Navigating “pink flags” and cultivating an outer circle

The Friendly Advice column is a public service by me, Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. I’m a certified connection coach and have been facilitating community groups for almost twenty years. I regularly speak and lead workshops on the topics of adult friendship and cultivating healthy work teams. If you’d like to work with me, reach out on my booking contact form. If you have a question that you’d like answered in a future blog post or newsletter, instructions are at the bottom of this post.

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Q: In the past few years I've put a lot of attention on growing friendships with folks who have skills to weather conflict because I've had many friendships drop off completely at the first bump. That hits a real sore spot for me. And so I'm learning to listen for “pink flags” as I'm getting to know someone new, for example, how they might describe other conflicts in their lives.

I recently moved and have been watering friendship seedlings left and right, some of whom revealed some pretty big pink flags after a few months. What kind of connection works for outer circle folks who probably are best kept out of extended one on one conversation? Or is it okay to let those peter out and focus instead on growing my inner circle? 

A: This is a great question. Thanks for sending this in and also good job to you on watering those friendship seedlings when you're new in town. It's definitely an effort. It's often an uphill climb when you're starting from scratch in a new town. So, yeah, it's going to take some time. 

And also kudos to you for your awareness around one of the things that sounds like a priority to you here, which is ensuring that the people that you're going to invest time in for closer friendship are people who have conflict resolution skills. People who are willing to talk through a rough patch, get through it, and then keep the friendship going, and to realize that if somebody doesn't have those skills, they're not a match for you for a long-term, deeper friendship or a spot in your inner circle. 

So that's very, very great in terms of self-awareness and intention in how you're cultivating these friendships. 

When it comes to this question of what to do with these people you don’t want to outright cut them out of your life totally, but they're definitely not going to be in your inner circle. You're like, “what do you do with them?” 

I have an illustration in my book We Should Get Together of a prescription bottle — it’s a metaphor for taking doses of friendship as medicine. Sometimes we take a medicine that's a high dose or a low dose. And sometimes it's no dose — there are some medicines you should just not take because they’re not for you!

You can use this metaphor to think about what you want to do with these friendships that don't feel like inner-circle material. They are definitely not high-dose friendships for you. You can leave them as a low-dose, or no-dose if you want to let them peter out.

The good news is that most adults are so busy and life is so full that if you kind of stop responding to somebody or you put your attention somewhere else, chances are it will kind of just fade away. And this is actually how most friendships end — they fade away through lack of attention and lack of engagement.

However, if you want to keep these folks in your outer circle, that's also totally fine because we do need acquaintances in our lives. We need people that we have lighter connections with — some people call them weak ties or loose ties. There's still value to feeling like a part of a community by having people in it that are not 100% bestie material, and who are not 100% exactly like you. 

You can just call them acquaintances at this point, and you have options.

Option 1: You can let them peter out and let them fade away. Or, instead of pruning, you can let that field go fallow for a while.

Option 2: You can think about including them at a time of the year when maybe you're having a bigger gathering and you want to have a lot of friendly faces there, even if they're not just all your besties. That could be something like a big community gathering, a big community picnic. Maybe you would invite them to a birthday party, maybe you would invite them to a special fundraiser that you're doing for your local women's empowerment group.

They could be great to have in a room with a bunch of other people, that doesn’t require a lot of one-on-one interaction. You can keep them for interactions when it would be fun to have more friendly faces around, but not necessarily invest in them for a lot of one-on-one connection. 

The other thing that you mentioned in your letter and that I want to touch on is this question of: “Do I need to only focus on growing my inner circle?” You can do both!

The outer circle folks are going to take less maintenance, so it's going to be less effort, and less time. But definitely keep building your inner circle to ensure that in your new city, you feel more rooted, more grounded, and you have a much more rich social support network there. 

When it comes to growing that inner circle, sometimes it’s a numbers game. It's meeting a lot of people and seeing who feels like a fit. It's a lot like dating! So you’re automatically gonna fill your outer circle faster.

When people do make it into your inner circle, it's important to make sure that you're nurturing them with your time and attention, your words, your actions, all of the things that help solidify and grow those close inner circle friendships. 

The Rings of Connection theory was first posited by connection hero Robin Dunbar, illustrated here by Kat Vellos

I also want to acknowledge that this is a stage that a lot of people are in right now at this stage of the pandemic. During the pandemic, we really cloistered ourselves with just our inner circle, just our bubbles, and now we have this opportunity to cultivate acquaintances again. And this is actually a really special place to be. It's something I'm thinking about as well for myself — it feels really nice to have a broad set of acquaintances that are friendly faces in the crowd, and friendly faces in the community, but they don't all have to be your bestie.

Having a robust circle of acquaintances contributes to the feeling of being a part of a bigger group, being a part of a bigger community. So there's value in investing in that as well.

I hope this is helpful and that this resonates with you. If you have a question you want to send in for a future audio answer or blog post, just reply below. 👋🏾