Four Great Ways to Connect with Your World

Connect With Your World

You say you'd love to have closer friendships, stronger (less stressful) family ties, deeper roots in the community, a significant other who could read your mind? Join the crowd—and make it happen.

You're single and you've met someone intriguing, but you don't feel an immediate "click." Should you get romantically involved anyway?
The click is tricky. More than sexual attraction, it involves a lightning-strike sense of familiarity and an uncanny feeling of being understood. Unfortunately, it can be illusory. And while many a successful marriage has started with "we just clicked," this is not a reliable way to forecast lasting romance. A better guide to the potential of a new relationship is to ask yourself whether being with the other person is more enjoyable than not. Was your original conversation amusing, intellectually stimulating, challenging, even memorably adversarial or odd? Then it is worth pursuing. Physical intimacy differentiates our central, partnered relationship from all others, but the desire needn't be instantaneous. It can grow, often from the most mundane contact. How many women have noted how sexy a man is when he's doing laundry?

You feel attached to your immediate family and friends but not to your community, the nation, the broader human family. Does that matter?
Welcome to the club. In the past 30 years, the number of Americans who've become members of a group, any group—the PTA, the Elks club, the NAACP, church congregations, Girl Scouts, bowling leagues—has plummeted. Turns out, such disengagement does matter but, happily, societal alienation is tractable; each of us can tackle it. If you have children, just attend your local school's next PTA meeting. Invite your friends to a cookout or lunch in the park. Turn off the television, too. The drop in American civic participation is closely tied to the period in the early 1960s when household TV ownership reached 90 percent. Participation in youth sports is also down dramatically across the country. Instead of watching the football game on Sunday, go outside and play football with your kids.