You send your partner a text. Hours pass without a reply.

Logically, you know they’re probably busy. But emotionally, your brain starts spinning. Are they upset with you? Did you do something wrong? Do they still love you?

Most people have moments like this from time to time. But for many people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), those feelings can be much more intense, and may be tied to something often referred to as emotional permanence.

Emotional permanence is a non-clinical term used to describe the ability to hold on to the feeling that someone loves, values or cares about you even when they aren’t physically present or regularly communicating with you.

“Emotional permanence is not an officially recognised diagnostic symptom of ADHD, although many individuals with ADHD report experiencing symptoms that closely resemble it,” said therapist Stephanie Lewis.

“Many report a lack of ability to maintain the emotional reality of a relationship as long as the individual involved is not physically present or actively engaged in communication with them. The phenomenon is much more than simply forgetting another person exists; rather it involves loss of access to the feeling of being loved, valued and/or connected to another person during short periods of time.”

A delayed text, a missed call or a quiet day from a partner or friend can suddenly feel like evidence that the relationship has changed and can cause not only anxiety for the person with ADHD, but also possible friction within a relationship.

People who struggle with emotional permanence don’t necessarily doubt their relationships all the time. Rather, they may suddenly feel as though an emotional connection has disappeared simply because it hasn’t been recently reinforced.

For example, someone with ADHD may intellectually know their partner loves them, but after a day without hearing from them, begin wondering whether something is wrong.

“In my work with individuals with ADHD I have met patients who intellectually understand their partner’s love for them,” Lewis said. “Yet, upon going one full day without receiving a text message from their partner, they begin to wonder whether something is wrong and/or if they have caused their partner to become upset with them.”

That uncertainty can quickly snowball.

“This emotional uncertainty will often result in anxiety, increased reassurance-seeking behavior or increased conflict within the relationship,” Lewis said.

The same pattern can show up outside romantic relationships. A delayed response from a friend can feel like rejection. A lack of feedback from a manager can feel like criticism. Even when nothing has objectively changed, the emotional certainty that someone cares can suddenly feel precarious.

Although emotional permanence is not part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, experts say several characteristics commonly associated with ADHD may help explain why many people with ADHD identify with this experience.

Lewis points to working memory challenges, difficulties with emotional regulation and rejection-sensitive dysphoria – an intense emotional response to perceived criticism or rejection that many, though not all, people with ADHD experience.

“A number of variables may also contribute to the existence of emotional permanence,” Lewis said. “For example, working memory deficits may limit the ability to retain emotional information, whereas difficulties with emotional regulation and rejection-sensitive dysphoria may increase the fear of rejection or disconnection.”

Clinical psychologist Navvab Tadjvar said these challenges can make the absence of emotional reassurance feel much more significant.

“Because the ADHD brain is so intensely bound to the immediate present, when the feedback stops, the internal anchor collapses,” Tadjvar explained. “Silence doesn’t evoke the possibility that the care will return; it evokes the feeling of total abandonment, leaving us helpless and all alone in the world.”

That doesn’t mean someone with ADHD doesn’t understand that they are loved or cared for. But it does make it difficult for them to access emotional connection in the moment, especially when there’s a gap in communication or they’re missing reassurance.

While emotional permanence is often discussed in the context of dating and relationships, ADHD coach Dom Passantino, who also has ADHD, said one of its biggest impacts is actually how people see themselves.

“People often flop into discussions of ADHDers’ lack of emotional permanence with the mindset, ‘They forget they’re in love if someone isn’t there,’” he said. “But it’s a lot more than that, and I feel like the darkest impacts of it are on how we view ourselves and not others.”

According to Passantino, many people with ADHD find themselves craving validation from people who rarely offer it while dismissing reassurance from the people who do.

“And when hypersensitivity is thrown on top, you turn these traits from upsetting to actively damaging,” he explained. “This becomes a breeding ground for dysfunctional and abusive relationships for both parties.”

Lewis said: “A critical first step would be the recognition of the phenomenon without judgment.”

One strategy she often recommends is creating an “evidence file”: saving thoughtful text messages, kind emails, handwritten notes or voice messages from loved ones that can be revisited when self-doubt starts creeping in.

“I frequently instruct my clients to develop ‘evidence files,’” Lewis added. “They may then refer back to the evidence file at times when insecurity regarding their partner increases.”

She also says cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) and ADHD coaching can help people learn to pause before assuming silence equals rejection and become more comfortable tolerating uncertainty.

Passantino agreed that keeping reminders of positive interactions can be especially helpful for people with ADHD. He compares it to the everyday systems many people with ADHD already use to remember tasks.

“In very much the same way that an ADHDer will need a Post-it note stuck on their monitor to remind them to buy milk or brush their teeth, we need to remind ourselves of the positive interactions we have with people,” he said.

He said this can be particularly important for people who have spent years masking their ADHD traits and learning to question whether positive feedback is genuine.

“Because we spend so much time masking, we just assume any positive interaction is fake, that people were just humouring us or being polite,” Passantino said. “Celebrating your own personality, not turning down the colours on it, is very important – it’s the classic ADHD coach mantra of ‘being yourself on purpose.’”

According to Tadjvar, strengthening emotional permanence is not only an individual process; loved ones can also help by creating more predictability and consistency within relationships.

“Cultivating emotional permanence requires a collective commitment to building a predictable world,” he said.

He encourages partners, friends and family members to create that sense of security through small, consistent acts of communication. “Sending a quick, ‘Thinking of you, buried in work until 5 p.m.,’ text rather than going radio silent provides the sturdy, predictable scaffolding the ADHD brain needs to feel safe,” he explained.

Ultimately, Tadjvar said, “Cultivating this skill is a practice of rewriting the intervals of absence: transforming silence from a terrifying void of abandonment into a secure, shared space where the connection remains safely intact.”

Keep in mind that it’s important not to self-diagnose. While many people with ADHD relate to emotional permanence, Lewis stressed that it is not unique to ADHD.

Similar experiences can also occur in people living with anxiety disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or attachment-related difficulties.

According to Lewis: “If you find that your inability to emotionally connect with others consistently affects your relationships and/or your daily functioning, consider consulting with a licensed professional mental health provider.”

President Donald Trump filed an emergency motion in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC to prevent the disclosure of his financial records in court — and withdrew allegations that the network had damaged his brand and businesses.

The emergency stay granted Thursday in the Southern District of Florida by US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett temporarily blocks the BBC from obtaining detailed financial information on the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is managed by the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.

“Counsel for the Plaintiff—who also represents the Trust—testified at the July 27, 2026, discovery hearing that the Plaintiff no longer intends to pursue a damages theory premised on injury to the plaintiff’s brands and businesses,” Lett wrote in her motion-granting order.

Trump sued the BBC in December over a documentary that aired on its flagship “Panorama” news program, which spliced together two different sections of a speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021 — before rioters stormed the Capitol.

Trump argued in his lawsuit that the program caused economic damage to his businesses, but dropped that particular claim ahead of a deadline Thursday to produce financial records corroborating this — which would have included tax returns, financial statements and ownership records.

A lawyer for Trump said during the hearing last month that Trump’s attorneys “don’t want to acknowledge that the brand has or has not suffered any injury,” and are “not pursuing that as part of our damages,” concluding, “It is simply the reputational injury to the President, full stop.”

The president is still seeking $10 billion in damages from the broadcaster.

Attorneys for the BBC argued Wednesday in a memorandum opposing the motion that Trump could have focused only on his supposed reputational harm when he first filed the lawsuit, and decried that he is still seeking damages without providing any actual disclosure.

“In fact, claiming $10 billion in harm while purporting to disclaim damage to Plaintiff’s business and professional interests renders it all the more implausible that Plaintiff will ever be able to show such damages,” the attorneys wrote Wednesday in the memo.

Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday had called the BBC’s request for disclosure “shockingly broad,” arguing it would cause irrevocable harm to the trust overseeing his companies. While Trump succeeded Thursday, the emergency stay does not necessarily shield his records forever.

The court could still decide that the BBC is entitled to obtain relevant financial information. The emergency stay itself will remain in effect until Lett rules on whether or not to lift it — following updated filings from Trump and his attorneys regarding the ongoing lawsuit.

During my senior year of college, I dated a boy who was tall, dark-haired, and smoked a lot of weed. (If I’d had a checklist, those would have been the boxes on it at the time.)

We talked easily, about everything from medieval art to music, and I found his lanky limbs and soulful eyes very appealing. But despite how much we enjoyed each other’s company, both in bed and out of it, I didn’t, fundamentally, feel anything. If he’d told me he never wanted to speak to me again, I wouldn’t have cared, except that I’d have needed to get my weed from someone else.

That’s when I came up with the theory of the third thing.

The premise is that there are three things that make you fall for someone. The first is a physical connection. The second is an intellectual connection. And then there’s the third thing… whatever mysterious ingredient makes you imagine a future together. My friends and I spent hours sitting on the floor of my dorm room, listening to Matchbox 20 and drinking diet Snapple with vodka, trying to unravel what the third thing could be.

I was a good student. I was naturally shy and awkward, but I was also used to thinking things through and figuring them out. In middle school, I’d analysed my classmates’ social interactions, realising that when someone told a story about themselves, you were supposed to respond with a story on a similar topic.

In high school, I’d made a checklist of all the things I needed to do to be cool (start reading Seventeen magazine, stop walking around with a book in front of my face, keep gum in my backpack and offer it to my classmates after lunch).

In college, I’d turned my attention to boys. It was easy to kiss them on sticky bar dance floors and meet them for coffee dates at the student centre. But I wanted to fall in love, and I wasn’t sure how to do it. If I could figure out the third thing, then I’d know the formula. I’d know how to find someone who I was really excited about.

I dated regularly throughout my 20s, but nothing lasted. Then, following another breakup, I found myself spending a lot of time on the phone with my friend Dan. We’d dated briefly when we first met years before on study abroad. He was awkwardly, gawkily handsome, and was one of the smartest people I’d ever met, dropping references to Byzantine emperors into casual conversation. However, at that time, there just wasn’t that third thing.

Then, suddenly, eight years later, there was. I wasn’t sure what had changed. I still didn’t know what the third thing was, but something was different, even if I couldn’t identify it. For years we’d just been friends – albeit friends who drunkenly made out occasionally when we ended up in his car together late at night. And now we were spending all our time thinking about each other. How had this happened? And what were we going to do about it?

As it turned out, we were going to get married. Three years later, we found ourselves holding hands and saying vows in a historic library in Providence. We ate cupcakes, drank prosecco, and spent the night dancing with our friends and family among the stacks. It was the happiest day of my life; I’d found a smart, handsome man whom I loved, and who loved me. We had chemistry; we could spend hours talking, and most importantly, we had the third thing. I felt like I’d gotten exactly what I wanted.

Except that after 10 years of marriage, it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. Dan’s brooding moroseness, which I’d found appealing, had begun to seem whiny. My quest for self-improvement, which he’d found admirable, had begun to seem exhausting. It had started to drive me crazy that he sang to himself. It had started to drive him crazy that I left the cupboard doors open. These were things that we’d lived with for years. They hadn’t been a problem. And now, suddenly, they were, and I wasn’t sure why.

There were other, bigger issues. We were politically divided. We wanted to spend our time in very different ways. My marriage didn’t end just because we no longer had the third thing. But that was part of it. We were still attracted to each other. We still talked about everything as easily as we always had. But we no longer had that ineffable thing that made us feel romantic about each other.

We tried. We left our son with his grandparents over the 4th of July weekend, went to a local brewery for IPAs and pepperoni pizza, shared a joint and had sex in front of a mirror. We sat side by side, feeling miles away from each other, and watched fireworks explode into distant sparks of light. We went to two different couples’ therapists. They gave us worksheets. We did the worksheets. We still didn’t love each other anymore.

The hardest thing about the end of the marriage wasn’t the loss of the present. At the time, we were sleeping on separate floors of our old suburban house, trying not to touch when we passed each other in the stairway. But in my imagined future, we were going to be one of those elderly couples who travelled around the country in an RV, who went to see independent films and had season tickets to the local symphony. We were going to sit side by side at our son’s graduation, and when he crossed the stage, unimaginably tall but still wild-haired and bright-eyed, we were going to squeeze each other’s hands.

Instead, I was single and dating again in my 40s. From everything I knew about ageing while female, I figured that dating at that age would be some kind of barren wasteland. Instead, I discovered that the apps had come along and made it easy. I could go on a date with someone new every night if I wanted, and for a while I did. I was doing things I thought I’d never do again, like kissing strangers at the entrance to the subway. And for the first time, I was dating women, which was something I’d always wondered about. When I was younger, I’d gone from one man to another, and suddenly I wondered if maybe the reason I’d had trouble figuring out the third thing was that I didn’t want to be with a man. Maybe my newfound queerness held the answer I’d been seeking.

I started dating a beautiful woman with long blonde hair, tattoos and a sweet smile. We sent each other passages from books, we talked about theatre, we spent hours making out. Still, despite how much we enjoyed each other’s company, both in bed and out of it, there was no third thing. We were mutually unserious, and after a few months things came to an end.

I think someday I’d like to fall in love again, but I’m also terrified because I’m finally coming to understand that there isn’t a formula. I’m realising that the third thing is different at different times, or for different people. That it’s something that can appear out of nowhere… and can disappear, too. That sometimes love just goes away, and if I find it again, it might go away again, no matter how hard I try not to let that happen.

I’ve finally figured out that I might never figure it out. If the third thing comes my way again, it’s just going to be because I’m lucky. I can’t control whether I find it; I can only control whether I’m brave enough to say yes to it. I don’t know whether I will be.

For now, I write, I teach and I worry about the world, and I watch my son use Magna-Tiles to build rainbow castles reaching up towards the sky. Sometimes I swipe right on strangers, and meet them for hikes or cups of coffee. I walk my dog around the neighbourhood in the spring and watch the crabapples bursting into improbable, extravagant bloom. The flowers drift down from the trees as I walk underneath them. I reach out my hands to catch them, and I end up empty-handed, but later, when I get home, I find myself picking delicate pink petals out of my hair.

Lia Romeo is a playwright, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway, as well as regionally and internationally, and her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other national publications. She is currently at work on a screenplay.

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People are lonelier than ever – that’s hardly breaking news. Everyone has a theory about why. Social media usually gets the blame; streaming platforms like Netflix are often part of the conversation; and, increasingly, AI is making the list.

In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general warned that the country was facing a “loneliness epidemic.” The diagnosis was clear. But what if we’ve been looking at the problem the wrong way?

Maybe loneliness isn’t about how many friends we have. On paper, many of us have larger social circles than previous generations, whether that’s hundreds of Facebook friends or a busy group chat alongside real-life relationships. We’ve come a long way from the days of small, close-knit communities where everyone knew your business before lunch.

The real issue may not be the size of our networks but the depth of our connections.

That idea is backed by decades of research. The landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies ever conducted on human happiness, found that the strongest predictor of a happy, meaningful life isn’t wealth, success or even physical health. It’s the quality of our relationships.

And that’s where many of us are struggling. We’re surrounded by people, yet starved of genuine connection. We call this the “Friendship Depth Gap,” and it may be one of the biggest reasons so many of us feel lonely.

Many people have plenty of friends, active group chats and a steady stream of social interaction, yet still feel strangely disconnected, unseen or unfulfilled. A term gaining traction on social media – the “Friendship Depth Gap” – puts a name to that feeling. The idea is simple: We’re surrounded by connection, but lacking genuine emotional intimacy.

Elisabeth Crain, psychotherapist and author of The Friendship Lab, has become one of the leading voices behind the concept.

“The research shows that we aren’t actually lacking friends. In fact, we have plenty of friends,” Crain said. “The issue is the level of closeness we have with our friends … the depth, or lack thereof, in these relationships. There’s a fear of vulnerability holding people back from becoming more intimate or close with their friends.”

In other words, most of us don’t need more names in our contacts list, we need to spend more meaningful time with the people already in it.

And there we have the frustrating paradox of modern friendship. We’re more connected than ever, yet many of us don’t have someone we’d instinctively call in a crisis. Our social circles may be wide, but too often they lack the depth that turns acquaintances into lifelong pals.

“I have a big group of friends, but I feel lonely a lot of the time,” said Maya S., 26, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy to talk about her relationships. “I don’t feel like my friends really know what’s going on in my life or care enough.”

For Charlie F., 29, the issue is around the quality of hangouts: “I feel like we’ve fallen into catch-up culture. I see a friend, we talk for an hour over dinner, bringing each other up to speed, then we don’t meet up again for a month, and repeat. It doesn’t feel like we get the chance to dig deep, as we’re so busy updating on dating and job stuff.”

Crain believes the “Friendship Depth Gap” is, in some ways, an inevitable consequence of adulthood.

“I think one big factor is that the barrier to entry into friendship increases throughout our lives,” Crain said. “For example, when we’re in grade school, we are somewhat forced into friend groups or social situations. This continues into college, where we are again in a pool of people we don’t always get to choose.”

She continued, “But throughout our lives, that pool gets smaller and smaller, and we do get to choose who we surround ourselves with. However, our ability to make friends becomes harder because of factors like a busy career, family or children or proximity (e.g., people move away). The irony is that making friends is not less important later in life. In some ways, it may be even more important because so many seismic things happen, such as grief, loss, divorce, career changes and raising families, and it’s important to have real, supportive friends along for the ride.”

If friendship has always required effort, why does the gap feel bigger than ever now?

One reason may be that we’ve started optimising friendship the same way we optimise so many other parts of our lives: for convenience. We’re wearing smartwatches, listening to podcasts on double speed and rushing our friendships.

Once again, optimising is taking another good thing from us.

Even if Crain is right that the “Friendship Depth Gap” is a natural part of getting older, that doesn’t mean we’re powerless against it. Just as we can take steps to protect our physical health as we age, we can also be intentional about protecting and deepening our relationships.

Building deeper friendships doesn’t necessarily require a dramatic life overhaul. It doesn’t have to be a full-time job. It can start with small changes: replacing the surface-level catch-up with a more meaningful conversation, asking questions you wouldn’t normally ask or creating space to talk without distractions.

Activities like question-based games such as “We’re Not Really Strangers” can help break down some of the barriers that keep conversations on the surface. And while shared activities, from watching sports to taking an exercise class, can be a great starting point for connection, the moments before and after, when people are simply talking and being present, are often where intimacy grows.

Crain also emphasises that deep friendships require continuing to make new connections. Over time, some friendships naturally fade. People move away, priorities change, and the closeness that once felt effortless can become harder to maintain. New friendships will likely initially feel more superficial, but depth is something that can be built with the right foundation in place.

“One of the most important things to consider when making new friends is taking calculated risks,” Crain said. “By that I mean trying people on for size, vetting them, seeing if you get along with them, and connecting with them in the early phases of friendship. If you want to deepen the friendship, you must open up, share intimate parts of yourself and let people get to know you.”

She continued, “Ultimately, the only way to deepen friendships is by allowing ourselves to be seen and known. By allowing others to see and know us, we can also see and know them. The ability to be vulnerable, however scary or daunting it may be, helps deepen our friendships. When we share, someone else gets to share about themselves, which helps us create meaning in the relationship.”

Closing the “Friendship Depth Gap” doesn’t require more friends. It requires more honesty, staying present and the willingness to let the people already in our lives truly know us. A scary thought.