In the middle of the 19th century, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was trying to solve a riddle: Why do people seek relationships when they lead to so much pain?

In response to this troubling phenomenon, he wrote a parable known as “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma.” ¹

Here is how it begins:

One cold winter’s day, a number of hedgehogs huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. ²

Schopenhauer draws a parallel between the behavior of these fictitious hedgehogs and humans in real life. 

Just as the hedgehogs can’t get too close to each other or they’ll get hurt, so too must humans keep a careful distance from one another — even at the expense of sometimes feeling cold and lonely. This, according to Schopenhauer, is the trade-off we must make if we’re to get along with people. 

His parable is alive and well today: think of everyone you’ve known who, to “play it safe,” avoids close relationships or letting their true feelings show. Or who’s too afraid of rejection to make the first move. You may be one of them.

Sometimes trauma is to blame, and such cases deserve special attention and consideration. Think of “attachment styles,” and all that. I suspect that the rest of us, however — including those of us who have healthy, functional lives — are still in danger of normalizing this kind of invulnerability. Day to day, we feel that we’re comfortable enough, just like Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs. But years later our behavior can come back to haunt us.

In 2012 a palliative nurse named Bonnie Ware shared a list of the 5 most common regrets of the dying. Ware was an experienced caregiver who had talked with hundreds of individuals during their final days. The fourth regret on her list may or may not come as a surprise to you:  

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

Ware’s patients admitted that in their final moments, they thought of — and missed — their old friends. But because they’d allowed themselves to be too busy and too distracted over the years, they had fallen out of touch. Now that they were dying there was little time left to reconnect, and sometimes it wasn’t possible to get in touch at all. 

Ware’s discovery is not unique. In one of the largest surveys on regret ever conducted, the two biggest regret categories were, respectively, “family,” and “partners.” People tend to have a lot of regrets over their relationships, period. There are many reasons for this, but I’m inclined to think the Hedgehog’s Dilemma plays a role.³.

We’re not intuitive about what will make us happy in the long run. Whether this is a holdover from evolution or something else, we focus on immediate outcomes over distant ones. And one of those immediate outcomes is, “Don’t get stabbed by a sharp spiky thing! And don’t go out of your way for anyone — especially if it means you could get stabbed!”

This modus operandi keeps us alive and out of danger. It saves us time and energy. It’s only after years of the compounded effects of not being closer to others do we finally start to realize just how lonely we are for our friends and loved ones. If we want to overcome the Hedgehog’s Dilemma to live a warmer, fuller life we must reckon with our biological hardwiring. Done right, we can experience warmth and closeness to others without continually worrying about being “pricked.” We need not suffer like Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs.

Alas, I have no universal one-size-fits-all solution, but here are three helpful ideas from my own life:

1. Keep a positive view of life and others

One of the trickiest maneuvers in life is to have a positive view, even when we have negative experiences. This means choosing to see the good in others, and to have hope in the possibility of being closer both to those we already know and to those we may not have met yet.

A positive view of life is not a Pollyanna-ish one; it’s a proactive one. It’s one in which we see each new person and encounter as an opportunity for greater fulfillment, even if we’ve been hurt in the past. (And hopefully, we have enough common sense to recognize red flags and not make the same mistake twice).

As we cultivate an attitude of warmth and openness to others, we’ll find the universe bending to meet us where we’re at. Not everyone will be our new best friend, and we can’t force anyone to love us, but there will be those who are also looking and ready to connect with us. You may never be close to your difficult dad or your prickly sister — and some friends may choose to disappear — but there will be many others who will be happy to step in and fill your life. 

In contrast, when we allow negative experiences to harden us we create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which others won’t stick around thanks to our unpleasant attitude. Take a look at Schopenhauer himself.

Schopenhauer lived a remarkably lonely life despite his prolific career.

His father died suddenly when Arthur was still a teenager, most likely by suicide when he drowned in a canal near their home. He had a terrible relationship with his mother who, rightly or wrongly, called him an “unbearable” person. He had few close friends, no wife or long-term partner, and in old age, he lived completely alone except for his two poodles. ⁴

Schopenhauer was something of a bridge-burner. He had a habit of insulting others he disagreed with, both in writing and to their faces. Once, he even injured a neighbor woman when he violently pushed her away from the entrance of his home; he spent the next twenty years grudingly paying her an annual pension after she won a lawsuit against him. I find it little wonder that “the philosopher of pessimism” wrote about the Hedgehog’s Dilemma after all this. His life experiences formed his outlook. Nor was he wrong in his views. Connection to others does require us to get hurt sometimes. Going out into society mean we run into weirdos every now and then. That’s the price we pay.

The choice is in our attitude. A positive and resilient attitude armors us against the “spikes” of disappointment so we can stay warm and close to others. A negative attitude keeps us cold, hurt, and ambivalent. I’ve seen plenty of examples of both throughout my life, and plenty inbetween.

2. Reach out first

I’m afraid I have to agree with the following statement by relationship expert Marisa Franco: “Much of friendship is defined by ambiguity. It’s rare that people straight up tell us whether they like us or not.”⁵

This more or less self-evident truth is why so many of us hold back from trying to be closer to others. Rejection stings, so the easy thing is to let the other person make a move first. If they don’t, we assume, it’s because they don’t like us enough. (Never mind the fact the other person might be thinking the same thing about us!).

Every healthy relationship does require some degree of mutuality. But we don’t do ourselves favors when we second-guess how the other person feels about us when we already have a good thing going.

The best way I’ve learned to overcome this instinctive insecurity is to assume the people we like also like us too, unless they blatantly let us know otherwise. Most people don’t initiate more often in relationships because they’re insecure or distracted by mundane, urgent things – not because they don’t care. One study even found that if people were given time to write a short note to an old friend and were reassured that the friend would be receptive, they still failed to reach out. ⁶

The more we protect ourselves, the more we hurt ourselves.

I thankfully somehow learned this lesson earlier on in life.

As an early twenty-something, I was way too aware of how often I contacted someone “first”, versus how often they contacted me first. My simplistic thinking was that if two people liked each other equally, they would naturally find some sort of 50/50 arrangement. If the other person didn’t reach out, it meant they didn’t care as much about me as I did about them (as if I could somehow quantify this).

Here’s what I noticed, though: each time we did catch up, it was always a great experience that left us both feeling full and happy. It didn’t matter that I did most of the initiating. So I made a mental shift.

I decided to reach out to my friends whenever I thought of them, and to hell with my insecurities. What I found was that every single time I did, they were happy to reconnect and we always had a great time. Over the years, some have thanked me for staying in touch — they recognize that it requires both thought and effort amidst life’s distractions.

It’s not natural for us to expose ourselves to the risk of hedgehog prickles, but connection is a real human need, even if it’s not as urgent as the need for protein and REM sleep. Or as Franco puts it:

“Connection affects who we are, and who we are affects how we connect. When we have felt connected, we’ve grown. We’ve become more open, more empathetic, bolder. When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection.” ⁷

The more we protect ourselves, the more we hurt ourselves. I’ve learned that if I want close, long-lasting relationships with old friends (and new) I need to ditch the tally score, reach out first, and and trust that my common sense will tell me when the other person is happy to connect, and when I need to look elsewhere.

As we reach out again and again, to both new and old friends, we will reap the compounding returns of those interactions for years to come. 

3. Show more affection and gratitude

In her studies on friendship, Franco made an interesting discovery on the difference between “regular” friendships and friendships of the deepest and closest kind. The key factor was affection.

People who feel close to others, and who want to continue to feel close, reinforce those feelings by showing affection. This needn’t be dramatic displays of hugging, kissing, or poetic declarations (unless that’s your style, I won’t judge) — affection can be as simple as letting the other person knowyou like and appreciate them. 

Our self-preserving instincts tell us that it’s weird to give our friend a spontaneous hug or to tell them how glad we are to have them in our lives. But these acts of affection are the magic ingredient I see missing in most relationships, even romantic ones. Affection creates the conditions for loyalty and security.

It doesn’t help that Western culture today often values sarcasm and flippant witticisms over sincere, direct expressions of love and admiration. It might require extra creativity to tell someone you love them without being awkward. But the rewards are well worth it.

Just as important as affection is the need to show gratitude. 

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar found in a study of conversations in eight different languages (from different parts of the globe) that people rarely expressed gratitude to each other for helping or giving. The catch? All of the people in these conversations were family members or close friends. ⁸

A sad implication here is that most people tend to take those they love most for granted. We save our expressions of gratitude for strangers or acquaintances we hope to make a good impression on. We think of immediate outcomes (“I need to let my boss know I was grateful for his help so he’ll keep helping me!”) rather than the long-term consequences of how we interact with the people we care about most.

The best remedy I’ve found for this is simply to be more conscientious. Life is unfairly, terrifyingly short. The future is uncertain. In light of this, my insecurities seem trifling. Saying “thank you” and “I love you” is no longer embarrassing. The long view of life makes even hard things easier.

Most people will choose the more passive option in their relationships — and in life. The results may not be noticeable for a while but it will come at a cost, and they risk becoming another one of the patients in Bonnie Ware’s study.

But when we glimpse how important relationships are to our lifelong happiness, we’ll be more willing to put ourselves out there and do the work. When we do this, others will respond in kind. And when we’ve done so, we’ll realize that we can overcome the Hedgehog’s Dilemma and endure a few inevitable prickles here and there in return for a life filled with much warmth and little regret.

It’s a deal I’ll take every time.

***

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1. In the original German, the animal in question is a porcupine. “Hedgehogs” wriggled their way into subsequent translations.
2. Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Parerga and Paralipomena: Short philosophical essays. Oxford University Press. volume II, chapter XXXI, section 396, pages 651–652.
3. This survey, called the American Regret Project, was conducted by journalist Daniel H. Pink and his colleagues. You can view the results here.
4. Schopenhauer certainly did have a love for animals and was quite the humanitarian in that respect.
5. Franco, M. G. (2022). Platonic: How the science of attachment can help you make–and keep–friends. G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
6. Aknin, L. B., & Sandstrom, G. M. (2024). People are surprisingly hesitant to reach out to old friends. Communications Psychology, 23. Read here.
7. Ibid.
8. Dunbar, R. (2022). Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Little, Brown UK.