
Eighteen months ago I moved to a new city.
In that time I’ve reconnected with a lot of old friends and become mates with a bunch of people from work.
But I haven’t made any “new” friends.
I meet people all the time at events and at friend’s parties and we seem to connect… but then nothing.
We do the small talk, we share a laugh, we might even follow each other on Instagram.
But I’ve never, you know, taken the one-time acquaintance-ship to the next level.
My biggest fear is that they won’t like me back and were just being polite in talking to me in the first place.
And I’m not alone in feeling this way. New research, which was published in Psychological Science, has found that most people experience a “liking gap” when meeting new people.
There’s a discrepancy between what people really think of us and what we think they think of us.
You see, psychologists at Cornell, Harvard and Yale Universities in the US and the University of Essex in the UK believe said “liking gap” is actually holding us back from making new friends.
While we might walk away from these interactions thinking we didn’t make a good enough first impression, the person we just met generally really enjoyed our company.