Rapport & Connection

Introduction: The Art & Science of Rapport

The word rapport comes from the French rapporter — to bring back, to return. In its original sense, rapport describes a loop: something offered that is received and returned. It is inherently mutual, inherently relational. You cannot have rapport with someone who is not also, in some meaningful sense, having rapport with you.

That simple etymology contains the seed of everything this guide is about. Much of the popular "dating advice" world — especially the seduction industry of the 1990s and early 2000s — treated rapport as a set of techniques you could deploy on another person. A manipulation toolkit. The right body language adjustments, the correct conversational moves, the calibrated balance of warmth and detachment — engineered to produce a feeling of closeness in your target while you remained strategically distant from the process.

This guide takes the opposite view. Rapport, when it works — when it produces the kind of connection that can develop into real attraction and genuine relationships — is a product of authentic mutual engagement. The science of interpersonal connection does not support the manipulation model. It supports something richer, more demanding, and ultimately far more rewarding: the willingness to genuinely show up, attend to another person, and be affected by them.

What This Guide Is — and Isn't

This guide draws on peer-reviewed research in social psychology, neuroscience, attachment theory, and communication science to explain how genuine rapport actually forms. It will give you frameworks and practical understandings that can make you a better relational partner — someone who is more present, more emotionally available, and more capable of the kind of connection that matters.

What it will not do is give you a script or a system for manufacturing feelings in someone who wouldn't otherwise have them. Not because such techniques don't exist — some do, in a limited way — but because they produce counterfeit intimacy that neither person benefits from in the long run.

A Note on Ethics and Inclusion

Rapport and connection exist across all relationship structures, orientations, and gender identities. Throughout this guide, language is intentionally gender-neutral and inclusive of all relationship configurations — whether you're dating one person or many, whether you identify as straight, queer, or somewhere along the full human spectrum. The psychology of human connection is not the preserve of any one demographic.

The Psychology of Liking: Why We Click With Some People

Why do some people feel immediately familiar, while others — even objectively attractive or accomplished people — leave us cold? What makes us feel a sense of "click" with someone? Social psychologist Robert Cialdini and relationship researcher Arthur Aron have, across decades of work, substantially mapped the psychological landscape of interpersonal liking.

Cialdini's Principles of Liking

In his foundational work on influence and social dynamics, Cialdini identified several reliable predictors of liking.^[1] While his research was originally focused on persuasion and compliance, these principles translate directly into the dynamics of early-stage attraction:

• Similarity: We like people who share our values, attitudes, backgrounds, and interests. This is one of the most robust findings in social psychology — similarity breeds liking, consistently, across cultures and contexts.
• Familiarity: The mere exposure effect, documented extensively by Robert Zajonc, shows that repeated exposure to a neutral stimulus increases positive feelings toward it.^[2] This applies to people as much as to objects — we tend to like those we have encountered repeatedly.
• Association: We like people who are associated with positive experiences, good news, or pleasant environments — even when they had nothing to do with causing them.
• Reciprocal liking: We tend to like people who like us. Discovering that someone finds us attractive or interesting is one of the most reliable initiators of attraction in return.
• Physical attractiveness: Though culturally variable and less stable than often assumed, physical appearance does influence initial liking — but its effect diminishes substantially as people get to know each other.
• Compliments and praise: Genuine compliments increase liking. Notably, Cialdini's research found that even insincere flattery produces positive feelings, though genuine praise is considerably more powerful and sustainable.

Arthur Aron's Self-Expansion Model

Relationship researcher Arthur Aron offers a particularly compelling model of interpersonal attraction: the self-expansion theory.^[3] The core idea is that humans are fundamentally motivated to expand their sense of self — to grow, to acquire new perspectives, knowledge, and capabilities. We are, in Aron's framing, always looking for opportunities to become more.

This has a powerful implication for attraction: we are drawn to people who expand us. Someone who shows us new ways of seeing the world, who introduces us to ideas or experiences we haven't encountered, who challenges us gently and opens new doors — that person activates our most fundamental motivational system. They feel exciting not just because they are attractive, but because they represent growth.

The Propinquity Effect

One of social psychology's most counterintuitive and enduring findings is the propinquity effect: proximity predicts attraction. Studies dating back to Festinger, Schachter, and Back's classic research on housing units found that people were far more likely to form friendships with those who lived physically closest to them — even within the same building.^[5]

In the modern dating context, this effect shows up in ways that are less obviously about physical space: shared communities, mutual social networks, recurring contexts (a regular café, a class, a workplace) all increase both familiarity and the perception of commonality. Repeated, low-stakes encounters create the conditions in which genuine rapport can develop more naturally than a high-pressure first date ever can.

Attunement & Mirroring: The Biology of Connection

Beneath the surface of every satisfying conversation, something extraordinary is happening at the biological level. The bodies of people in genuine connection begin to synchronise. Their breathing rates align. Their heart rates converge. Their gestures mirror each other. Their brains, astonishingly, begin to show similar patterns of neural activation. This is not metaphor — it is measurable physiology.

Mirror Neurons and Social Resonance

The discovery of mirror neurons — first documented in macaque monkeys by Rizzolatti and colleagues and subsequently identified in analogous human neural systems — transformed our understanding of social cognition.^[6] Mirror neurons are neural circuits that activate both when an individual performs an action and when that individual observes the same action in another. They are the neural substrate of imitation, empathy, and social learning.

In the context of interpersonal connection, mirror neuron systems allow us to directly simulate the emotional and physical states of others — not just to infer them intellectually, but to resonate with them at a pre-cognitive level. When you wince watching someone stub their toe, or feel a surge of joy when a friend shares exciting news, your mirror system is doing the work. This is the biology of empathy, and it is fundamental to rapport.

Neural Coupling: The Brain-to-Brain Connection

Neuroscientist Uri Hasson's research at Princeton documented a phenomenon he called "neural coupling" — the finding that during genuine communication, the brain of a listener begins to mirror the neural activity of the speaker, often with a short lag.^[7] The more successfully a speaker communicates — the more the listener truly comprehends and resonates with what is being shared — the more closely coupled the two brain patterns become. In some cases, the listener's brain activity actually anticipates the speaker's, suggesting a genuine shared cognitive state.

This finding has profound implications for how we understand rapport. It suggests that the experience of "clicking" with someone is not purely psychological — it is a real, measurable neurological state in which two brains are temporarily synchronized. You are not just feeling connected; at the neural level, you partially are connected.

Authentic vs. Deliberate Mirroring

Given the evidence for the power of mirroring in creating feelings of connection, it's unsurprising that some dating advice recommends deliberately mimicking the gestures, posture, and speech patterns of a person you want to attract. The research on this is complicated.

Studies by Chartrand and Bargh documented what they called the "chameleon effect" — the finding that unconscious mimicry of a conversation partner increases liking, and that people who are mimicked tend to feel more positively toward the mimicker, even without awareness that mirroring is occurring.^[9]

However, the same research revealed important limits. Deliberate, effortful mimicry is detectable — and when detected, it strongly backfires, producing discomfort and distrust. Moreover, the positive effects of authentic natural mirroring are substantially larger than those of deliberate mimicry. The implication is clear: the best version of mirroring is not a technique but a consequence. When you are genuinely present with someone — genuinely interested and genuinely listening — natural attunement follows. You cannot efficiently hack what happens naturally when you are simply, fully there.

Vocal Entrainment and Language

Attunement extends beyond posture into the more subtle dimensions of speech. Giles' Communication Accommodation Theory documents how people unconsciously adjust their speech patterns — pace, pitch, vocabulary, dialect — to match those of their conversational partner when they feel positively toward them.^[10] This vocal convergence is a reliable signal of rapport, and its absence (divergence) signals social distance or disapproval.

Similarly, Ireland and colleagues found that couples who matched each other's function word usage (words like "the," "a," "and," "I") in written communication were significantly more likely to remain in the relationship over the following three months — and reported higher relationship quality.^[11] Language synchrony, it turns out, is a window into genuine attunement.

Emotional Resonance: Feeling Seen and Understood

Among all the components of genuine rapport, emotional resonance may be the most important. It is what happens when you share something meaningful and the person you're with doesn't just hear your words but actually receives your experience — when you feel genuinely understood, not just politely listened to.

Psychologist Harry Reis and his colleagues have studied what they call "perceived partner responsiveness" — the degree to which someone feels that their partner truly understands them, values them, and cares about their wellbeing.^[12] Across a substantial body of research, perceived responsiveness emerges as one of the strongest predictors of relationship quality, attraction, and commitment. When people feel that another person really gets them — their needs, their experiences, their inner world — they are powerfully drawn toward that person.

The Three Components of Feeling Understood

Reis and colleagues identify three distinct but related components that contribute to the experience of being understood:

• Understanding: The sense that the other person accurately perceives your thoughts and feelings — that they "get" what you mean.
• Validation: The sense that the other person accepts your experience as legitimate — that your feelings make sense, even if they differ from theirs.
• Care: The sense that the other person is invested in your wellbeing — that your experience matters to them.

All three are necessary. You can understand someone's experience without validating it (accurate but dismissive). You can validate without understanding (warm but vague). Care without either understanding or validation becomes smothering. Genuine responsiveness requires all three operating together.

Active Listening vs. Waiting to Speak

One of the most persistent misconceptions about conversation is that listening is the passive partner to speaking. In reality, high-quality listening is intensely active — and the difference between active and passive listening is immediately felt by the person being listened to.

Empathic Accuracy

William Ickes' research on empathic accuracy — the degree to which one person can correctly identify what another is thinking and feeling — reveals important nuances.^[13] Higher empathic accuracy is associated with greater relationship satisfaction, but with an important caveat: in distressed relationships, too much empathic accuracy can paradoxically be destabilising, because accurately perceiving negative thoughts in a partner can escalate conflict.

The implication is that emotional resonance is not simply about being maximally accurate at reading another person. It is about creating conditions in which both people feel safe enough to be transparent, and in which accurate perception is accompanied by care and acceptance — not judgment.

The Attunement Repair Cycle

Developmental psychologist Ed Tronick's research on mother-infant interaction introduced the concept of the "attunement-rupture-repair" cycle.^[14] Tronick found that even the most attuned caregiver-infant pairs spend only about 30% of their interaction in genuine synchrony; the rest of the time they are either slightly misattuned or in the process of repairing a rupture.

This finding is liberating for adult relationships. Rapport is not a state of constant perfect harmony — it is a dynamic process of reaching for attunement, falling out of sync, noticing, and re-establishing connection. The quality of a relationship is less about how often ruptures occur and more about how quickly and generously they are repaired. This is as true in dating as in any other relational context.

The Vulnerability Loop: How Opening Up Builds Connection

In contemporary dating culture — particularly in the heterosexual cis-male dating advice space — vulnerability has often been framed as a liability. Show too much too soon and you look needy. Admit genuine feelings and you lose power. The strategic ideal was a kind of affable imperviousness: warm but unreachable, interested but never invested.

The research could not be more clearly opposed to this framing. Vulnerability — the willingness to disclose genuine thoughts, feelings, uncertainties, and experiences — is one of the most powerful mechanisms of interpersonal closeness. Not as an unlimited quantity deployed without discernment, but as a calibrated and genuine act of relational trust.

Jourard's Self-Disclosure Research

Social psychologist Sidney Jourard's pioneering work on self-disclosure established that the willingness to reveal one's authentic self to another person is fundamental to both psychological health and relational intimacy.^[15] Jourard documented what he called the "transparency" principle: people who allow themselves to be genuinely known are more capable of intimacy and more likely to sustain satisfying close relationships.

Crucially, Jourard also documented the reciprocity of disclosure — the finding that self-disclosure begets self-disclosure. When one person in a conversation shares something genuine and personal, the other is significantly more likely to do the same. This is the "vulnerability loop" in action: authentic opening from one person creates safety for the other to open in return.

Brené Brown's Research on Vulnerability and Connection

Researcher Brené Brown's qualitative and quantitative studies on shame, vulnerability, and wholeheartedness converge on a consistent finding: people who report the most satisfying intimate relationships share one characteristic above others — what Brown calls "the courage to be imperfect."^[16] They did not hide their struggles, doubts, or fears. They allowed themselves to be genuinely seen, imperfections included.

Brown's research also illuminates the paradox at the heart of emotional armour: people who protect themselves most thoroughly from vulnerability are also least capable of genuine connection. The walls that keep pain out also keep closeness out. The armour works — but at the cost of the thing it was built to protect.

Vulnerability vs. Oversharing

A clarification is necessary here. Vulnerability is not the same as oversharing, emotional dumping, or the absence of appropriate social calibration. Some popular misreadings of the vulnerability literature suggest that the route to connection is simply to share everything with everyone immediately. This is not what the research supports.

Genuine vulnerability is discerning. It involves selecting what to share, with whom, and at what stage of a relationship. It is an act of trust — which means it is calibrated to the actual (not wished-for) level of trust present in the relationship. Sharing your deepest wounds on a first date is not vulnerability; it is a search for a surrogate therapist, and it typically has the opposite effect on connection from what is intended.

Shared Experience & Co-Creation: Living It Together

There is a version of early-stage dating that is essentially a performance review. Both people arrive at the encounter with carefully curated presentations of their best self — rehearsed stories, polished opinions, practiced charm. They take turns performing, each evaluating the other's performance while managing their own. The conversation is pleasant, perhaps even impressive. But genuine connection rarely emerges from it.

The reason is that co-performance is fundamentally different from co-experience. Genuine rapport develops most reliably not when two people are performing for each other but when they are experiencing something together — when their attention is jointly directed at a shared object in the world, and they are discovering their responses to that object in real time, alongside each other.

The Psychology of Joint Attention

Developmental psychologists have long understood "joint attention" — the shared, coordinated focus of two people on the same object or event — as foundational to human cognition and social development. In adult romantic contexts, joint attention functions similarly: when two people are jointly engaged with something external, they are simultaneously building a shared world while observing each other's authentic responses.

This is partly why first dates centred on activities tend to produce stronger connections than those centred purely on conversation. A cooking class, an art gallery, a difficult hike, a board game — these create genuine joint attention, shared micro-challenges, and authentic rather than curated responses.

Aron's Self-Expansion Through Novel Experiences

Arthur Aron's self-expansion research yields a particularly practical finding: engaging in novel, exciting, or challenging activities with a partner increases reported feelings of attraction and relationship satisfaction, beyond the baseline level.^[3] In one classic study, partners who completed a challenging physical obstacle course together reported significantly higher attraction and relationship quality afterward than those who completed a mundane walking task.

Aron's explanation invokes the self-expansion model: novel challenges activate the expansion motivation, and because the partner is present during the expansion experience, the positive feelings associated with growth become partially attributed to the partner. They feel exciting partly because the experience is exciting — and the association sticks.

The Story-Building Function of Shared Experience

One underappreciated function of shared experience is its contribution to what psychologists call "relationship narratives" — the stories partners tell about their relationship's origins and development. Relationship researcher John Gottman found that couples who could articulate a vivid, detailed, and positively-valenced story of how their relationship began showed consistently higher relationship stability and satisfaction over time.^[18]

Shared experiences provide the raw material for these narratives. "We met at a bar" is a thin foundation. "We got hopelessly lost trying to find that obscure gallery, ended up at a hole-in-the-wall ramen place, and talked until midnight" is a story — a beginning of a shared history that both people have genuine claim to.

The Role of Humour in Rapport: Why Laughter Is the Real Tell

Ask people what they most want in a partner and "sense of humour" reliably appears near the top of the list, across cultures and demographics. This preference is so consistent and so widely reported that it has attracted substantial scientific attention. Why is shared laughter such a reliable indicator of compatibility — and what is actually happening, neurologically and psychologically, when two people genuinely find each other funny?

The Neuroscience of Shared Laughter

Laughter is far more than the audible expression of amusement. It is a sophisticated social signal, deeply embedded in primate communication long before the development of language.^[19] Robert Provine's extensive research on laughter documents that it is predominantly a social phenomenon — people laugh approximately 30 times more in social contexts than when alone, and the content of the remark that triggers laughter is often secondary to the relational context in which it occurs.

At the neurological level, shared laughter activates the reward circuitry of the brain — specifically dopamine-mediated systems associated with pleasure, bonding, and motivation. The opioid system, which underlies social bonding and pain relief, is also involved. Dunbar and colleagues found that shared laughter produces a measurable increase in pain tolerance — a proxy indicator for endorphin release — consistent with the hypothesis that laughter is a bonding mechanism that evolved to facilitate large-scale social cohesion.^[20]

Humour as Compatibility Signal

The reason "sense of humour" is so widely valued in a partner is not just that laughter feels good. It is that genuine shared humour is an extraordinarily reliable signal of cognitive and values alignment. To find something funny together requires a shared framework — shared assumptions about what matters, shared aesthetic sensibilities, shared ways of pattern-matching between expectation and violation. Two people who consistently find the same things funny are, in a meaningful sense, thinking in compatible ways.

Conversely, finding yourself repeatedly puzzled by or uncomfortable with a potential partner's humour — or feeling that your own humour consistently lands wrong with them — is a signal worth paying attention to. Not because either person is "bad at humour," but because humour incompatibility often reflects deeper worldview incompatibility.

Wit vs. Forced Humour

A critical distinction in the context of rapport: there is a fundamental difference between natural wit — the authentic expression of a playful way of seeing the world — and performed humour, the self-conscious attempt to appear funny for strategic effect.

Self-Deprecating Humour and Vulnerability

Particularly in early-stage dating, self-deprecating humour — the ability to find your own flaws, missteps, and absurdities genuinely funny — serves a specific connective function. It signals that you do not take yourself too seriously, that you have a realistic and unguarded relationship with your own imperfections, and that you are secure enough to expose them without anxiety. This combination of security and openness is deeply attractive.

The caveat: self-deprecation works when it comes from a position of genuine self-acceptance. The same words, delivered from a place of actual shame or a bid for reassurance, read very differently — and typically produce discomfort rather than closeness.

Digital Rapport: Building Connection Through Screens

A substantial portion of modern dating happens through screens — through dating app profiles, text message exchanges, voice messages, and video calls. For many people, the majority of their initial connection with a potential partner occurs in digital space, long before an in-person meeting. The question of how to build genuine rapport through digital channels is therefore not peripheral to modern dating — it is central to it.

What Is Lost in Digital Communication

The challenges of digital rapport are real. A significant portion of the channels through which in-person attunement occurs — facial micro-expressions, physiological synchrony, vocal tonality, touch, spatial proximity — are absent or heavily attenuated in text-based communication. Mehrabian's often-misquoted research (frequently cited as "93% of communication is non-verbal") is more nuanced than its popular version, but the core insight holds: a great deal of the emotional information transmitted in face-to-face interaction simply does not travel through text.^[22]

The practical consequences are significant: tone is easily misread, humour falls flat without delivery, irony becomes sarcasm, and the natural rhythm of conversation — the flow of attunement and responsive adjustment — is disrupted by asynchronous messaging.

What Digital Communication Does Well

However, digital communication also has genuine relational affordances that in-person interaction lacks. The asynchronous nature of text allows for more considered, reflective responses — time to think about what you actually mean rather than blurting the first thing that comes to mind. Written language, when used thoughtfully, can achieve a precision and expressiveness that spoken conversation in the heat of the moment rarely reaches.

Video Dates and Virtual Connection

The COVID-19 pandemic's forced experiment with video dating produced a body of informal and emerging formal evidence about its relational possibilities and limitations. Research by Finkel and colleagues suggests that video communication is significantly better than text for rapport-building but still substantially less rich than in-person interaction — particularly for the subtle physiological attunement processes described earlier in this guide.

Nonetheless, video calls offer genuine opportunities for rapport. Eye contact is possible (though the camera-screen displacement creates a subtle mutual mismatch). Facial expression is visible. Vocal tone carries. The practical advice here is to treat video calls as genuinely relational encounters rather than auditions — engage fully, be present, allow for natural pauses, and resist the impulse to perform.

Maintaining Rapport Between In-Person Meetings

Perhaps the most important function of digital communication in early-stage dating is the maintenance of connection between in-person encounters. Research on the "anticipation" function of romantic communication suggests that messages that build toward the next shared experience — that reference ongoing threads from previous conversations, that deepen the felt sense of a shared narrative — are significantly more rapport-maintaining than generic check-ins.

From Rapport to Romance: When Connection Becomes Attraction

This guide has been primarily concerned with the psychological and neurological mechanisms of genuine rapport — the conditions under which people feel truly connected to each other. But a question naturally arises: how does rapport become attraction? Are these independent processes, or does genuine connection itself generate romantic desire?

The answer, the research suggests, is complex but meaningfully directional: genuine rapport is a powerful driver of romantic attraction, particularly in contexts and for people where initial physical attraction is not overwhelming. And the attraction that emerges from rapport has different — and in many ways superior — characteristics to attraction that precedes it.

The Attachment-Attraction Link

Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and elaborated by Mary Ainsworth, describes the fundamental human need for felt security in close relationships.^[23] The research literature on adult attachment has consistently found that people's attachment styles — their characteristic patterns of seeking or avoiding closeness — powerfully shape the kind of attraction they experience and the relationships they form.

Critically for our purposes: people with more securely attached styles — those who are comfortable with both intimacy and independence — tend to experience attraction that is more strongly associated with genuine rapport and less strongly associated with the anxious-arousal of uncertain pursuit. They are, in a real sense, attracted to people who are genuinely good for them rather than people who activate their attachment anxieties.

The Role of Familiarity and Knowledge in Romantic Attraction

The common cultural narrative treats attraction as something that either exists or doesn't — a spark either present from the first moment or permanently absent. The research literature complicates this substantially. Paul Eastwick and Lucy Hunt's work on "distinctive attraction" and "emergent attraction" documents that a significant proportion of long-term romantic attraction is built over time — and in many cases, people who became lasting couples report little or no initial attraction.

This finding aligns with the self-expansion model: as genuine rapport develops, as we come to know another person's mind and character, our sense of them as interesting, appealing, and attractive can grow. We are not just updating our rating of a static object; we are forming an increasingly full picture of a complex person — and it is often the complexity and depth of that person that becomes the source of attraction.

Rapport Without Romantic Interest: Respecting What Emerges

An important note that belongs in any guide on rapport and attraction: genuine rapport does not automatically produce romantic attraction, and it should not be treated as a mechanism to manufacture romantic interest that isn't otherwise present. People can build deep, genuine rapport — real warmth, real closeness, real mutual regard — and simply not feel romantic attraction toward each other. Both are real; neither negates the other.

The ethical approach to rapport in dating means attending to what actually emerges — not instrumentalising connection to produce a desired outcome. If genuine rapport develops alongside growing romantic attraction, that is worth pursuing with openness and care. If genuine rapport develops without romantic attraction, that is worth naming honestly rather than continuing to pursue as a dating project.

From Connection to Commitment

The research on relationship commitment — what causes people to choose each other specifically, and to remain chosen — converges on a finding that directly mirrors the core argument of this guide. Psychologist Caryl Rusbult's investment model of commitment identifies three key factors: satisfaction, quality of alternatives, and investment (the resources — time, energy, emotional history — put into the relationship).^[24]

Genuine rapport is the most efficient mechanism for building all three simultaneously. It increases satisfaction (genuine connection feels deeply satisfying). It decreases the perceived quality of alternatives (the specific irreplaceable quality of this person, known fully, is hard to replicate). And it builds investment naturally — genuine rapport is built through real time and real engagement, which are themselves the investment.

Navigating Mismatched Feelings

One of the harder realities of the rapport-to-romance journey is that genuine connection does not always develop symmetrically. One person may feel the draw of romantic attraction while the other experiences only warm friendship. This asymmetry is common and deserves honest, compassionate navigation.

The ethical path here is directness over ambiguity. Continued "rapport-building" when you are aware of a significant mismatch — hoping proximity will eventually convert friendship into desire — typically causes more harm than an honest, caring conversation. Genuine rapport includes the willingness to be transparent about what you are and aren't feeling, even when that transparency is uncomfortable.

The Practice: Becoming Someone Who Connects Genuinely

It would be a mistake to end this guide by reducing its insights to a checklist. The evidence is clear that technique — the strategic deployment of connection skills in the service of an outcome — is not just less effective than genuine connection; it actively undermines it. The act of monitoring your own performance divides your attention, reduces your presence, and makes authentic attunement impossible.

What the research ultimately supports is something simpler and more demanding: the practice of genuine attention. Being more fully present with the people you are getting to know. Listening more carefully. Sharing more honestly. Attending to others' experience with real curiosity rather than instrumental interest. Being willing to be known as well as to know.

The paradox of rapport is that the more deliberately you try to produce it, the less of it you get. And the more you simply commit to being genuinely, attentively, humanly present with another person — the more naturally and sustainably it arrives.

That is both the science and the art of genuine connection. Not a set of moves, but a way of showing up. Not a game to be played, but a dance — one that only works when both people are really there.

The good news embedded in all of this research: genuine attentiveness, warmth, and curiosity about another person are learnable orientations. They require practice, self-awareness, and the willingness to be changed by the people you encounter. But they are within reach of anyone who chooses to make them a priority — which is to say, within reach of everyone.

References

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3. Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284.
4. Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. N., Vallone, R. D., & Bator, R. J. (1997). The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4), 363–377.
5. Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing. Harper & Row.
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8. Feldman, R. (2007). Parent–infant synchrony: Biological foundations and developmental outcomes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(6), 340–345.
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11. Ireland, M. E., Slatcher, R. B., Eastwick, P. W., Scissors, L. E., Finkel, E. J., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship initiation and stability. Psychological Science, 22(1), 39–44.
12. Reis, H. T., Clark, M. S., & Holmes, J. G. (2004). Perceived partner responsiveness as an organizing construct in the study of intimacy and closeness. In D. Mashek & A. Aron (Eds.), Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy. Erlbaum.
13. Ickes, W. (1997). Empathic Accuracy. Guilford Press.
14. Tronick, E. Z. (1989). Emotions and emotional communication in infants. American Psychologist, 44(2), 112–119.
15. Jourard, S. M. (1971). The Transparent Self (Revised ed.). Van Nostrand Reinhold.
16. Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing.
17. Altman, I., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
18. Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown Publishers.
19. Provine, R. R. (2000). Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Viking.
20. Dunbar, R. I. M., Baron, R., Frangou, A., Pearce, E., van Leeuwen, E. J. C., Stow, J., Partridge, G., MacDonald, I., Barra, V., & van Vugt, M. (2012). Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1731), 1161–1167.
21. Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2008). Dissing oneself versus dissing rivals: Effects of status, audience, and sex on the short-term and long-term attractiveness of self-deprecating and other-deprecating humor. Evolutionary Psychology, 6(3), 393–408.
22. Mehrabian, A. (1981). Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes (2nd ed.). Wadsworth.
23. Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent–Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
24. Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(2), 172–186.

All citations are peer-reviewed or are major academic texts. DOIs and publisher information available on request.