It’s a Sunday evening in Austin, Texas, in a calm gray room the perfect size and shape for a circle of around 30 adults. It’s a fairly diverse group, though there are more men than women here. Most of the guests look about 30 or younger, and a majority seem to already know each other. Right now, I know nothing else about the people I will spend the next three hours with, but I’m expecting I will soon—we are all here to “authentically relate” to one another.
We’re gathered here for a game night, a cornerstone of the authentic-relating movement, which aims to give people tools to connect more meaningfully with others. The movement, still grassroots, but growing, began in San Francisco in the late 1990s and now has a presence in 50 communities in 14 different countries throughout the world. Some of the biggest outposts are in Austin, Boulder, Montreal, and Amsterdam, and authentic-relating techniques have been taught and practiced in schools, software companies, and start-ups. Sara Ness, the movement’s unofficial organizer and the founder of Authentic Revolution, the Austin outfit, estimates that 4,000 to 5,000 people go to similar game nights each week around the world. They play games like the “Handshake” game in which partners make nonverbal eye contact to “meet” the other (without shaking hands) and “The Noticing Game,” also known as “intersubjective meditation,” in which a pair goes back and forth sharing their perception of the other’s actions and answers as anxious, argumentative, confident, or guarded and so on. The movement now has a manual, curated by Ness, of around 150 games created by facilitators the world over.
But in the plainest human language with which I can explain it: Authentic relating uses exercises, or games, to teach and facilitate the skills, like curiosity and empathy, necessary to quickly create deep, meaningful human connection. In a period when loneliness is increasing as our avenues for connecting expand, practitioners tell me they are drawn to a community that makes conversing and relating with one another an intentional activity—one with guidelines and structure designed to elicit intimacy.
“On a basic level, it just gives people a place and excuse to connect with each other, which is most of what we need for wellness,” says Ness. But Ness and other enthusiasts also believe the techniques practiced in authentic-relating exercises help users develop agency and a sense of self as they begin to better relate to others.
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