thought exercise on Interactions

Have you ever heard of the forensic science theory known as Locard’s Exchange Principle? Named after the "Sherlock Holmes of France," the French criminologist Emile Locard, this theory sugge...

The Latin term for confrontation means “to turn your face toward, to look at frontally.” It merely indicates that you are turning toward the relationship and the person. You are face-to-face, so to sp...

Lucy says to Charlie Brown: ‘You know what the whole trouble with you is, Charlie Brown?’ ‘No; and I don’t want to know! Leave me alone!’ ‘The whole trouble with you is you won’t listen to w...

Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish economist and diplomat deeply committed to his Christian faith, served as the Secretary-General of the United Nations during some of the most turbulent times of the Cold Wa...

If we want to connect with people, we can be like the census taker who had driven many miles down a remote country road to reach a mountain cabin. As he pulled up, a woman sitting on the porch yelled ...

Almost everything we do touches a relationship in some way. Just think about your day. Whether you’re at home or at work, driving your car, playing, exercising, shopping, vacationing, worshipping at c...

Waiting isn’t an in-between time. Instead, this often-hated and under-appreciated time has been a silent force that has shaped our social interactions. Waiting isn’t a hurdle keeping us from intimacy ...

Whether young or old, Americans are feeling more isolated. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, about half of Americans have weekly interactions with their neighbors, which means ...

Susan Pinker, the social science columnist for the Wall Street Journal, gave a TED talk in 2017 titled, “ The Secret to Living Longer May Be Your Social Life .” In her research she discovered that the...

These days, a common trick people use to remember someone they’ve just met is to save their first name along with the place where they met them—like “Matt PTA,” for example. I recently realized I stil...

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...

When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe, she naturally drew on her own experiences to flesh it out. This is true even for such alarming creatures as ‘dementors’. These are soulless beings...

The idol of niceness refers to the ways we make ourselves pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, or likable in order to get something. We use niceness to achieve belonging or avoid conflict, but we also use...

I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that niceness has a hold on us, but in order to understand why that is, it helps to understand how it came to be. Like many words, nice has meant different ...

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

One of my favorite things to do is to sit on the aft deck of a boat going across the ocean and just watch the wake. It is such a beautiful, ever-changing creation as the ship continues on its path. Yo...

Solitude is the most radical of the disciplines for life in the spirit. In penal institutions, solitary confinement is used to break the strongest of wills. It is capable of this because it excludes i...

One of the fastest ways to learn a language is by immersion . This term can mean a few different things, but the basic idea in all of them is that you are exposed to that language in your social inte...

“Association breeds assimilation.” In other words, there is no such thing as a casual relationship. All relationships are consequential. They are catalytic. They push us forward or hold us back. They ...

In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me , John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiati...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

Many of us live in two worlds when it comes to relationships. In one world we have friendly conversations in which we avoid all disagreements; in the other we have major conflict-type conversations th...

In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation. If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and e...

Studies of conversation both in laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in the periphery of their vision cha...

Salt and light are both effective commodities. They change the environment into which they are introduced. … It may be argued that salt and light have complementary effects. The influence of salt is n...

The advantage that cities and traditional neighborhoods have over sprawling suburbs with respect to interdependence is that they allow people of a greater variety of ages to participate meaningfully i...

When it comes to our work we likely need at the very least three conversation partners. Two of these should ideally be peers—perhaps one who is in a similar line of work (e.g., a fellow nurse who know...

Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, con...

Sharan Merriam and Carolyn Clark, in their fine study Lifelines , effectively show that life is fundamentally about two things—our work and our relationships. And maturity is found in having the c...

I have a little game I play when traveling. I regularly hear strangers meeting strangers, and usually within thirty seconds to a minute one asks the other, “What do you do?” Well, when someone asks me...