.
I’ve been reading about this lately, trying to understand my own patterns. Simply Psychology describes it perfectly: “Avoidant attachment is a style of relating where people manage closeness by pulling back, suppressing emotions, and focusing on independence.” That last part stopped me cold. Focusing on independence. As if independence was the goal, not just the consolation prize.
Growing up in Melbourne, I watched my parents navigate financial challenges while maintaining family stability. They were hardworking, efficient, rarely fought. But I also learned early that strong people handle their problems alone.
I remember being young, having a particularly bad day at school. The message I internalized was clear: needing others is weakness, and weakness will hurt you.
So I became excellent at not needing. Through school and university, I had plenty of friends, but I kept them all at arm’s length. I was the guy people came to for advice, never the one asking for it. I dated, but always kept one foot out the door. Even in my mid-twenties, when anxiety and an overactive mind had me spinning out regularly, I dealt with it alone. Meditation, exercise, journaling, anything but reaching out and saying, “I’m struggling and I need help.”
The pattern became so ingrained that I stopped noticing it was a pattern at all. It just felt like who I was. The independent one. The self-sufficient one. The one who didn’t need anyone too much. And in many ways, it worked. I built a successful career, wrote a book about Buddhism and mindfulness called Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, created a life that looked good from the outside. But late at night, scrolling through social media and seeing groups of friends who’d known each other for decades, I’d feel that hollowness that no amount of achievement could fill.
The irony is that all this self-protection hasn’t actually protected me from anything. I’ve still been hurt, still been disappointed, still felt lonely. The only difference is that I’ve felt all of it alone, without the buffer of close friendships to soften the blow. I’ve been so afraid of needing people that I’ve guaranteed I’ll never have them when I actually do need them.
Recently becoming a father to a baby daughter has forced me to confront this pattern in a way nothing else could. Because here’s this tiny person who needs me completely, and whom I need in a way that terrifies me. The love I feel for her is so overwhelming, so beyond my control, that it’s cracked open something I’d kept sealed for decades. She doesn’t care about my independence or my self-sufficiency. She just needs me to show up, fully present, fully vulnerable.
Watching her reach for me with complete trust, no fear of rejection, no hedging her bets, I realize this is how we all start out. Open, trusting, believing that our needs will be met. It takes years of small betrayals and disappointments to teach us otherwise, to make us build those walls that feel like protection but are actually prisons.
I’m trying to unlearn those lessons now, though it feels like trying to write with my non-dominant hand. I’m forcing myself to reach out when I’m struggling, to let friendships develop past that comfortable surface level, to sit with the discomfort of needing someone and not knowing if they’ll show up. Keely Dugan, an Assistant Professor of Social Personality Psychology at the University of Missouri, notes that “People who felt closer to their mothers and had less conflict with their mothers in childhood tended to feel more secure in all of their relationships in adulthood.”
But what about those of us who learned the opposite? Who learned that closeness was conditional, that conflict meant withdrawal, that the safest thing was to need as little as possible?
We have to learn it backwards, I think. Learn in our thirties and forties what others learned at three and four: that needing people isn’t dangerous, it’s human. That vulnerability isn’t weakness, it’s the only path to real connection. That the risk of being hurt is worth taking because the alternative, this careful, managed distance from everyone, isn’t actually living at all.
So I’m practicing. Texting friends when I’m having a rough day instead of pushing through alone. Letting conversations go deeper than comfortable. Admitting when I don’t have all the answers, which is most of the time. It’s uncomfortable and awkward and I’m terrible at it. But I keep thinking about my daughter, about the kind of father I want to be for her. I want her to see that it’s okay to need people, that connection isn’t something to be feared but something to be treasured, even when it’s messy and uncertain and doesn’t come with guarantees.
The other day, that colleague who’d shown me the camping photos asked if I wanted to grab a beer after work. My first instinct was to make an excuse, to maintain that safe distance. But I said yes. We talked for two hours, and at some point, I found myself telling him about this realization, about being 37 and finally understanding that my isolation wasn’t a personality trait but a defense mechanism. He listened, nodded, shared his own struggles with letting people in.
It wasn’t a breakthrough moment. We didn’t become best friends. But it was a start. A small crack in the armor I’ve spent decades building. And maybe that’s enough for now. Maybe learning to need people when you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding it isn’t about dramatic transformations but about these small, terrifying acts of reaching out, one uncomfortable conversation at a time.
