Your Five Key Relationships

The Connections side of Emajon starts with one question: who are the people who matter most to you right now?

Not your LinkedIn network. Not everyone you've ever met. Just the handful of people you'd want to hear from if you were having a terrible day. Your inner circle.

Why Five?

There's real science behind this number. Robin Dunbar — the anthropologist who mapped how human social networks naturally organize — found that mental and physical health are best predicted by having about five close relationships. Not ten, not twenty. Five.

These are the people you invest roughly 40% of your total social time in, whether you realize it or not. Dunbar calls them your "sympathy group." We call them your Inner Circle.

I wrote more about the research in The Science Behind Your Five if you want to go deeper. But the short version is: five is enough, and five is worth being intentional about and so we are starting and focused on those five.

Adding People

When you open Connections, you'll see a circle visualization with "Me" in the center and space for your people around the orbit.

To add someone, click the + button on the circle. Type their name and hit Enter. That's all you need — just a name. No email required, no phone number, no birthday. You can add details later if you want to, or you can leave it at a name forever. Both are fine.

If the person already exists in your contacts from somewhere else, Emajon will suggest them as you type so you can pull them into your Inner Circle without creating a duplicate.

You don't have to fill all five spots right now. One person is a perfectly good start.

Enriching Profiles Over Time

When you click on someone in your Inner Circle, you'll land on their profile page. Over time, you can add:

• Stories — moments, memories, things they told you. "She just got promoted." "His dog's name is Biscuit." The stuff that makes a relationship feel real.
• Important dates — birthdays, anniversaries, or any date that matters to them. Emajon will remind you when they're coming up.
• Photos — pictures of them, pictures of times together, whatever helps you remember.

None of this is required. An Inner Circle person with just a name and no other details is completely valid. The profile enriches naturally over time as you notice things worth remembering. There's no completeness bar nudging you to "finish" someone's profile, because profiles aren't something you finish.

The Reconnect Nudges

Here's the part that actually matters: staying connected.

Each person in your Inner Circle shows a small timestamp — "3 days ago," "about a month ago" — reflecting when you last logged an interaction with them. Over time, if it's been a while, Emajon will gently surface that person as someone you might want to reach out to.

These aren't alarms. They're not guilt trips. Think of them more like a friend tapping you on the shoulder and saying, "Hey, it's been a while since you talked to Sarah."

You can act on that nudge or ignore it completely. There's no score that drops if you don't call someone back. The nudge is there when you're ready — and invisible when you're not.

If you have ADHD, you probably know the feeling: you care deeply about someone, but the reminder to reach out just never fires in your brain. Three months feels like three weeks. The nudges exist to close that gap — gently, without the shame spiral.

Moving People Between Rings

Your Inner Circle isn't permanent. People move in and out of closeness over a lifetime, and that's natural.

If you hover over someone in the circle, you'll see a small arrow icon. Click it to move them to a different ring — Close, Regular, Casual, or Acquaintance. They don't disappear; they just move to your broader contacts. You can also move them to "Remembered" — a place for people who mattered once and you want to honor that, even if you're not actively in touch.

There's no wrong configuration. Rearrange as your life changes.

Start Small

If you take one thing from this post: add one person. Just one. Type their name into the circle. You can figure out the rest later, or not at all. The whole point is to be intentional about the people who matter — and you can start that with a single name.

A Little Glance of Where This Is Going

For right now, you are just identifying who is important and starting to capture little pieces about those people to help you remember to reach out to them, dates that are good moments to remember, and even stories about them and photos so that you have a place to store your memories. We are working toward taking this and building deeper ways to stay connected. We want to move these relationships out of the noise of your email and SMS which surrounds the important stuff with distractions and junk. Eventually, we will give you tools to help you connect, share those stories and memories directly and use Emajon as a more focused connection and relationship tool than your current email, Zoom, and other messaging tools might be.

While we will keep building and adding to these tools, Emajon is really not about the technology. It is here to help you be intentional toward the connection. So while other social apps spend a lot of energy trying to keep your attention and lock you in — we want to encourage you to pick up your phone and call, or grab lunch together, and connect in the real world far more than we want to lock you into our software.