An important lesson about dyadic interaction is that different people want to interact with you in different ways (different shared project, different modes of communication, etc.) Some people may not want to interact with you at all. Trying to discuss modern art with someone who doesn’t care about modern art, or trying to go bowling with someone who doesn’t like bowling, is like trying to fit a puzzle piece in a spot where it doesn’t fit.
There may be a temptation to analyze one’s past in terms of the theory of dyadic interaction, and to figure out how one could have won over this or that person. But most of the time, the reason an interaction didn’t work is that you were trying to fit a puzzle piece in a spot where it doesn’t fit. Maybe that person wasn’t right for you overall, or they just weren’t right for the kind of activity you wanted to do with them. People might try a certain shared project for a while, but if it isn’t really their thing, they might eventually stop wanting to do it. That’s not your fault.
The fact that people are like puzzle pieces, which may or may not fit in a certain way, is dyadic specificity. A useful exercise is to go through your past interactions or relationships and acknowledge that when they didn’t work, it wasn’t because you or they were a bad person overall, but because the puzzle piece didn’t fit in the way you wanted it to fit – at least, not at that time in your and their life.
This is important because if you think that “not fitting” means “I am doing something wrong” then it is possible to unlearn many good behaviors. Someone rejected you while you were doing a lot of household chores? You might conclude: it must be that people don’t appreciate household chores! In this case, I would say no – it might mean that this person doesn’t appreciate the chores; or it might mean that the lack of fit was related to some entirely different problem unrelated to the chores. Someone rejected you while you were being kind? It must be that people don’t appreciate kindness! Again, I would say that this person doesn’t appreciate kindness, or else the lack of fit was about some other thing. If you don’t know about dyadic specificity, you might give up on your true strengths (doing chores, kindness) because you think that if this person didn’t appreciate me, then no one will appreciate me.
Nexus State Theory 