At a glance
You can long for close friends and still be the one who keeps them at a polite distance. From inside it feels like openness, but from outside it reads as waiting. Here you can look at what the waiting shields you from, what it quietly costs, and how closeness usually starts.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- Warm, but out of reach. Clients describe being pleasant company and hard to get close to, and are surprised when a friend finally says so.
- Never the first to ask. Clients often frame their holding back as tact about other people’s busy lives, when it also means nobody can ever say no to them.
- Opening up too late. Clients tend to reveal more of themselves once the other person has already made peace with the smaller version they were shown.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why do people say I seem distant when I feel open inside?
Other people can only go on what you do, and much of what you do is wait.
Inside, you are curious, free and pleased whenever someone gets in touch. Outside, you answer messages but rarely start them, say yes to plans but seldom suggest any, and give shorter replies than the questions you ask. None of this is much on its own. Taken together it tells anyone paying attention that you are comfortable where things are. The part of you hoping for more stays invisible, and few people will go searching for it.
Living abroad can sharpen this. In a new culture you may not know how forward you are allowed to be, so you hold back a little more than usual, and the people around you may be holding back too. Two people who would both like to be closer can then spend months in a polite standstill that neither of them would describe as one.
What is my holding back protecting me from?
Most often, the moment of reaching out and seeing nothing come back.
A message left on read or an invitation quietly declined hurts in a particular way. It is minor, easy to explain away, and still seems to confirm something you hoped was untrue. Waiting takes that risk off the table. You can wish for closeness as much as you like, and so long as you never ask, nobody can turn you down. The price is that you also never learn how often the answer would have been yes.
For some people this is an old pattern rather than something the move created. When reaching out in childhood brought warmth on one day and irritation on the next, not reaching out became the safest setting, and it tends to stay on long after life has changed. I cannot know from a page which of these is yours. What helps is asking whether the holding back began when you moved, or whether you have met it in every place you have called home.
Is it the culture around me, or am I hiding behind it?
It can be both, and the second is the part you can actually work with.
- The reserve may be real. In many places adults keep long-established circles, friendships grow slowly, and care is shown by showing up rather than by gushing.
- It also makes a very good excuse. A setting where nobody pushes lets you avoid any move without anyone noticing, yourself included.
- A small experiment tells you more. Asking one particular person to one particular thing teaches you more than another season of watching how people behave.
- Either answer is useful. If they say yes, the culture was not what stood in the way. If they decline twice and suggest nothing else, you have learnt something about that person, not about a whole country.
Understanding a new culture is valuable. It turns unhelpful once it accounts for everything, because an explanation that fits every case no longer tells you anything about yours.
How long does friendship actually take?
Longer than it seems fair, and most people underestimate the hours.
In one piece of research, adults who had recently relocated and, separately, first-year university students estimated how many hours they had spent together before they counted the other person as a casual friend, and later as a close one. The estimates ranged from somewhere around 40 to 90 hours for a casual friend, and from roughly 120 to 220 hours for a close one.1 These were people recalling their own time afterwards, and the researcher points out that the shifts probably came earlier than the totals imply, so I treat the figures as a rough sense of scale rather than a rule. What they suggest matches what I see: closeness grows out of plain, repeated, unremarkable time, and a lot of it passes before anything feels like friendship.
If you measure by meetings instead of hours, you will decide much too soon that it is going nowhere. Half a dozen good chats over half a year add up to only a few hours. That is not a failed friendship. It has hardly started.
How can I reach out without it feeling forced, and when is that not enough?
Make each offer smaller and more frequent, rather than trying to make it warmer.
- Send the message you hoped to get. A single line, no reason, no apology for getting in touch. Who sent it matters far more than what it says.
- Invite people into what you already do. A walk, a weekly class, a regular errand. Nobody has to decide whether you are worth a whole evening.
- Repeat before you deepen. A third ordinary coffee does more than one elaborate dinner, and it hurts less if it leads nowhere.
- Let something be unpolished. An honest opinion, something you are struggling with, the fact that you felt let down. Now and then is enough to shift how someone sees you.
- Count the hours, not the weeks. It keeps you from deciding after a month and a half that nothing has happened when hardly any time has passed together.
These steps work best when the distance comes from a habit of holding back. They help less when what stops you is a deep expectation that reaching out ends in hurt, because then every unanswered message seems to prove the expectation right, and it is the expectation that needs attention. It is also fair to look honestly at the people you are waiting on. Some are reserved but reachable. Some simply have no room for a new friend, and no amount of patience will alter that. An outside view often makes it easier to tell them apart.
Questions people ask
Can therapy change the fact that I keep people at a distance?
It changes the waiting, which is something you do, not your temperament, which is who you are. A private person can still learn to send the first message.
Does it make sense to see a therapist by video for this?
Yes, because the pattern travels with you, and sessions can happen wherever you happen to be living. All sessions are in English, by video, at a regular time agreed in Copenhagen time.
What would the first sessions look at?
Usually one actual friendship, and the precise point at which you pulled back. That single moment tends to hold the whole pattern in small.
Is it worth working on friendships rather than a relationship?
Friendships often show the pattern more clearly, because less is at stake and nothing keeps you there. What you learn usually carries over into closer relationships.
How long would this take?
I cannot give you a number before I understand what keeps the distance in place. A first conversation is usually enough to tell whether the work is likely to be brief or to need more time.
If you recognise yourself as the one who waits and want to understand why, online psychotherapy gives you a place to look at what the distance has been keeping safe.
Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
