Anna Runkle's Connectability and the Friendliness Facet (E1)

Connectability, by Anna Runkle, known online as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, is about a quiet form of loneliness: the way people shaped by early hardship learn to hold others at arm's length without quite realizing they are doing it. She calls the pattern covert avoidance. On her podcast she names the feeling: "If your life feels empty and lonely, despite the fact that you do all the things that are supposed to fill up your life." How readily you warm to other people and let them close is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Warming to others and letting them close is the Friendliness facet

That facet is Friendliness (E1), under Extraversion, how warmly and easily you take to other people and how quickly you let them near. A high scorer likes people on sight and forms bonds readily; a low scorer stays reserved and slow to warm, keeping a careful distance. Runkle's covert avoiders sit at the low, guarded end, often not by choice but by habit, having learned early that closeness was not safe. Her book is a map of that low-E1 pattern and a case that it can thaw. It is worth being clear that childhood trauma is not a personality facet; the trait here is warmth toward others, a dimension everyone sits on.

What the book adds to the trait is the insight that low warmth can be protective rather than cold. Runkle's avoiders often long for connection while quietly pushing it away, which is why the loneliness feels so baffling from the inside. This post is about the trait, not a diagnosis, and it is not a substitute for treatment. That guardedness is distinct from simple Gregariousness (E2), the taste for crowds, since a covert avoider may attend every party and still let no one close. E1 is about the warmth itself, the willingness to be reached.

For a reader placing themselves, your E1 is a fair read on how easily you warm to people and how readily you let them in. High on it and Connectability is a window into why closeness is hard for others. Low on it and the book may name a loneliness you have felt without understanding, along with a way toward the connection you wanted all along. Where you sit on Friendliness tells you how readily you open to other people, and we take the facet apart in Friendliness (E1).

Read the book: Connectability: Heal the Hidden Ways You Isolate, Find Your People, and Feel (At Last) Like You Belong by Anna Runkle.

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