There’s a moment in every relationship when you discover which kind it actually is. Mary Chan describes it with uncomfortable precision: someone she knows reconnected after a long silence. Not to catch up. Not to share something that made them think of her. Just to ask a favor — could she please share something with her network?

“It’s ask ask ask, gimme gimme gimme. Is that the relationship you actually want?”

The question cuts because most of us have been on both sides of it. We’ve felt the flatness of being contacted only when someone needs something. And if we’re honest, we’ve probably reached out to people we’d let drift away, suddenly remembering they exist because they became useful again.

But here’s what’s worth examining: the problem isn’t asking. The problem is that asking reveals what was never there.

Think about the people you actually stay connected with. Not the ones you should stay connected with, or the ones it would be strategic to maintain. The ones you do. What keeps those relationships alive isn’t obligation or networking discipline. It’s resonance — something they said or did that stuck with you, that surfaces again days later, that makes you want to continue the conversation.

Craig Constantine describes this cycle during the same conversation: “The things resonate and then you go, oh, I got to get this out of my head. I should message back.” That back-and-forth becomes a virtuous cycle — when things resonate, you reach out, and the reaching out creates more resonance.

That’s the test. When you reach out to someone, is it because something about them is still alive in your thinking? Or is it because you just scanned your mental Rolodex for who might be useful?

The uncomfortable truth is that you can’t fake this. You can schedule “relationship maintenance” touches. You can set calendar reminders to check in with people quarterly. You can even ask genuinely warm questions when you reach out. But the person on the receiving end knows. They feel whether you’re continuing a conversation or starting a transaction.

This matters beyond simple etiquette. The transactional approach poisons the well. Once someone experiences you as someone who only appears when you want something, they categorize you accordingly. Every future interaction gets filtered through that lens. Even if you later develop genuine interest, you’re fighting against the pattern you established.

The more interesting question is why we slip into transactional mode in the first place. It’s rarely conscious extraction. More often, it’s a failure of attention — we stop noticing what’s interesting about people, and then we’re left with only their utility.

Consider how Mary and Craig’s conversation itself demonstrates the alternative. They’d been building a relationship across multiple interactions over more than a year. When Craig mentions listening to Mary’s recent episode about video and having thoughts percolate for days before reaching out, that’s not networking. That’s what connection actually looks like — a conversation that continues even when no one’s talking.

The resonance test works in both directions. When you’re deciding whether to reach out to someone, ask yourself: has anything about them stayed with me? Have I thought about something they said, wondered about a question they raised, noticed something that made me think of them? If yes, reach out. If no — if you’re reaching out because you “should” or because they might be helpful — maybe don’t. Maybe wait until something genuine surfaces.

And when someone reaches out to you, you know almost instantly which kind of contact it is. Not because of what they ask, but because of what came before the ask. Is this message part of an ongoing thread, even if that thread has gaps? Or is it a cold restart powered by need?

The relationships worth having are the ones where the conversation never really stops — it just has longer pauses sometimes. Where you can pick up after months because both of you have been carrying it forward in some small way, noticing things, wondering things, waiting for the right moment to share them.

Everything else is just networking. And networking, stripped of resonance, is just mutual extraction with better manners.

This field note references the PodTalk episode “Presence with Mary Chan,” published March 24, 2025.