There’s a woman I know in Saigon, a friend of my wife’s, who is, by any ordinary measure, one of the most fortunate people I’ve met. She’s strikingly beautiful. She’s warm with strangers. She speaks three languages. She has a generous laugh. People light up when she walks into a room.
She also, as she told my wife in a quiet conversation a few months ago, does not have a single close friend.
Not a single one. She has what she calls “a lot of company.” People who want to have dinner with her. People who want her at their parties. People who offer her favours, introductions, trips. She is constantly surrounded. And she is, in her own words, profoundly lonely.
The easy read on this, the one the comment section of any article would reach for, is that she must have a personality flaw she can’t see. That she’s cold underneath. That she’s performative. That she pushes people away.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening. And the research actually suggests something much more painful and specific.
The halo effect, and what it does to the person inside it
Psychology has studied this phenomenon for close to a century. It’s called the halo effect, first identified by the American psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. The Wikipedia entry on the halo effect, which is a solid summary of the research, notes that people perceived as physically attractive are automatically rated higher on a long list of unrelated traits. Intelligence. Trustworthiness. Kindness. Competence. Even their likely future success.
A 2022 cross-cultural study, summarised in Psychology Today by one of its co-authors, analysed responses from more than 11,000 participants across 45 countries. Across every region, attractive faces were rated as more confident, emotionally stable, intelligent, responsible, sociable, and trustworthy. The researcher, Carlota Batres, called it “beauty goggles.” Attractiveness clouds the observer’s judgement and floods the attractive person with positive assumptions they didn’t earn and have no way to refuse.
Most of the halo-effect literature is written from the observer’s point of view. What gets discussed less is what it’s like to be the person standing inside the halo.
Here’s what it’s like, at least as I’ve observed it and as this friend has described it. From the age of about thirteen, people start choosing you. They choose you for the party, for the team, for the job interview, for the date. They choose you before they know anything about you. Because of the halo effect, they arrive already believing you are warm, capable, kind, and fun. You are not being met as a stranger. You are being met as a projection.
If you are also, underneath the halo, actually kind, the machine becomes self-reinforcing. Your kindness is read as confirmation of what the halo already promised. You become known for your generosity. People start to rely on it. You become, without ever choosing to be, the one who gives, who hosts, who connects, who listens, who provides.
You get chosen constantly. What you almost never get is chosen for who you actually are.
Why this ends in no close friends
A close friendship requires something specific. It requires the friend to have seen you, at some point, as a person rather than as a function. To have been curious about you before they knew what you were useful for.
The dynamic the halo creates makes this almost impossible. From the outside, the attractive, kind person looks like the ideal friend candidate. Everyone wants access. But the very abundance of interest is the problem. When thirty people want to be your friend, almost all of them want something specific that you provide. The social access. The emotional labour. The warmth that makes their own life feel better. They’re not choosing you the way you are hoping to be chosen.
Over time, and this is the painful part, the person inside the halo starts to notice. They notice that people keep calling when they want something. They notice that conversations are about the other person’s life. They notice that when they themselves are having a hard week, the inbox goes quiet.
They don’t articulate this as “I’m being valued instrumentally.” They usually articulate it as “I have lots of friends but I feel lonely,” or “Something feels off but I can’t name it.”
This connects to a well-researched idea in psychology called contingent self-worth. A series of five studies involving more than 2,500 participants, from a University of Buffalo research team published in 2020, found that when people stake their self-worth on a specific external domain, loneliness reliably follows. The original research focused on financial contingency of self-worth, but the mechanism is general. When your value is tied to what you provide rather than to who you are, the people around you will provide you with transactions rather than friendship.
The trap of being good at the role
Here’s the cruel twist. People who grow up being chosen for their qualities often become genuinely excellent at the providing role. Their social skills sharpen. Their empathy deepens. Their ability to make others feel seen becomes almost supernatural.
This competence is read, by almost everyone who meets them, as evidence that they are thriving. They look like the last person who needs anything. They radiate the kind of low-maintenance warmth that makes other people relax in their presence.
So nobody checks on them. Nobody asks, at three in the morning, what’s actually going on. Nobody pierces the halo and asks to meet the person.
And the person inside the halo, having been trained since adolescence that their role is to provide, usually doesn’t ask either. Admitting loneliness feels like a betrayal of the whole social contract they’ve been in. It would mean admitting that the kindness is, in part, a performance they’ve built their identity around, and that they have private needs they haven’t allowed themselves to voice.
The Buddhist angle
In Pali Buddhism there is a concept called lokadhamma, the eight worldly winds. The Buddha taught that there are eight forces that blow through every human life. Gain and loss. Fame and ill-repute. Praise and blame. Pleasure and pain. His point was that most of us spend our lives trying to control these winds, and that real peace comes from no longer being at their mercy.
Attractive, kind people are blown constantly by the winds of gain and praise. Most people assume this must be a gift. The Buddha, I think, would have pointed out that being constantly loved for a particular quality can be just as binding as being constantly hated for one. In both cases, the person is being related to through a label rather than as a living, changing human being.
I wrote about the worldly winds in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, and my own experience of practising with this concept is that the dangerous winds are not the obviously harsh ones. The dangerous winds are the flattering ones. Gain and praise can quietly train you to perform the version of yourself that produces them, until you no longer know what you’d be if you stopped.
What would actually help
If you are the person I’m describing, a few small suggestions, offered with care.
The first is to notice what people are drawing from you, and what they’re not. In almost every friendship, there’s a quiet ledger. Are people curious about your inner life, or mostly your availability? Do they ask how you are, and wait for the honest answer? Are they willing to be inconvenienced by you, or only to be served by you?
The second is to risk being less convenient. This is the hardest one. The halo economy depends on your reliability as a provider. If you want friendships that are about who you are, you will have to let some of the people who wanted your providing fall away. Not dramatically. Just by no longer being available in the exact shape they got used to.
The third is to say, at least to one person, what you actually think. Not the warm, diplomatic version. The unfiltered, slightly thorny, genuinely-your-own-opinion version. Watch what happens. The people who stay after you do this a few times are the ones who were actually interested in you.
And the fourth, which I say with the most love, is to forgive yourself for being good at the role. You were chosen for it before you were old enough to consent. You built skills around it. Those skills are real and valuable and they are not the problem. The problem is that you were never taught to ask, out loud, for something different.
You are allowed to. You always were. The halo was never a contract. It was only ever a trick of the light that other people’s eyes were playing, and you’re allowed to step out of it whenever you’re ready.
