Research suggests that the most warm and generous people are sometimes the loneliest, and the explanation isn’t that kindness pushes people away, but that a particular way of being kind quietly does.

The second, which the researchers call unmitigated communion, is what the first thing turns into when it is not balanced by any comparable orientation toward the self. Both kinds of person care equally, on the measurement instruments. Genuine emotional intimacy, the kind that reliably produces the feeling of being known, requires the flow of vulnerability in both directions. What unmitigated communion does, quietly and without any conscious decision on the part of the person doing it, is close off that second channel. And the thing that produces the second is the way the first has been quietly shaped.