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A guest list problem
A friend offered to host a baby shower before Priya Parker's first child was born, and she chose the guests. Then her father called, upset that she hadn't invited a step-brother's wife who lives in another state. There was nothing negative between the two women, but they were not in each other's community of psychological safety.
Inviting her pushed the circle outward. She had to ask who else from that ring of people would need an invitation, and how she would behave in front of someone she felt she had to perform for instead of just being herself. She ended up not inviting her, and afterward she had some repair to do, but with her father.
Talking it through
A few months later, in a coffee shop in Philadelphia, she raised it with him. He was still hurt. His life had a circle of eleven in a joint family, he told her, and he didn't understand why she wouldn't invite all eleven. She answered that his circle was not hers.
Her repair did not mean apologizing. It meant finding the right amount of space and overlap between a father and a daughter, a process like coming to the river together and looking at the water.
Why does everyone draw their circle differently?
Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar has proposed that human social networks form layers of roughly 5, 15, 50, and 150 people. The innermost layers hold the few people we confide in and the next ring holds close friends. Which relatives and friends land in each layer varies with culture, family structure, and personal history. Two people can therefore look at the same family tree and draw very different circles.
Why does performing for someone feel tiring?
Sociologist Erving Goffman described this in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He split social life into a front stage, where people manage the impression they give, and a backstage, where they can drop the act. Around some people, a person stays in front-stage mode for the whole encounter. Goffman built the idea on a theater metaphor, with roles, scripts, and audiences.
What do researchers mean by a repair attempt?
Psychologist John Gottman, whose lab at the University of Washington studied couples for decades, used the term repair attempt for any effort to stop tension from escalating. Repair attempts can be a joke, a touch, a change of subject, or a statement like let's start over. Gottman reported that whether a repair attempt is accepted predicts a couple's outcome better than how often they argue. An apology is only one of many forms they can take.
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