3 Things Killing Your Relationships That You Do Every Day

Here are three quick tips to help you build better relationships when hanging out with friends. These all revolve around a general nuisance: consuming instead of connecting. I encourage you to read these with a certain seriousness as I deeply believe this issue slowly builds up into a serious disease which makes it all the more important despite its seemingly trivial nature.

Movies

If you want to connect with your friends, DON'T watch a movie together. Watching a movie is a bulletproof way to be in the same room as your friends without actually ever talking to each other. It's passive and lazy and a cop-out for the work of finding something active to do... finding something that isn't staring at screen without thinking. Every biological signal that gives you the feel-good emotion of having spent time with someone doesn't happen while watching a movie.

Music

Let's imagine a very specific context for this one although, this rule does generalize to some other scenarios: we are in a car with three other friends two hours away from our destination, and one of them wants to play music while the rest are impartial. If you want to spend two hours not talking to each other, great, play music. If you'd like to actually spend time connecting with your friends, DON'T play music. Playing music metaphorically shuts the door to any conversation that might have happened because nobody wants to fight the music. Do the work of conversation.

TV/Reels

Routinely sitting in the same room as family/friends while doing nothing in particular is vital to your relationship with them. This is the time where conversations might happen – the door is very metaphorically open for this serendipitous, crucial bonding to happen. If you want to squash any chance of this connection, watch the TV or listen to shorts with the volume up. These other people will likely be uninterested or focused on something other than this excessive noise you are pumping throughout the house, and they will soon leave and literally close the door to conversation. Just put earbuds in – the audio will be better anyways.

Don't get me wrong, I love love love movies, music, and TV (probably) more than you do, and I'm saying this so explicitly because it would be unfortunate for these ideas to come across as crazy or easily dismissed given my believed severity of this issue. This is just a wake up call to make sure you aren't defaulting to movies and music because they are easier than figuring out something to do or driving potential connection away with noise that nobody else wants to hear.