For most of my life I was not, I don’t think, a very facially expressive person. I’m ethnically Korean, and we tend not to move our faces too much (partly because it’s just the norm, along with a shared cultural concern that it encourages wrinkles). Even when telling a dramatic story, big expressions never felt natural to me, the way they seemed to be for others, and I’d wonder whether the restraint on my face was limiting my ability to connect with people.

It’s not an absurd idea. Research from 2024 concluded that being facially expressive is socially advantageous, suggesting it might lead others to like you more and see you as more agreeable. Another study found that expressiveness predicted how attractive people seemed to others.

My relationship to facial expressiveness started to change about three years ago, when I started learning American Sign Language. ASL is a language of the body. Individual signs provide a vocabulary, but much of the grammar and descriptive nuance comes from how you move your body and face. Suddenly, my stiff and muted facial expressions became a fluency issue, getting in the way of my legibility as a signer.

Signing ‘I like’, for example, communicates something far different when you do it with bright eyes and strong movements compared with signing it with a shrug and noncommittal expression. I’ve learned to make these distinctions clear across my face.

Over time, I’ve noticed a difference – I am more expressive now with everyone, not just when I’m signing. This, in turn, has made me feel more outgoing in conversation. I have a hunch that people now perceive me as friendlier.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling tired or shy, I’ll notice myself under-expressing, slipping back into my old ways. In those moments I remind myself that showing your feelings on your face is rewarding, and a way to invite greater understanding.

If you’ve heard about attachment styles – the ways we tend to relate to others in close relationships – you might have been told that it comes down to how our parents treated us. According to classic attachment theory, those of us lucky enough to receive plenty of warmth and support from our early caregivers develop a ‘secure’ model of relationships: we continue to trust close others to be there for us and feel comfortable depending on them. Those who don’t receive such support may develop ‘insecure’ models – becoming anxious about losing people, or averse to getting too attached.

Yet these models are not ‘set in stone’, contemporary attachment researchers say; we update them based on novel relationship experiences. That is, it’s not all about mom’s responsiveness to your needs. Other kinds of bonds matter, too.

Supporting this view, the research psychologist Keely Dugan and her colleagues analysed data on hundreds of people, provided by their parents, observers, and the participants themselves as they aged to around 30. As expected, people’s experiences with their mothers in childhood were correlated with how secure they felt in multiple kinds of relationships as adults. But the quality of other early relationships was predictive as well. For instance, having more positive experiences with friends in childhood was associated with feeling more secure in romantic relationships as an adult.

These results had me thinking about my own attachments in unexpected ways. Not just about how parental warmth might have equipped me to feel safe relying on others, but how my friends from childhood (some of whom I’m still close with) may have served as attachment figures themselves. Did learning – year after year, hangout after sleepover after band practice – to feel safe with my pals help set me on a course toward a happy marriage? I’m sure they’d love to take credit for that, and perhaps they deserve some.