Interview: Making and keeping friends as a grown-up with Marisa Franco

In case you didn’t know, we’re still making two episodes a month for our Patreon and Apple Plus subscribers. We wanted to give all of our listeners a little preview of our most recent episode!

 

Consider joining our Patreon to listen to the rest of the episode(or watch the episode!), get additional bonus episodes, ad-free episodes, and join a community of Terribles. (Or, if you’re an Apple Podcast listener, you can sign up for TTFA Premium right in the app!)

_

Have you thought at some point in your adult life, I wish I had more friends?

 

Maybe you moved to a new city, saw your social life dwindle after having kids, or spent all your time and energy on your romantic relationships. No matter how you got there, trying to make friends as an adult is a really hard task! To try and help us all be better friends, we called in an expert:

 

Marisa Franco is a professor and studies and writes about friendship and human connection. She is the author of Platonic: How the science of attachment can help you make- and keep- friends. Marisa and Nora discuss how important friendships are to our mental health and how we can all strengthen our friendships.

 

Please send us your questions and comments about this episode or any other! You can email us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 612-568-4441.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

---

In 2023, the US Surgeon General published an advisory titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. This is something that they do only for urgent public health issues, and that is what loneliness is.

It is an urgent public health issue that, according to many studies, affects more people than diabetes or smoking-related illnesses. I have felt lonely as an adult. Most people have.

It’s hard not to in the US in this era. We work a lot. We work from home a lot.

We have a lot to do. We don’t have a lot of time to be. We live in communities that aren’t really communities all the time.

I have lived in neighborhoods where I didn’t even meet most of my neighbors because we all just went from our houses to our garages to our cars to work, and then back again at night. But we are built for connection.

We crave it, and it is vital to our well-being and our health. And we don’t just crave romantic connection or family connection. We crave friendship.

And for a lot of us, friendship was easier when we were kids. Our friends were the people who lived on our block or sat next to us in class, or were on our sports teams.

And as we got older, our friends were whoever lived near us in the dorms, or who shared a cubicle wall with us. But we’re not living in the same world we were living in even 10 years ago or five years ago. We are working from home.

We have families now, or we don’t. And old friendships just might not fit us anymore. But new friends feel really hard to make.

And making time for the friends we do have can feel so hard. And friendship is a topic we hear about a lot from our listeners.

We’ve made a few episodes about friendship, about friendship breakups and friendship losses, but not about how you make friends. So today’s guest is Dr. Marisa Franco.

She is the author of the book Platonic, How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends.

This is a book that I’ve talked about many times before on my social media, in my newsletter, and it’s also a book that I have highlighted the ever loving crap out of, and have suggested to a lot of people like I’m suggesting to you now.

Because most of us never really learned how to be a friend, and most of us have never had the time or the space to think about how we show up in our friendships, or why we show up that way.

And this is important because Platonic love is not a secondary kind of love. It is not a frivolous kind of love. It is a healing, transformative, and nourishing form of love that we all need.

I learned from Marisa’s book that loneliness affects our mortality, like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which is a lot of cigarettes.

Strong social connections are a key to happiness, to longevity, and a big healthy boost of oxytocin, that magical hormone that makes you feel more friendly, more generous, just all around good.

And yet studies have shown that we have fewer friends than we did in the 1980s or the 1990s, or even the 2000s. And for men, it’s even worse.

So if you are lonely and hoping to make new friends, but don’t know how, or if you are hoping to deepen the friendships you have, if you want to learn more about your own friendships, keep listening. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Marisa Franco.

We’re going to start out by talking about loneliness. You wrote that we talk about loneliness as though it is an inevitable feature of our human condition, but that it isn’t. How do you think we got here?

Oh my gosh, so many things.

Well, we just used to live in these communities where we worked in the home, and we worked amongst our family, and we didn’t leave those communities throughout our lives. But then with industrialization, we started to move.

Honestly, there wasn’t even a word for loneliness as we know it. Loneliness used to mean the state of being alone, like aloneness rather than the pain of it.

But yeah, with industrialization, we left our families, we started moving, we got more mobile, we worked outside of the house, and community bonds began to taper. But honestly, things got a lot worse in the 1950s.

And what was happening at that time was the creation of the television. And before that, people would spend their leisure time around other people.

But then they started to spend it at home, just focusing on their TV shows, giving them a parasocial connection, which was a snack of connection with whoever’s on the show, but never the nutrient-filled meal of actually being around people.

And then you can think about 2012 with the creation of a smartphone. That’s when things got even worse. So it’s just been getting worse and worse and worse for over the past century.

Yeah, it’s almost like every advancement that helps the individual hurts the collective and our connection to each other.

Wow.

Yeah.

I remember getting a Discman and being so excited about it.

And my dad’s saying that it made him sad because when he was in high school, you would buy a record and you would play it on your record player, but you’d be with friends, all listening to the same thing and appreciating it together.

And he was like, it just makes me sad to see people wearing their own headphones and having their own experience.

Oh, that’s so interesting.

Yeah. And I was like, okay.

Okay. I can’t hear you.

I’m listening to Britney Spears. I’m not interested. And it’s skip proof.

Okay. So one thing that I’ve realized, you mentioned industrialization, you mentioned all these advancements technically that have created more loneliness.

One thing I’ve realized making this show is I sometimes feel like one of those memes of people putting together like a murder board with the red string because it just feels like everything is connected.

And especially when it comes to American individualism, this celebration of the self as the center of the universe and the center of your universe are American, you know, just mythology of the self-made person and pulling yourself up by the

And they also arguably disconnect us from ourselves because I think naturally we all do want connection in one of your and the, you know, the idea that you should not seek support from other people and do everything on your own is actually a

destruction of self because we naturally desire support, we desire connection, we desire closeness. And that means you are almost like destroying those parts, those very normal, natural human parts of you.

Yeah, I think you put it as like, it makes us feel that connection is weak when really we are wired for connection and like we need it, like physically. It’s the default.

Right, why is there any shame in it? It’s kind of wild, right? Like people are ashamed of being like, I want friends.

And I’m like, uh, that’s like the most human thing you could want.

Yeah, you should. And I think after or even during the pandemic, you know, you mentioned like, oh, we’re now, you know, we’re working in, like you might work an hour away, right, from where you live, or you might move across the country for a job.

But now also I work here. I work in this room, period.

Absolutely.

You know, so like there are days where I don’t see and speak to another person outside of the people I live with and the people that I see on a screen. And I can tell the difference in myself psychologically on those kinds of days.

And even like physically, like I feel worse.

Yeah. There’s this really interesting concept called like learned loneliness that like after the pandemic, people got habituated to being lonely. Like some people reported, I really want to go out and connect.

But some people got used to being isolated so much so that they like stopped trying, which is really sad.

Yeah, I feel, I feel that I did not acclimate all that well to it. But I also feel like it’s like almost a little bit of like learned agoraphobia too. And I wonder, I wonder so much about like the long-term studies.

I can’t wait for like two generations from now when they’re studying, you know, the pandemic, because we also told children, you know, like you can’t see your grandparents, you’ll kill them if you breathe on them.

You can’t go outside and play with your friends. And then also it’s fine to go to school, keep a mask on, stay three feet, I guess, away from your peers. And then actually it’s just fine to go to school.

It’s just like, it’s been a lot. It’s been a lot.

It’s confusing.

And I will always remember my toddler seeing another kid out in public during the pandemic and like being gravitated towards this other child.

And he and this other kid from our neighbor that we didn’t know because we just moved to a new city, running to each other and stopping as though there were, they were dogs like hitting an electric fence.

Like just remembering, like, and just being like, Oh, like, it’s like in their body.

Yes, yes. I’m like, Oh, God. So these are these are lonely times.

And it’s it’s also almost like kind of a habit of loneliness. It is not surprising that so many people are struggling with feeling lonely, struggling with making friends. You wrote something that truly made me gasp out loud.

I underlined it and I wrote gasp next to it. You said we live in a society in which it’s acceptable to cancel plans for work. But never vice versa.

You can never cancel work and make sorry. I got to go see my friends, my friend.

It’s been so long.

It’s wild.

Yeah, it is wild. And you know, with the pervasiveness of loneliness, so about, you know, up to 50% of people reporting that they’re lonely. Loneliness doesn’t just alter how you feel.

It alters how you perceive everything around you. When we’re lonely, we think we’re being rejected when we’re not. We see people as more threatening than they are.

You know, we think if they might have said something to us, we kind of take it more personally than we would otherwise. We get more vengeful and hostile towards others.

And this feels really ironic because if you’re lonely, wouldn’t you be primed to want connection? But actually, you see connection as so threatening that you end up primed to withdraw.

And so the lonelier we all get, the harder it is for people that are not lonely to stay not lonely because they’re interacting with us in this more lonely state.

And there’s actually one study that finds that if someone you’re in close contact with gets lonely, you’re 52% more likely to become lonely yourself. Oh, I know. It’s sad.

It’s really hard.

Yeah, you can catch it, which also like don’t be afraid of that. Like you still. But then the cure for that, I’m imagining, is not to withdraw from the lonely person.

You don’t have to send a card. So I’m wondering, what got you interested in the study of Platonic love?

Well, I was not a Platonic love evangelist. I was a romantic love evangelist, and I felt like romantic love made me worthy, and it was the be-all, end-all, and I guess all the ways you’re socialized to look at love when you’re a woman.

And then I went through a breakup, and I felt so bad, so I started this wellness group with my friends. We meditated, we cooked, we did yoga, and I looked around, and I was like, why doesn’t this love count? Why do we pretend this doesn’t matter?

Why have I pretended this didn’t matter? I’ve always had love in my life, and I felt like, why did one form of love make me worthy when I already had so much love?

This doesn’t make any sense to me when I actually thought about it critically, and I felt like it wasn’t just me.

There’s just this larger social pressure to discount a beautiful form of love we have in our life and act like it doesn’t matter to us or it isn’t meaningful.

I want it to be part of leveling that hierarchy we place on love in ways that honestly I argue would make us more honest with ourselves.

If you’re in a long-term partnership and you’re only with one person, that probably feels really hard and you do feel a different type of loneliness in that you’re not able to express all the different sides of you just around one person.

Each person brings out different parts of you. So I wanted to be part of that, bringing respect and dignity to Platonic love. And I figured to do that, people need to know how to make friends.

So that’s why I wrote Platonic.

When you were growing up, what were some of the pieces of media that shaped your idea of the importance of romantic love?

Oh my gosh. This is such a good question and such a hard question because it feels like oxygen. It’s so omnipresent that it’s hard to even identify one thing.

But I mean, I did watch Disney movies and like Beauty and the Beast had some weird messaging in there. Cinderella had some weird, you know, I didn’t see it.

They, okay. Snow White falls in love and is like, and is like, first of all, I’m like, your friends just like kept your body on ice and just like worked around you. But then she meets again.

She’s like, bye.

And he’s like, let me kiss you while you’re sleeping. So you know how in love with a hundred percent.

I watched that and I was like, yes, yes. When my true love comes, I will be asleep. I won’t even know.

I won’t have a choice. I will be selected. I will be selected unconsciously and I will accept.

I’ll wake up and I’ll say, that must be, that must be the one right there. I, like even in, I asked that because I was thinking I’ve been like revisiting media that I really, really liked when I was younger.

And also raising children is such a wild trip through your own psyche and through just theirs and it’s bizarre.

And we sent a kid off to college and before she left, I was like, you know, I want to rewatch something that I watched before I went to college. Let’s watch Felicity. So Marisa, did you watch Felicity when it was on?

Sporadically, but I don’t remember it meant.

Yeah.

It’s so bananas. It’s so nuts. But like, this girl like bases her college decision on a boy mentioning that he’s going to essentially NYU and she’s like, uh, me too, changes her plans, shows up.

Oh my gosh. It is such an illustration of what you talk about, which is like this hierarchy of love. All she cares about is locking down Ben and she betrays her friends who are still there for her.

Right?

Like she, it’s so wild and all you can think of is like, oh, you’re ignoring all these other people who care about you or kind of like mistreating them or they’re treated as side characters when really like, they are also huge loves of your life.

And I have felt that in my life too, right? Like when I look at my longest term friendships, right? The people who have loved me the longest are my friends.

Exactly.

You know?

Yeah.

The longest loves of your life.

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s really, it’s fascinating.

And I’m so glad this book exists. I’m so glad this book exists for so many reasons. And it’s also, I just, you know, I think maybe there might be people who read science in a subtitle and think like, Ooh, not for me.

It reads like a story. It’s really good. Like it’s very readable.

So I just want to give you that, that, that compliment.

But for people who don’t know what attachment theory is, or for people whose depth of knowledge is the length of a TikTok video that was served to them, can you give a light explanation of what attachment theory is?

Yeah. Well, it’s fundamentally this idea that how your caregivers or parents treat you in early life creates a internal model for how people will treat you forever.

And that model becomes how you sift through, interpret, behave in social relationships thereafter. So if you’re anxiously attached, you might have had a parent or caregiver who gave you inconsistent love.

If you cried, if you tantrumed, they love you, but otherwise they were distracted. So you go into friendships, relationships in general, assuming people are going to abandon you unless you fight. You also take things really personally.

You put a lot of effort into connection, but you don’t get a lot of reward. Like, it feels like your relationships are fragile.

You kind of sacrifice yourself for other people and for your relationships because that’s what you learned to do when you were younger to get love.

You overshare, you try to build connections really quickly because that soothes your fears of abandonment. Then you have avoidantly attach people. These kids, I mean, they were, we become anxious before we become avoidant.

So their parent was so checked out emotionally that there was no way they could get their parents’ attention to meet their needs. So what they did was basically they shut off their need for love.

They almost alter their consciousness so that they no longer are in touch with the fact that they need other people and how rewarding connection feels like. So they tend to be afraid of intimacy, keep people at a distance, they’re never vulnerable.

Lone wolves are maybe a lot of shallow relationships. When people try to get close to them, they freak out and pull away. They’re turned off by other people’s vulnerability, more likely to ghost you.

They’re low effort and low reward when it comes to connection. But then you have people that are secure. They’ve had parents that have been attentive to them, have been loving, have been comforting.

They go into connections assuming the best.

They can trust others, they can be open, they can initiate, they feel comfortable taking all of those risks that we need to connect with people, like showing them love and being vulnerable and being generous and doing things for them.

And they tend to have more friends, create more friendships, and have more enduring friendships than people with the other attachment styles.

What’s really fascinating as a parent reading this book and also a person just reading this book is the way I could see this playing out in my own friendships, in the friendships and relationships with the people around me, and then also like among

my children where a blended family, only three of the kids have had like, you know, traumatic parental loss and one of the kids has not. And you can tell which one is just like a secure little guy skipping into school, literally skipping through the

world as though it is the safest place on earth. And everybody loves him because why wouldn’t they? And I’m like, oh, God, there’s an exercise in the book that I thought was so wonderful and so helpful to understanding this.

And of course, there’s like, you know, quiz questions as well, which I found very helpful. But will you walk us through the exercise that takes place in the high school cafeteria, a place that we never thought we would have to revisit?

So, this, let’s say you’re in a middle school cafeteria, most scary place to ever go back to.

I wouldn’t right now. Like, have you talked to teenagers? Like, have you done any school speaking events or anything?

They just, honestly, they’re the hardest audience for me to catch.

Harder than CEOs, like just harder, just so hard.

And the way I physically, I immediately sweat, my mouth is dry and I have no idea. I would rather do an impromptu Ted Talk, but naked than ever walk into another high school and try to talk. I’m like, whoa, okay.

Like just, okay. But anyways, we’re in the cafeteria.

We’re in the cafeteria. Our friend who usually sits next to us is not there. And so we’re wondering, where’s my friend?

Where’s my friend? Asking, are there friends sitting at the table? Do you know where they are?

All of a sudden, we see milk coming down our shirt, and we look behind us, and there’s our friend. Drop milk all over us. Now, how do you interpret what’s going on?

Do you think, oh my gosh, they must have fell. Like they’re so clumsy. I can’t believe they spilled this milk on me.

Or are you like, they’re out to get me. They’re out to harm me. They did this on purpose.

They’re trying to embarrass me. They’re trying to humiliate me. And a study that presented the scenario to kids found that the secure kids were more likely to say, oh my gosh, that was an accident.

You know, it’s chill. I don’t like, you know, I guess I’ll get a new shirt or whatever.

But the insecure kids were not only more likely to say they were apply vindictive motivations, but they were also like more likely to report than wanting revenge on their friend and wanting to respond with more hostility back.

And even if it’s not a cafeteria, however you extrapolate that exercise, I think it’s so valuable to look at the ways that you default react to situations and where you assign intent that might not be there.

I’m Nora McInerny and you just heard an excerpt from our latest podcast episode. You can get the full episode, our entire back catalog and two new episodes a month through Apple Plus or on our Patreon which is linked in the show description.

Listener support lets us keep doing this work in a way that is sustainable for us emotionally and financially, but it’s not possible for everyone. We get it. We do not, we’re not judging you, but it’s not possible for everyone.

We totally get it. We have over 100 episodes of this show available for free, for you to listen to wherever you’re listening. We are putting out free videos over on YouTube, and generally we just appreciate you for being here.

We are an independent podcast and that has its challenges, but we like it that way. Our team is Marcel Malekibu, Grace Berry, and Claire McInerny. Our theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson.

Thanks for listening.