In childhood, I was so insecure. It was made very clear to me by my peers right away that
like I was not cool and I would never be cool and like there's nothing I could do to
be cool. So like you just have to accept whatever people are willing to be friends with you.
It's really strange that we don't get any, I feel like any kind of even lay education
in friend making. I mean there's like Cosmo for like how to get a guide and notice you,
but like you don't get any kind of like tips on like making friends. And so it's really
hard, especially for someone who never had a lot of friends because you can't just like
repeat what worked in the past because nothing worked.
Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The
Atlantic. This is how to start over. Today we analyze a relationship that many of us need more of,
but struggle to keep around. Friendship. First, our in-house friendship expert will share her insights
on friendship from years of reporting. There was this guy who was Marie condoing his house. Again,
the year was 2019, he found a sweatshirt that he had stolen from his best friend in high school
20 years ago. And so he texted the friend and was like, Hey, I would like to give this sweater back
to you 20 years too late. And it turned out that they have been living a few miles apart from each other
that whole time and just like never hung out. And then we talk about the science of making friends
as an adult and how to get over some common hurdles to friendship. So one of the things that's
unfortunate is although we keep meeting a lot of new people, we don't necessarily find people who
are open to the possibility of friendship at all. Being an introvert, like I feel like I never
really want to go out and I never really want to meet new people and I never really want to talk
to people. But once I do, I'm like, that felt really good. I should do that more often. I'm just
curious if there's a way to make the process of that a little simpler and smoother because I'm
guessing for introverts, there's just a lot more thinking that goes on before you engage in that
social interaction or you go to the hangout or you go to the drinks. Like what's kind of going
through your mind before you have to meet up for a social engagement? It's like I'm probably not
going to like these people. They're probably not going to like me. We're not going to have anything
to talk about. I don't really have anything to say. I'm so boring. Why am I so boring? I decided
to become a journalist so that I would not have a boring life. Yeah, here I am. Being really boring.
I'm feeling kind of depressed. Are they going to pick up on that and think that is like a sign
that I don't like them? Even more than I already naturally don't like them? I have a lot of ways
to talk myself out of things that aren't just like hiking and listening to music and watching TV.
I will say I think a great friend can be like such a salve. You can feel so like known and
like loved by having a really good friend. I also think that like finding and making and keeping
a really good friend is very very very hard. I don't know. There's just more filtration that goes
on in friendships. Like you're trying to present your best self because I think people know that
friendship is pretty transient. There's a certain volatility to friendship that we've discussed
on the series before. Romantic relationships. There's a sense of obligation. The commitment is
different. There are at least some unspoken rules about how it should go. Where friendship is so
subjective that if a friend is like, hey, I'm going out of town for the summer. Like I'm not going
to see you for three months. You have to be like, okay, great. Like enjoy your vacation. You can't
express the need for them to stick around if that makes sense. Yeah. It's very awkward to tell a
friend. I will genuinely miss you. Like you play a role in my life. It's not easily replaced.
I hope I play a role in your life too. Like that's, I don't know. I think people who are really good
at making really really good friends have like this skill and this ability that I just, that I am
still working on, but I don't really have yet. I've been reporting a lot about friendship and it
was something I was really interested in, particularly because it tends to get less attention than
other kinds of relationships. A lot of the scientific literature on relationships focuses on romance
or on family, parent, child relationships and there's a really small but mighty subset of
researchers who study friendship. Julie Beck is my friend and colleague and a senior editor at
The Atlantic. She recently wrapped a multi-year reporting project called The Friendship Files for
which she interviewed well friends. How do you make a friend as an adult? And I say that
literally because I don't think I know how and like as I've gone to therapy more and more,
my therapist is like yes I don't think you know how. And so I would like the answer to that question.
I hate to say it depends. Making friends as an adult is just different than when you're young. Like
when you're young you are literally trapped in a building all day, every day with a bunch of
potential friends that are also bored. I mean one of the main ways that people tend to make friends
is just whoever you're spending time with is more likely to become a friend and so for kids
that school, for adults that's often work, people that I've interviewed for The Friendship Files have
said that they were really surprised to make some of their closest friends in midlife. You know,
they're like I thought the friends I had were the friends that I had and then through whatever
avenue it was, you know, for some people it was like a parents group, for some people it was,
you know, there was a fantasy baseball camp that they went to and now they're all best friends
with their fellow campers. So I think it's just kind of like paying attention for opportunities when
you connect with somebody and then having the intention to pursue that. There are a lot of people
I spoke to who kind of blur the lines of friend and family. For instance, I interviewed this group
of stay-at-home dads and they all parent their kids together and their families go on vacations
together and all of these things. I also interviewed two couples who bought a house together and one
of the couples has a young daughter and you know the other couple that lives with them is really
involved in her life and they have chosen to make home ownership a more communal experience.
Another woman I spoke with was a surrogate for her best friend and actually had her best friends
babies and it turned out to be quadruplets. So it was maybe more than she bargained for but in
that case, her kids call the woman who gave birth to them like on to ever and she's super involved
in their life. What are some of the barriers to making friends? As I have tried to make friends
for my personality article, I felt so awkward and basically like a five-year-old on the playground
and being like, do you want to be friends with me? I would literally rather do anything else
than ask another adult that question. I'm wondering if that's a universal feeling or like, or what?
I think it's fairly universal. I think much as with romantic dating and not to make too
too many parallels, I think there are like slow burns, right? And then there are instant connections.
And if you instantly click with somebody like, that's great and I have heard a lot of stories
about that from the friends that I've interviewed but I think a lot of times friendships,
especially as an adult when you're kind of fitting things in your schedule,
it does end up like dating where maybe you go on several awkward rounds of drinks but you kind
of like them but it's still awkward but you like them enough to keep showing up and eventually
you get more comfortable and it becomes easier. So let's say you want your friend or friends to play
a more significant role in your life. So you want to level up from having coffee once a month
to maybe not surrogate quadruplets or you want to go from group hangs to solo hangs. Let's start
slow. Or you would just like to increase the frequency of the hangs. What are some ways to kind of
increase the intensity not to be weird of a friendship without making it weird?
One piece of advice that I heard is that you just need you need to reach out and you need to reach
out probably more than once, especially as an adult because friendships do tend to fall by the
way side in midlife. Like that's something that's kind of been documented. People get busy with
work, people get busy with their family responsibilities and because of the way society sort of
prioritizes friendship, many of us, that's the first thing that we will drop if we just simply
don't have the time for everything. And so I think people really appreciate it when someone else
takes the initiative of setting something up a time to socialize that they didn't have to put
any energy into. I know I personally tend to get discouraged if I try to set something up
with someone and it falls through or they flake on me or something came up and it doesn't actually
work out. But I think maybe we read more into that than we should because life is so busy and
if you really do want to prioritize friendship and level up that friendship, you might need to reach
out multiple times and just know that you're not being annoying. It's probably really appreciated.
So from all of your reporting and all of your interviews, what are some of the most creative
ways that you've seen people make friends and keep friends and you know I'm hoping maybe listeners
can steal some of these ideas for themselves? I think as of when this podcast will air, I'll have
done a hundred interviews with friends, groups of friends and there have been a lot of interesting
ways that people have met. There was this guy who was Marie Kondoing his house. He found a sweatshirt
that he had stolen from his best friend in high school like 20 years ago and so he texted the
friend and was like, hey, I would like to give this sweater back to you 20 years too late and it
turned out that they have been living a few miles apart from each other that whole time and just like
never hung out. Sometimes it's been circumstances beyond people's control like the most creative
one. I probably have heard was an interview I did recently where this woman decided she wanted to
create an arranged friendship group like basically like a range marriage. You know she came from a
culture where a range marriage was common and said that you know she knew tons of relationships
that had done really well that started in that model and she wanted to bring it into friendship.
So I guess what she did is just kind of go up to women that she knew casually or one of them was
someone she met like out of conference and just asked them if they wanted to join this arranged
friendship group and they all said yes and then they had like a ceremony like they all got together
at her house and they had a ceremony where they essentially said like we are committing to be
friends to each other and like that's what this means. So they sort of started from the premise of
like okay I'm going to show up for these people who I may not even really know that well and let it
grow from there. What I've observed in my interviews is when I speak to groups of all male friends
they are so hungry to tell me how much they mean to each other like they just feel like it feels
like something that they maybe haven't had a chance to say as much or that nobody has asked
them like they just seem like very very eager to like talk about how deeply they love their male
friends and not that the women friends I speak to don't also love each other deeply and tell me
about it but I think they're more used to having that conception and talking about their friends
that way like of course I love my friends like of course they're this important to me and I think
that our society has more of an expectation with male friendships that they are shallower or you
know there's studies about how they're based around activities and not around shared intimate
moments and and maybe that's true but I do think that the the male friends I've spoken to have
gotten emotional and like wanted to tell me about how how important it is.
As Julie's work shows there are plenty of ways to make friends as an adult but why does it still
feel like friendships always fall by the wayside in adulthood no matter how hard we try
and is there anything we can do about it am I the only one struggling to make friends in my 30s?
So I think people are responding to the idea that it was easy to make friends but they're forgetting
that their whole life was kind of built on this idea of easy access to people who might be open
to developing a friendship. Jeffrey Hall a professor of communication studies at the University of
Kansas walked me through not only what it takes to make a friend but how to maintain a good one.
Jeffrey helped me realize that being a good friend to others is equally as important as knowing
how to keep one around. So I generally look at this idea that there is a period of time between
adolescents and young adulthood from basically 15 to 25 years of age where you are going to get the
most relationship partners are going to have in your entire life. During that time you're going
through developmental changes where it becomes really important for you to figure out whether or not
you're going to pursue a certain career whether you're going to be a certain kind of person
you're exploring your sexuality you're exploring your sense of identity but there's another
piece there which is that period of time is marked by an incredible number of people around that
could be friends. You're surrounded by same sex friends and your sports teams and in all of these
different school environments you're going to have more cross sex friendships at that period of
time than you may never have again and during that time between 15 and 25 you have time on your hands
and then from that point on you actually begin to lose friends over the rest of your life.
Oh no, oh my god that's so depressing. Yes, oh no. Wait okay so I want to really unpack that.
So I have been trying to make new friends as an adults. What are some of the you know in the
academic literature or from what you found? What are some of the barriers to making friends as an
adult? It's actually one of the things that's kind of scary it's given oh no right is that we
actually lose about a friend per decade of our lives after 30 years old so one friend per decade.
We know from several different research studies that the reason that people tend to actually
lose their friends in their midlife has to do with really important accomplishments in their
lives they get married they have children you know they find someone they want to settle down with
and share their space and time with they find a career that takes them across the country.
So study after study has confirmed the idea that those barriers to friendship is moving away
getting married having children and becoming really dedicated to your career. I'll push against
the possibility of forning new friendships and this is also in a context where out of time that
you have goes down right because you're spending more time with people that you love that you've met
in your relationships or maybe through your children but also more time that you're spending with
people who are of many different age groups at work many different sort of backgrounds and all
of them don't necessarily have the time that it takes to make a friend with you. So one of the
things that's unfortunate is although we keep meeting a lot of new people at that period of our
lives we don't necessarily find people who are open to the possibility of friendship at all.
Well okay so here's something I have been struggling with is how do you actually
make a friend as an adult and I ask this I know it sounds like you know what are you from Mars but
it's like I you know I feel like in high school or in in college you know you bring a frisbee
to someone's dorm room and you're like hey wanna toss this around like hey wanna go to that
sigma kai party on Friday you know like it's kind of like you just have a lot more opportunities
to spend time together but now it's like are you free on Thursday at 7.30 pm and like can we
meet at this bar and like do you have childcare I can't find parking you know what are the best
practices for making a friend as an adult I don't know. I think people are responding to the idea
that it was easy to make friends but they're forgetting that their whole life was kind of built
on this idea of easy access to people who might be open to developing a friendship. Yeah the
solution is to quit our jobs and go like live on economy I think. If you can find a way to sustain
life that way let me know. I find myself more drawn to people who have similar experiences as me
just because like a lot of our friendship is going to be like getting drinks and talking about
what we're going through. If we have nothing no shared experiences in common I feel like it's
it's going to be harder for us to really make those friendship bonds but I don't know have you
have you found that as well. I would say that similarity is a critical crucial force. It doesn't
matter what time of life even in very small children prefer similarity of activities and bringing
them together. But I think adult friendships are different in the ways that you mentioned because
what's not common is for people to have a shared experience that's external to them. There is one
key suggestion that I would add to that that you didn't mention. There's a lot of really good
reason to think that people are able to make friends if they actually go join organizations or do
things that are by choice. For example I took up a Taekwondo seven years ago because my son
and I did it together and I liked it so much I stayed with it. The people who are there I see
a couple times a week. Most of them are people who have been around for several years. I talked to
them a little bit but mainly we do the exercise and activity together but I would count some of those
people as my friends and their new friends. It's great is there people I don't have to talk about
with work. I don't have to just kind of have those conversations instead I can kind of just get
to know them on their own terms. I think what's kind of important about that is that you can take
active steps that aren't like I have to pick a friend which is tough. Instead you can say I'm
going to go do things that there are people who are going to be there over and over again and
they're likely the same people. That's an opportune andemic friends. I think a lot of people have
this idea that I would like more friends. This is something that I want but it's really hard to
prioritize making friends and I'm wondering why it's so hard for adults to prioritize that.
Even though I research these things and I've spent in over a decade thinking about friendship
and writing about it, I have to remind myself too. I actually have on my list of things to do
like write friends or make an appointment. I do not lack for outstanding friends in my life and
I feel very lucky but I'm also cognizant of the fact that this takes a constant level of work
and it's a kind of work that's actually not dissimilar to the kind of work you have to put into
building a really good nutritional habits for your health or building really good exercise habits.
It's rewarding. It's extremely good for your life satisfaction, your well-being and your
health in the long run but it still works. Most of the time we do what's called negatively forecast.
It's a negative forecasting error meaning we expect something that is going to be a much less
pleasant than we actually are in practice. With a friend at similar, he's like, oh,
mind about our hard day at work. I don't want to go out. I got to go find parking in DC and it's a
freaking mess. But then you go out and you're with him like, oh my god, I'm so glad I did that.
I am happy that I spent it and my research would suggest for days afterwards you carry the
benefit of having connected with somebody with you. I think that in some sense it's absolutely
normal that people feel these ways and it's even more understandable that they feel that way when
they're doing it online or on the phone. But I think the fact that some conversations are just
hard to catch up on has a lot to do with the ideas. It's easier to be in touch with people
who are in touch with than to be in touch with people who are not. So one thing I'm wondering about
is if there's any research from you or anyone else on how to tell if someone wants to be your friend.
Like, what's the difference between someone saying, yeah, I'll get coffee with you and like,
you have a good coffee and you're like, great. And then you ask them out, I mean, should you
should you ask them out again as a friend and like twice in a row or should you wait for them to
ask you? It's very confusing to me. Yeah. You know, one of the other ones that's really confusing is
in the United States we're constantly saying, oh, we should get together or I'd love to do this
again sometime and you can't tell if people mean it. You're like, maybe they mean that? I don't know
if they mean that, you know, and then they certainly don't follow up, which suggests that they
didn't mean it. So it's really confusing to actually know what are the signals that says this
person is available to continue to work in that relationship. I think in some ways one way to think
about it is that it kind of doesn't matter. And what I mean by that is that if you had a good
experience with someone and you by choice went and had coffee with them and you enjoyed that interaction,
you should do it again. Like, it kind of doesn't matter whether or not they initiate or you do.
One thing I've become very sensitive to as I've studied these things is that there's a large group
of people who really, really appreciate being asked, but are really terrible at asking. So I think in
some ways it's good not to get too caught in our own heads about what's the right set of protocol
and instead recognize that prioritization of it simply means you keep doing it. And even if it's not
perfect. Wow. Doing things even if it's not perfect is not my strong suit. But I will aspire to that.
So one of your most interesting studies is about the number of hours that it takes to actually
make a friend. So I was wondering if you could talk about what you found as far as like how long it
takes until someone is technically your friend with a capital F. So I did two sort of studies,
one that looked at this idea of people who had geographically relocated in the United States,
usually for work, sometimes for other reasons, and asked them in the last six months. So they had to
have moved within six months. In the last six months have you met anybody new? And if so,
how much time you've spent at them this week and how much time do you spend with them on a usual
week? And then what kind of relationship do you have with them? And the other study I did was on
college freshman here at the University of Kansas. And I got them within two weeks of when they arrived
at KU. And then I said, first, who have you met? Right? Who do you think has potential in terms of
people that you've met in terms of developing friendship? So I looked at kind of a natural progression
of friendship over that time. So it takes somewhere between 40 and 60 hours to develop a casual
friendships. And one really critical thing I want to get across is it is not the case that 40 to 60
hours with somebody means they're your friend. Absolutely not. In both samples, there were cases in
which that people spent hundreds hundreds of hours with someone and said, this is just a workmate,
right? We work together, we're not friends. Or this is still just an acquaintance even after all
of that time together. Time is not, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition for developing
friendship in my argument. The other thing that I'd say is that varied a lot. So that 40 to 60 hour
range is a range that said that essentially you didn't see people saying this is my casual friend
before 40 hours, but you more likely to find it after that period of time. The big one was spending
time hanging out just for the sake of their company, like eating and drinking together.
Yeah, so I wanted to move on to a burning topic for me and my producer, which is how much you
should tolerate friendships that have serious flaws. There's this kind of like strain of thinking
now that it's like you need to take care of yourself and avoid toxic people or
codependent friends. Are you of the school that like just kind of accept that people are human
and they have flaws and you have a history with someone just try to stay friends with them?
Are you supposed to kind of reevaluate your friendships and be like this person is really not
the right friend for me? How much are we kind of supposed to unconditionally accept or love our
friends? You know, one argument is the very definition of a friend is being there when they need us.
So if they need you and you're able to be there for them, you know, it may make an enormous
impact in their lives. I mean, I would just consider the fact that there are people out there who's
like there's one in nine Americans who have no no one in their lives who they would name as a close
person they can confide in or they can really rely on beyond someone who is related to them or
married to them. So there's a lot of people out there who are in our in need of friends. So in
some sense, I think it is important to keep in mind that too much discourse that says that we
should only focus on ourselves and our own needs and otherwise may kind of muscle out the realities
that there are there are people who are struggling with serious issues of loneliness and isolation.
There are people who, you know, like all of us kind of suck and we're not great people,
but people deserve to have friends, you know. And I might point out is when people need you is also
probably when they're at their worst, you know, they're not probably not reciprocating conversation,
right? So you're doing all the listening and they're doing all the talking. They may be going
through a really bad period of time where they're self-focused or they're making bad choices and
you kind of want to tell them to knock it off and quit being an idiot. So I think what's really
hard about this is that on one hand, I really do worry that we don't want to build too much of a
self-focused attitude about kind of avoiding toxicity or cutting everybody out in our lives
to forget the realities that were all imperfect were all kind of lousy sometimes. So too much
self-focus may forget the idea that what really makes people happy in the long run and the
life satisfaction kind of way, not in the near term, it feels good kind of way. It's kind of enduring
through another person's struggles. Yeah, I mean, that's such a good point. And I wonder what the
line is between being a therapist and being a good friend. I don't know, do you know if people
should sort of say, I get that you're having a really hard time right now, but you're completely
dominating our conversations. And I'm having a really hard time enjoying our get-togethers,
you know, is that a reasonable thing to say. One of the very first studies that I did was on
gender differences in, you know, friendship expectations. And one of the things that I was really
inspired by in that was the idea that there are different kind of priorities that more masculine
and feminine ways of behaving in friendship really kind of occur. And I use the words masculine
and feminine here to not say masculine is only done by men and feminine is only done by women,
but these are two ways of being in friendship. And a way of being in a masculine way of knowing
is one who's going to like cut to the chase, but also do things like prioritize having a good time
and not taking things too seriously and brushing off problems. But it also comes with a downside of
a lot of times people being dismissive or diminishing of another person's hurt. Feminine ways of
knowing in friendship particularly involves that self-disclosure that comforting and that buffering of
stress that comes from really good friendship. But it comes with a risk, which is what's called
co-rimination. And a lot of times you'll see two people who are over-problem focused going back
over the same problem over and over again. So both ways of being in friendship have value,
but both ways of being in friendship actually are diminishing. So in the case of being able to
find that balance where you cut someone off, I would say in both cases it's possible.
We were both wondering, my producer and I were both wondering whether you should ever break up
with a friend. And if so, what the right way to do that is, like I know people who just
ghost their friends, I know people who send a long email, you know, what's your take on this?
Yeah, I mean, I think people should break up with their friends. I do actually, you know,
the first thing I'd say is that there are certainly transgressions beyond the pale, you know,
the most common ones are like true violations of your privacy or your confidentiality,
you know, basically sharing your secrets with other people. Drifting away is actually pretty normal
in friendships. And I know people hate being ghosted, but I'm on the opinion that a lot of times
being able to be, you know, kind and still compassionate towards another person, but not necessarily
being like, here is a letter of my grievances and I want to address them. I'm not sure that that
necessarily is going to get you where you want to go. And it may just end up being something that
in the long term says things more directly and more hurtfully than you may have ever wanted them
to be said. Yeah, what's the best way to like, I guess, do conflict resolution within a friendship?
Because friendships are relationships of choice rather than ones that we are obliged or legally
required to have like a married partner, we don't actually have to go through the process of
fixing our conflicts with our friends. You know, they don't have those open conversations. Instead,
they tend to stew on things that they're upset about. Open communication about the things that
hurt you, especially if there was something that they could apologize for or something that they
may have not intended, it's good to start out with this idea of, yeah, I'm hurt and I don't want to
lose your friendship over this, but it's been bothering me. You want to give people an opportunity
to explain themselves and treat them with the kind of, you know, trust and integrity that your
friendship deserves, meaning you want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn't do
it intentional or hurtfully, but may have done it neglectfully or in a way where they weren't paying
attention to your needs, which is human. However, if it comes to past during that conversation, they
don't want to take any responsibility for it or they start kitchen syncing you, you know, start
blaming you for all the ways that you're wrong. And otherwise that may be a pretty clear moment in
which that the relationship can't be repaired. But if it's really something that they actively
did to hurt you, that's a little different, right? That's different than they're bad at keeping
in touch or they're always talking about themselves or they're kind of, you know, they're not being
fully present because they're distracted or really not available to me and the way I'm available
to them. Is it worth something to actually bring up? Because chances are any conflict is a two-way
situation. Right, you want to give them an off ramp? Totally. Yeah. I like that as an idea of an
off ramp. You want to be able to de-escalate as fast as it escalates and an off ramp may just
simply be, you know, I know that I wasn't great or I wish I hadn't said that or I had I went too far.
So those are all very useful kind of off ramps to make another person feel as if that they're being
hurt or at least have a chance to apologize. Well, this has been so profound and helpful. Thank you
so much for joining us. Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. You know, these things are personally
really important to me and I feel like in some ways I'm kind of an evangelist for friendship.
Yeah, we could really use that these days.
What are some universal principles of friendship that you've learned by doing this project?
Like, what can we do to be better friends to each other? I kind of landed on six forces that
help people to form friendships and maintain them throughout the years.
Accumulation is the most obvious one just simply the amount of time you spend with people.
Attention, which is really just paying attention to when you click with someone,
many of the people who I spoke with found friendship in unexpected places. For instance,
there was a woman who stayed friends with her ex-boyfriends mom for 30 years and they're very close.
And then I also added intention. So attention only gets you so far. You really have to deliberately
act. I think a lot of times we have to court our friends a little bit, woo them a little bit.
And even once they're established, we still need to put that effort in to make sure that they
continue to grow. Another force that I noticed in a lot of friendships is ritual.
Just the effort of scheduling things. And that can be as simple as like a dinner party.
I put club, a monthly hike. I talked to some friends who've been playing the same
Dungeons & Dragons game for 30 years. The next force is imagination.
Friendship is often on the sidelines of our culture, playing second fiddle to romance into careers.
There are a lot of people out there who are imagining something different for themselves.
If you don't want your friendships to sort of default to this norm, I think it does require some
imagination and some creativity. And that doesn't mean that you have to buy a house with your friends
or raise your children with your friends or be a surrogate for your best friend.
And then the final force is grace. And the way I think about that is everything that I've set
up to this point is an ideal. We can't always live up to that forgiveness and the space that we
offer each other to be imperfect and not to resent or judge each other when life gets in the way.
And then I also think about grace in the more spiritual sense of just a gift that is so huge
and profound that you could not possibly deserve or earn it. And I do think that friendship is that.
The wonderful thing about some of the friends I spoke with is you know they love each other so
much that they nominated themselves to be interviewed about how great their friendship is.
And they would still say yeah we don't see each other as much as we would like. We don't talk as
often as we would like. That was not a one-to-one indicator of how important that person was to them.
Right? How often we are able to see someone isn't always commensurate with how much we actually love
and care about them.
Friendship is an area of my life that I really struggle with. And it was funny because I was
recently hanging out with a friend who were only friends because she made 100% of the effort and
like plucked me out of nowhere was like hello I would like to get drinks with you you seem cool.
We got drinks she did that like probably like five more times. So now we're friends because of her
has like complaining to her. It's really hard to make friends in DC and she was like it's very easy
to make friends in DC. She's like I'm gonna cheat and everything out we've had. That's how this happens.
She's like I think it's hard for you to make friends in DC and it's it's honestly because I don't
try very hard or like I have not been in the habit of trying very hard. Is there anything
from that friendship that you took away and maybe eat now that you ask?
Definitely she like provides a good blueprint for how to make someone your friend. But also I
always thought like people will be annoyed at me if I ask them to hang out too much. I was never
annoyed at her. I was always like really happy to be asked. It's like nice to be wanted and like I
feel like I totally underappreciated that nice to be wanted feeling that people get when you
asked to be around them. That story was just interesting to me because it seems like she clearly like
is very well versed in front making and is so comfortable with it that not in an inconsiderate way
but she didn't think through how it would make you feel or how it would be on the receiving end.
She was just like I need to make a friendship happen and I really like this girl Olga and I'm
gonna make it work for me. I just think the two opposing approaches to friendship were really
interesting. I mean thank God for people like that because otherwise I would still be like a hermit
and she also introduced me to like a whole bunch of other people and like I just like sit in my house
and look at Netflix until someone invites me to go do something. I kind of reached this point and
now I'm like this sad little four-year-old like wandering around DC asking people if they'll be friends
with me. I will gladly be friends with you. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just gonna wander around. Thank you.
That's all for this week's episode of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca
Rashid and hosted by Olga Hazan, editing by AC Valdez and Claudine Ibeidh. Fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrian LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.
