The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Listener Favorites: Marisa Franco | How the Science of Attachment Can Help you Make and Keep Friends

According to a survey of 2000 adults, the average American hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years, and yet, 45% of people would go out of their way to make a new friend if they only knew how. Marisa Franco is here to help you not be a part of these statistics. Armed with the best of psychology and the science of attachment, she provides us with an easily digestible solution to making (and keeping) new friends.

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Duration:: 1h 2m
Broadcast on:: 28 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. I think it's destructive for everybody to orient to a form of connection in a way where you're like, "This isn't a priority. This should always be positive and light. This isn't a responsibility. It's not a commitment." Like, just our scripts for friendship are so narrow and so flimsy. And I say in the book, like, "Here we are investing less in our friendship, spending less time with them, not having formal ceremonies with them, affirming them less." And then we assume that friendship isn't inferior because something inherent to friendship. But if we look at our behaviors and how we treat friends compared to other relationships, any relationship that has that little investment in it is not going to be as great or as close or as intimate. And so I think I'm trying to push people to be more critical and think, "Oh, all these things I do for my family or for my romantic partner, I could also experience that with a friend." Like, even asexual communities have really been the pioneers in getting us to look at the possibility of friends as life partners. I'm Srini Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds, who've started movements, built driving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at UnmistakableCreative.com. Marissa, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thanks so much for having me. It is my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about you by way of our mutual friends, Smiley. And when he told me you wrote a book called Platonic, which was all about friendship, I thought, "Yeah, this is a no-brainer considering this is fundamental to all of our lives." So I thought I'd start with a question that I think is very fitting, given the nature of your work, and that is what social group were you a part of in high school? And how did that end up impacting what you ended up doing with your life and career? Okay, I will go with, I was a fencer for like two years, and honestly, I was pretty good. Like, they rank you in fencing A1 is the top, and I was A1 for our team. Because I'm tall, so I had like a long reach. I don't think I was particularly skilled, but it taught me two things that just because I'm good at something doesn't mean I should pursue it, because I didn't actually end up loving the sport. So I dropped out of fencing. The other thing that I remember from it is just like, there's one day where a family friend died and it really affected my game. So I think from then I figured maybe for the first time, like this is the impact of your mental health on how you perform and how you show up. Nothing must draw such an odd group of people. I mean, that's maybe that's my perception. But one, it's not something that's available to most people in high school. What kind of people are drawn to it and what drew you to fencing of all things? Because you only see it on TV or in movies. I don't think I've ever seen it in, I don't know anybody to date until I've talked to you that told me they were infensing as their extracurricular activity in high school. Yeah, that's a fair point. So for us, the fencing crew actually started when I was there. So it was like the new thing, I guess, that nobody knew which felt kind of comforting for me because it's like coming to these sports that people had already been playing and being new to them, volleyball just felt more difficult. But we are a school of nerds. I went to a specialized high school in New York City and shout out Staten Island Technical High School. So, you know, I mean, it's funny, I don't even know if I could say the nerds are attracted to fencing because we were all nerds. So it's hard to say like, who exactly would have gone for fencing? But it definitely wasn't the coolest kids in the school that joined the fencing team. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was going to ask you next. So what are the social structures and social circles like in a school that is full of nerds? I mean, based on your description, does it have any of the same sort of typical structures that a typical high school social hierarchy has? Yeah, it certainly did. I guess maybe I should correct myself and say we were all smart, not we were all nerds because some of us were definitely nerdier than others and some of us were more social than others. But I do think there was a lot of kids who were like, not so cool in their middle schools, but then came to that high school and kind of moved to the top. It's like a, you know, it's like how cool you are depends on your pond, I guess. And so those of us that maybe we're in middle school and we're a little more cool all of the sudden became very cool. It just elevated everyone a little bit, I would say. That's such an unusual experience for most people, I think, making the transition from junior high to high school, but I think also one of the things I saw was that the whole idea of cool seems to matter less and less as you get further and further along in high school. Like cool is very much this important thing in junior high where it's like, okay, those are the popular kids. Those are the rich kids. They're the ones who have the nice clothes and shoes. And then suddenly you kind of get to right around 11th grade and you realize nobody really gives a shit about any of this. And I think that, you know, part of it is that you feel so insecure. So look, I wonder what was your overall sense of self worth like when you were in an environment like this? Because I feel like if there's one period of my life that I would happily never have to relive ever again, it's adolescence because I think adolescence is literally the time in your life where your parents become the most horrible people in the world. You think you're the smartest person on the planet, even though you're full of shit. And it's such a bizarre experience, especially as an immigrant kid. Yeah, yeah, certainly. I don't think I would want to relive it again either. I think for me, my sense of self worth, you know, it's funny because at the time I wouldn't say I had a low sense of self worth, right? But I think having a high self worth isn't just how you feel about yourself consciously. It's also about how you ask the world to treat you and how you relate to others. So I will say from some of my behaviors, like I feel like I would not talk to certain people because I would assume that they're better than me and they wouldn't necessarily like me, you know, kind of taking myself out of the game before it started or it would be a struggle for me to like ask for things for myself or speak up, you know? And so I think even though I don't think I was conscious of it at the time because if you ask me how I'd describe myself, I'd probably use positive words. The reality is that you can really tap into maybe someone's less conscious sense of self worth through how they interact with the world, how comfortably they feel, asking for things for people, whether they go into interactions, thinking that they're less than other people, whether they try to reject people before they'll be rejected, all these things. And I think I definitely had a lot of those behaviors. It's funny you say that because it reminds me of this friend that I connected with, something like 30 some odd years after we finished 9th grade, so I moved away from Texas to California. And this kid and I were in pretty much 5th through 9th grade together and I always viewed him as one of the popular or cool kids who just really wasn't interested in getting to know me or anything like that. Somehow, we never had a class together, but we overlapped and we were in Costa Rica 25 plus years later. He saw me wearing a Texas A&M shirt and he asked me, "Where did you get that shirt?" And I said, "I grew up in college station." He was like, "No way, that's where we're from." And I then asked him, "Where are you with the high school?" And asked him, "What, you're graduated?" And I thought to myself, "Holy shit, that means we probably have been in classes together or we went to school together." And it was really interesting because when I started to get to know him, we became really good friends and he invited me to his house when I went to visit Texas. And I thought to myself, "This is a kid that I always thought was just somebody who didn't think anything of me." But I remember him telling me that the year that we were in 8th grade, his dad died. And I never knew any of that. I had this sort of just perception based on his social circle of what kind of person he was and a circle that I would never be accepted in, which was wildly inaccurate. Well, that is so real. And I think that's what I know now that I didn't know then, which is, first of all, everybody's insecure and everybody's afraid of rejection. No matter how cool someone seems, you can't know how someone feels about themselves through things that are external to them, even their group of friends. And what I also have learned, I see, from studying friendship, is that sometimes the people that are rejecting you the most, fear rejection the most. People that are most sensitive to rejection tend to come in with a sort of performative rejecting of others, getting cold, getting withdrawn, if there's any signal to them that they might get rejected, which can be something that's totally benign. And so these people that fear rejection so much, they'll be quite, you know, just like me, right? I was sitting next to kids that were popular, I wouldn't talk to them. I was rejecting that, but I just thought they think they're better than me and maybe they are. So, you know, if I try to talk to them, they're not really gonna like it or they're not gonna accept me. Yeah. So, I mean, you wrote a book on friendship. I wonder, were you the type of person who got to college and, you know, three-year adult life, but you had an easy time making friends, or are you one of those people who basically studied the thing that you needed to learn because, you know, they make the joke that we teach what we need to learn? Yeah. I was an average friend maker, I'll say, which means, I think, which I think is helpful because it means that I've learned the tools and I've applied them and because I've learned them and applied them, it signifies that we can all grow and evolve and make better friends. I will say, the thing that I did need to learn that led me to write the book is really just seeing romantic love as the only love that mattered, the love that defined my worth. If I wasn't in a romantic relationship, I was feeling worthless and unlovable and it wasn't till, you know, upon grieving that in my younger 20s, I started this wellness group with my friends where we would meet up and cook, meditate, do yoga together. And I just looked around at them and I was like, wow, they love me. Why doesn't this love matter? Why have I been pretending like this love doesn't count or isn't significant or valid? So that's something that I learned, I think, when I was younger, that just because you're loved by friends, even if you're not loved by a romantic partner, that doesn't mean you're loveless and that doesn't mean that you're less than. I think that's one of the themes that I try to convey in the book. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. No, no. No. No. Honestly, when I started this, I thought only I'd have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15.00. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch, whenever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes of CD-Tails. This season, Instacart has your back to school. 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By working with a dedicated Merrill Advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Having the bullet your back helps your whole financial life move with you. So when your plans change, Merrill's with you every step of the way. Go to ml.com/bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company, what would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk, Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fender and Smith Incorporated, registered broker dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC. Millions of people have lost weight with personalized plans from noon, like Evan, who can't stand salads and still lost 50 pounds. Salads generally for most people are the easy button, right? For me, that wasn't an option. I never really was a salad guy, that's just not who I am, but new work for me. Get your personalized plan today at noon.com. Real new user compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, the typical new user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. 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Because every time you make a purchase, Bombus donates an item to someone who needs it. Go to bombus.com/acast and use code ACAST for 20% off your first purchase. That's bombus.com/acast, code ACAST. Well, we'll get to all that in a lot more detail. So I'm one of their questions about this early period in your life and in general. I have always kind of made this observation that there are all these skills that are basically vital to our well-being in adulthood, that we do not learn anything about in childhood. My most popular article to date is this piece title that we should have learned in school that never did. It ended up going viral on Medium, the New York Times picked it up. And the funny thing is I didn't actually write about friendship, but I did write about the fact that we are not taught anything about how to interact with the opposite sex, despite the fact that it is something that all of us, you know, or, you know, interact in romantic relationships, period, whether we're straight or not, we never learn that. But when it comes to friendship, what do you think they should be teaching in schools? Because I'd imagine if we were to teach this skill earlier in life, people would be much happier than, you know, have much richer social lives. Yes, man, so many things. First, like, don't assume friendship happens organically, because according to the research, that assumption predicts our loneliness in five years. Assume you are going to have to try and initiate. Assume people like you, because when you do, according to the science, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes you warmer, open, more positive, more engaged. You have to overcome overt and covert avoidance, overt means you have to show up, but covert means when you show up, you have to engage, you have to introduce yourself to people. "Hey, hi, my name is Marissa." People are less likely to reject you than you think, according to the science on the liking gap, when strangers were paired and asked, "Hey, how much do you like one another?" People generally underestimate how much people actually like them, and friendship doesn't have, like, don't rely on a spark for friendship. According to the science of Meric's phosor effect, when people are familiar to us, we like them more, even if we haven't engaged with them. So what that means is, like, it's normal to feel weary of people when you first meet them and for initial interactions to be a little awkward, but that doesn't mean that they'll be like that forever. Well, I mean, I'm trying to think of how this would all land on me as a 13-year-old kid who's insecure, and just kind of raging hormones going through puberty and thinking, "Okay, would this land or would it not?" I think it would be hard for me to really internalize what you're saying, but let's talk about this in the context of college, because I'm having this conversation with a soon-to-be freshman in college that was at my parents' house, and I was giving advice on sort of how to do well in school. I'm thinking to myself, I'm giving him advice on how to do well in school when I did terrible in school. And surprisingly, his parents thought all my advice was spot on when I said, "Yeah, the beneficiary of a lot of people who are smarter than I am have gotten to talk to in this show." So I've been writing this article titled "Advice for Freshman," what I wish I had known when I started college, and one of the things that I wrote about building a social life was to be like Van Wilder. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie. Mm-hmm. Okay, so the beauty of Van Wilder is that Van is in college for eight years, and the crazy thing about Van Wilder is that he is literally friends with everybody. He doesn't discriminate against any sort of cool people, nerds, jocks, whatever, and as a result, he is the most liked person at the school, and it's apparently based loosely on a true story about somebody. So to me, that always stayed with me because I thought to myself, there's no time in your life where people are going to be more open to meeting other people, and yet it's amazing how quickly people start to fall into sort of a routine and a set social circle. I just know this from my own experience because I graduated from college thinking, "How the hell do I not know anybody other than Indian people?" This is insane. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny in college, I feel like the sorting happens super early on, and you end up with people that you're not necessarily, like, you don't necessarily feel comfortable and close to, but then you assume after that, like, what I've seen in college students, I teach them too, that you're like, "Everybody has their friends, so I guess I'm just going to have to accept this group of lackluster connections that I've created." And yeah, you just feel like, "Oh, there's this, like, very small, with period or window for making friends," and then outside of that, I just am going to assume everybody already has their friends, which is such a toxic assumption for friendship, especially because, like, we are lonelier than we've ever been, like, in human history, and college students are the lonelier, like, Gen Z in general, are the loneliest of all the generations. And so other people are just as lonely as you and probably, like, more hopeful for friendship and connection because of that than we've ever been to. So, yeah, so assume people would want to meet you too. So what is it that actually led you to want to write a book about this? Because I think that you're right about the fact that, you know, you say in the book that Platonic Love lies at the lowest rung of the hierarchy, our culture places on love, but I've learned it to devastating loss to all of us. All of us, if we dispose of it there. And that's so true. We don't actually spend a lot of time really studying friendships. And there's so many damn books on romantic relationships, and there's so few on Platonic Love. Exactly. Like you and Lydia Dunmore are the two people, and she's been a guest on this show. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Yeah, Lydia's great. Smiley. I'll just shout out to a couple for a time. We have so fewer books. And I think for me, it's just like, I'm just like, we have this cultural problem that is really destroying us. And there's not enough people questioning it, right? Like, it's destroying everybody to feel like you have this form of connection that doesn't matter to you. It's, I think it's destructive for everybody to orient to a form of connection in a way where you're like, this isn't a priority. This should always be positive and light. This isn't a responsibility. It's not a commitment. Like just our scripts for friendship are so narrow and so like flimsy. And I say in the book, like, here we are investing less in our friendship, spending less time with them, not having formal ceremonies with them affirming them less. And then we assume that friendship is inferior because something inherent to friendship. But if we look at our behaviors and how we treat friends compared to other relationships, any relationship that has like that little investment in it is not going to be, you know, as great or as closer as intimate. And so I think I'm trying to push people to be more critical and think, oh, all these things I do for my family or for my romantic partner. I could also experience that with a friend, like even like, you know, asexual communities have really been the pioneers in getting us to look at the possibility of friends as life partners, right? You don't have to be having sex with someone to choose them as your life partner, right? And, you know, I just think all of us could like really widen our script on friendship and that'll even benefit people in traditional relationships because according to science, like, if you're in a traditional romantic relationship and you get into a fight with your spouse. Your cortisol, your stress hormone release becomes wacky unless you have support outside the marriage and you're more resilient to stress within your marriage. So I think we're getting more and more insular, like into like couples, family, unit, and it's just harming us. We're in more. Yeah. And I want to come back to that because I know how you wrote about sort of the coexistence of romantic relationships and friendships, and I had a lot of questions about that. But, you know, I think what really struck me is how much you emphasize not only the benefits but importance of friendship at the beginning of the book, you say friendship is a medium through which we find the truest, kindest, and richest selves. And friendship affects who we are, behaviors, traits, and identity for some additional evidence of importance, let's zero in on its effects on our biology. Can you talk about that? Like, how does it affect us both mentally and physically? Yeah, that's a good question. So one of the points that I make in the book, right, is that friendship or connection in general helps us release this hormone called oxytocin, which oxytocin is a hormone that also makes us better at making friends because it makes us more trusting about others, more generous towards others. And not only that, but oxytocin also contributes to us living longer. So that's why the quality of your friendships determines the quality of your life, like Esther Peral, she's a psychologist, she would say, right, that there's this hormone we released when we feel connected that makes us further connect with other people, and it makes us live longer. So the benefits are fast, like basically a lot, throughout the book, all the different things that I say, the behaviors you could take on generosity, affection towards others, right, these behaviors that help make other people feel good, make us feel good. Like they decrease our level of stress and decrease our blood pressure and things like that. And so anything we do to like make a lot of things that we can do to make friends, I should say, make us better and healthier as people. But the other thing that I talk about really in that chapter is just the impact on friends and our sense of identity in ourselves. Like to figure out who we are, we see aspects of ourselves represented in our close connections, and it helps us to begin to embody those traits ourselves when our close connections have those traits, right? So it's just like, you know, just to make it less abstract. Maybe I would love golf, but I never know it unless someone in my network exposes me to that idea, right? And because of something called inclusion of others in the South, which is this theory that when we get closer to people, we include them in our sense of ourselves. So it almost feels like what they do is what we do. Whatever our friends take on, we're more likely to try on too. So we just become richer, we just become more expansive, and I think we become more true to who we really are. So one thing, I wonder, you talked about sort of familiarity, because I had his friend from college, and I remember early on in our friendship. I didn't think much of him, I didn't really see him as somebody that I would want to be friends with. And I remember he asked another friend, he's like, "Does Shrini hate me?" And he's like, "No, Shrini just thinks you're an anal fuck." And she's like, "Shrini doesn't hate anybody." And he and I traveled through Europe together, and the funny thing is, despite my first impressions of him, we ended up becoming really good friends. So what is that all about? Here's this person that I think is obnoxious, and there are things about him that still irritate the shit out of me, but I think he and I are so polar opposite, but somehow, in the end, we found common ground. Yeah, great question. So remember how I said, don't assume friendship just happened organically? Well, sometimes they do. According to the sociologist Rebecca Adams, when we have continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability, our friendships kind of take off. And you could see how we have that at school, right? Like lunch, recess. We just have these periods of time where we see each other repeatedly, and we have our guards down. And that's what really creates organic connection. It happens at college, it might happen on a trip with someone, right? And the problem is, though, that doesn't happen in adulthood for many of us. Like, at our jobs, we see each other repeatedly, but we're often, the vulnerability is missing. We're only showing one side of ourselves, which is why I think your template for making friends as a child cannot be your template for making friends as an adult, because your setting has changed, and I think we really need to reconcile with that. Yeah. Well, let's come back to that. Let's talk first about the ideas of how attachment styles affect our friendships, because I know that you basically dedicated all of chapter two to this idea about how our past relationships affect our present relationships. So, how is that? Like, what is the impact of attachment styles on friendships in our lives? I realize it's a massive question. Yeah. Well, first, I'll just explain the theory. So the theory behind my book is attachment theory, and the idea is like, how is connected has shaped who we are? Like our personalities are reflections of our previous experiences of connection or lack thereof. Our personalities are almost strategies to deal with the connections, the experiences and connections that we assume will experience based on our past, right? So whether we are cynical, trusting, friendly, warm, vulnerable, withdrawn, all these are behaviors and traits we develop based on our previous experience of connection. But not only that, once these these experiences of connection shape us, then our personalities that develop out of this shape, how we continue to connect, right? It's not random. The people that have connected will develop these traits and characteristics that help them to continue to connect well, whereas the people that have baggage, disconnection, trauma, develop these traits and characteristics that are primarily about protecting themselves and the cost is their relationship. So that's like, insecurely attached people anxiously or avoidantly attached people. Both these groups be your abandonment from others. They handed it, handle it in different ways, avoided people completely devalue connection because they assumed they'll be rejected. They are not vulnerable. They do not enjoy their friendships as much. They do not initiate friendships as much. They're more likely to ghost on people, whereas, because they think people don't care about them anyway, really. But then you have the anxiously attached people. They handle their fears. They have great fears of being abandoned. And they handle that by clinging very close. You see them developing friendships that are very volatile, get very intense very quickly. They take things very personally. The research actually finds that they're amygdala. The stress out part of their brain lights up more strongly in reactions to events. And what you also see is that, you know, one of the studies I talked about in the book, when people with insecure attachment are exposed to stories that are ambiguous about how people are treating them. So, you know, I talked about this study where people were in a cafeteria and your friend comes up behind you and you see that they spilled milk on you. How do you interpret that situation? Insecurely attached people think their friend was out to get them, did it on purpose, and then they become vengeful, right? They want to spill milk back milk back on their friends. Whereas the securely attached people, the people that had those healthy connections, they assume their friend is just clumsy and they don't try to take it out back on their friend. So you see how the insecurely attached people, they project rejection and then they escalate the rejection and it really harms their friendships. Whereas the curly attached people, like I said, with the tip of assuming people like you, they assume people like them. They assume people are trustworthy. They assume people want the best for them. And the implications of that means that they act in kind and friendly ways. They don't have to be in this protective stance against rejection that kind of sabotages their relationships. Yeah, wow. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. 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And you even said, you know, the template that you had for making friends as a child is not the one that you can use in adulthood because the context has changed. And I think that this was particularly like personal to me because I went through this experience because I lived at my parents' house until I was almost 36 or 37. And I remember moving to San Diego in the first couple months, I thought to myself, okay, this is great, I'm finally free, I'm not living at home. And I think about six, seven months in, I kind of just found myself in a pretty deep depression thinking, wait a minute, half my friends are completely unreliable. They cancel plans. If I can get them to make plans in the first place, it's a miracle. The other ones are relationships where they're joined at the hip. And it just kind of sucked me into depression. And part of the reason I left was because I had such a hard time with making friends. And I could not for the life of me figure out how to build a social circle when half the people in my life were in these different situations that made it almost impossible for me to see the ones that I already knew. And I was kind of beyond that stage of I want to go out to bars in item 37, you know, 38 at that time, I think. I want to be in bed by 10 o'clock at night. Yeah, this is a great question, you know. And I think your point is well taken in that to make friends, you have to find people that want to make friends, right? Like people that are similarly as invested as you, which isn't always easy. According to the research, what you can look for is transitioners, people that have just moved to the city, just gotten out of a relationship, just retired, transitioners, these transitioners, they just tend to be particularly open to friendship. And, you know, you can find the transitioners, I think when you, when you join, when you have a hobby or interest, right? You choose to do that hobby and interest in community with others. Oftentimes that's because you're not just there to pursue your hobby, but you're there to find community. So you find people who are really open to connection when you decide, okay, instead of doing running alone, I'm going to join a running group. Or, you know, instead of learning my languages alone, I'm going to take a language class or trying to teach myself photography. I'm going to take my photography class, like joining that group that's really repeated over time so you can capitalize on that mere exposure effect that I talked about, that when people are familiar to us, we like them more. But not only that, once you do that, you have to generate exclusivity, which means you have to start having experiences with someone that you don't have with other people in the group. That's how you start feeling like you're friends with people rather than you're just, you know, a part of this group. So it literally takes, and I say, to assume people like you, right, because again, that makes it, it's a self, it's a self, it's a self, it's like practically it's called the acceptance, prophecy and the research. And so you say to someone, oh, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you in this book club, like, would you be open to connecting outside this book club, I'll exchange, would you be able to exchange your content information and then following up with them. Yeah, okay, so this is kind of a weird question, probably, but I realize there are a lot of guys who, most of us will go to an event or something like that. And if we're being brutally honest with ourselves, we're like, do I really want to be friends with this girl, or do I just, you know, am I interested in her sexually? And the answer is almost always the opposite. It is the latter, and I mean, you may remember that, you know, Chris Rock joke where he was like, men, female friends are women that you once liked and weren't able to sleep. It's true. And it's so unfortunate because men that are friends with women experience more emotional intimacy across their relationships. And while women report that their closest friendships are often with other women, for men, it's mixed. You know, some men report it's with other men, some men, it's reported with other women. So men uniquely benefit from friendships with other women, but I do agree, Trini, that we're up against this narrative. I think that a lot of men have around, you know, if I'm going to be friends with the woman, it has to be because I'm romantically sexually interested in them. Well, it's funny because I have certain female friends where somehow right off the bat, it's just kind of a given that there is absolutely no like sexual or romantic interest between the two of us. And we're actually able to maintain a really close friendship. But the idea is in my head at all. And like, like, I really don't want to be your friend. Yeah, you're too hot. We can't be friends. Yeah. Pretty much. I mean, it kind of takes us back to the whole when Harry Met Sally thing, right? It was like men and women being friends. So I'm curious, like, you know, you kind of alluded to the fact that, you know, men who are female friends tend to be better in relationships. So putting aside the sex drive, you know, how do men feel female friendships where this is not part of the equation? Yeah. You just choose ones you're not attracted to physically. You could choose ones you're not attracted to. Or I think you can do, you can, you can talk about people you're romantically interested in or hoping to date to sort of clarify. You can hang out in a group like there's certain like indirect behaviors that we use to kind of convey. Hey, I hope this is a platonic form of connection. Yeah. Well, so let's talk specifically about sort of one other thing that you talk about, which is this whole idea of how important it is to maintain your friendships when you're in a romantic relationship because I can't tell you the number of friends that I have that once they get into a relationship, they don't bake time for their friends. The relationship is their life. And I saw this happen with a female friend. I saw this happen with one of my best friends. And I remember we were all pissed off at him when they finally broke up. We're like, dude, you pretty much neglected all of us all for this role who dumped your ass. Yeah. And of course, I remember my sister was like, don't be a jackass. He's your friend. I'm like, yeah, he's an idiot. But I was more than anything. I was just upset because he was my roommate and he left. And, you know, he and I were really close. And, but it just struck me and he wasn't the first. I just seen this happen so much. So two questions. One, do you notice that this is more common with men or women? And two, how do you avoid it? Yeah. You know, it's absolutely more common with men, interestingly. And I think at first, I started to understand why, right? Because men's friendships tend to be less close and less intimate than women's, what they get out of a romantic relationship is so unique. They don't get it out of their friendships. And often, you know, because men just tend to invest less in their friendships, right? There's just might be things that they experience in their romantic relationship that they really don't get out of their friendships. And that's just, you know, we could talk about the larger problems that we tend to see with men's friendships. But with women, there's a lot more overlap. Like they have a woman tend to have a lot more intimacy in their friendships, tend to have intimacy with their, you know, romantic partners or spouse. So it's not like, "Oh, this relationship feels so much better. I'm getting so much more out of it than my friends. So I'm just going to invest on my time in this relationship." Whereas for women, it's more like, "Well, this is where I get something. I get something here. I get something there." Just because they're, you know, they're just tends to be a lot more intimacy and vulnerability in women's friendships. So that's why women just tend to keep a larger network alive when they get into romantic relationships than men do. And to me, it's really, I think we do this based on so many misconceptions, right? Like some people think that that's a way to value your romantic relationship, is to just, you know, make them your only priority, right? But we know from the research that this isn't true, that your romantic relationship, according to the science, is just more resilient to stress when you have an outside network. And, you know, if your romantic partner is like your only source of support, when things are going wrong, according to the research, you're going to be a lot more affected by them than you would be if you had other forms of support in your life. And so I think fundamentally, like, for healthy romance, you need friends. And we know that, like, we need an entire community to feel whole because there's actually three different types of loneliness. And only one can be fulfilled by a traditional spouse. So there is intimate loneliness, which is we crave a relationship of deep intimacy, like a best friend, like a spouse. There's relational loneliness, which we crave a relationship that's kind of like as close as a friend. And there's collectivistic loneliness, which is like we crave a group working towards a common goal. And we can experience any of those forms of loneliness. So even if I have like the best relationship ever, I could still experience the collective loneliness and the relational loneliness, because we just, we just sort of need it. There's also this, like, jargony term called, like, the functional specificity model, which basically argues that, like, each relationship gives us something special and something unique. And I think we tend to, again, think on a hierarchy, like, oh, romantic love gives us everything, platonic love gives us romantic love minus some things, right? But no, instead I think we could think of, okay, each relationship has value in our lives so one can't necessarily be replaced by the other. Yeah, no, I'd be, you know, as you're saying this, I'm thinking about sort of my relationships when I start dating somebody and they're there all the time, and I love the fact that they're all the time. And then about a month, and I'm like, fuck, you're here all the time. Yeah. Can't you? You want a pressure. Can't you just go leave and do something? And I always thought, like, I was the type of person who wanted somebody to be around all the time, but I think, you know, the fact that I'm 44 and still single. Like, I realize, like, wow, I'm a person who needs space. If you're there all the time, I'm going to lose my fucking mind. Like, and I'll want you to be there all the time in the beginning. And then once we've established a relationship, I'm going to be like, I need you to leave. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that's, that's very normal. There's this theory called equilibrium theory that basically finds that we need time together and we need time alone. And when we experience time together, we have a natural desire for time alone. And when we experience time alone, we have a natural desire for time together. And implications of that are like, if someone needs a little bit of space, give it to them, because that means they're more likely to want to come back to connect with you. Yeah. The funny thing is that I think part of my challenge with that earlier was that I was, you know, when I read that attachment, like, I was like, shit, I'm one of these anxious people, this sucks. And it became less that way, I think with time, Amy Cham was the one who told me, she was like, you can actually change your attachment style, which I was really pleasantly surprised to hear. But yeah, that's one of those things I think that it just evolves with time. Yeah, exactly. You can certainly change your attachment style, like actually reading about attachment style. So some researchers have found can change your attachment style because you don't know the behaviors that you're doing that contribute to your relationships. Being harmed, unless you understand how your attachment style impacts your behavior. So, you know, that's what I talk about in platonic, but also I think an important way to change your attachment style is like, noticing moments of safety that counter your attachment style assumptions, right? So if you think everyone's going to abandon you, notice when people show up and really take it in and see for those moments. And more you do, you're going to release certain hormones that lead to like changes in the structure of your brain if you really focus on it and savor them. But like when we have a certain attachment style, we tend to only register moments that match our template on the world. And we tend to discount those moments that are counter to that. So that's kind of one of the reasons attachment styles can be sort of self-reinforcing. Well, let's talk about the two concepts of vulnerability and authenticity and friendships, because I think that the way that you made this distinction between vulnerability and oversharing really struck me. You said that vulnerability is the deepest form of authenticity and involves sharing the true parts of ourselves that we fear may result in our rejection or alienation, the parts we feel most shame over. Shame is the sense that our secrets make us unworthy of human connection. And then you go on to say, oversharing is pseudo vulnerability because vulnerability is authentic and oversharing isn't. So talk to me about the distinction between those two because I noticed that there were certain friends that I truly could feel vulnerable with, and I realized no matter what I told them that wouldn't change our friendship. And then there are definitely others who I have to be very sort of selective about what I'm willing to tell them about. Yeah, yeah, great point. So I kind of define authenticity and it was tricky for me. So I was like, all these researchers are saying it's your true self, but what the heck is that? So from the research that I read, I kind of deduced that our authentic self is who we are when we feel most safe, and when we're not hijacked by defense mechanisms. What do I mean by defense mechanisms? I mean that sometimes we feel an emotion that we want to push away, and instead of allowing ourselves to feel it, we employ these defense mechanisms. So, hey, I'm jealous of you for getting that job I didn't get. And instead of admitting I'm jealous, because that's vulnerable, I engage in a defense mechanism like, wow, you're not that great, or I'm surprisingly gave it to you. I kind of put you down a little bit, for example, right. And so oversharing is a form of utilizing defense mechanisms because it's compulsive. Vulnerability, when you're vulnerable, you're sort of discerning that someone's safe, and then you're sharing, right, because, again, authenticity requires those feelings of safety not being hijacked by defense mechanisms. Oversharing is often a compulsion wherein you fear people will abandon you, usually anxiously attach people use it. So you kind of test them by throwing out this, you know, this very deep information about you for yourself early on to test whether they'll stay around. And anything that's testing people is not you sharing your authentic or your vulnerable side, right, the authenticity and the vulnerability would be like, oh, I'm afraid of reduction, and I noticed that and I recognize it instead of this defense mechanism of oversharing and testing you so that I don't have to acknowledge my fears. Well, let's talk about anger in friendships, because, you know, I think that that is one of those things that, like you point out, it's normal to have sort of tactics and solutions for resolving conflict with family members and romantic relationships. But in friendships, you kind of almost just assume that it will kind of dissipate at some point, and often that just ends up leading to resent in my experience. Yep, yep, I think, you know, me too, this was the chapter that I'm like, this was my biggest growth area, getting into arguments with friends and being like, it's my job to get over it, and that's what it means to be a good friend to get over it. And then not getting over it and just withdrawing from my friends, right, and I think we often don't realize that that if we, it's not like we could just not bring it up and it's not going to have an impact, we don't bring it up and then we withdraw and we harm the friendship. So our whole goal, I think, and not bring it up was to keep the friendship safe and actually we are sort of causing that outcome that we feared when we just withdraw anyway. And so for me, you know, I came across the study that found open and pathic conflict contributes to more intimacy in our relationships. So I really started to question my, okay, I'm going to pretend everything's fine behavior. And then I started to read the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner who talked about flaccid safety, which means you just pretend everything's fine so it feels safe. Versus dynamic safety, which is we rupture and we repair we rupture and we repair and that she says is like, what's behind deeper intimacy. So I was sort of like, that actually sounds really nice to be able to be that level of honest and to not feel like, if anything's wrong in this friendship, I just have to deal with it or dump them, right. No. That there's this third option that we could like heal or we could recalibrate our behavior. So, you know, knowing that research, I also realized as someone who was more anxiously attached before, they often really feared that if I brought things up, people would abandon me. And then I would only bring things up when I was so activated that it would come across as very accusational. And so what I realized is that I wasn't my relationships weren't being hurt by me bringing things up. It was how I brought them up, like just attacking and blaming people, right. And those two things are very different, very different dimension. So I would assume, you know, is that, okay, this is proof, you know, anything I bring things up, people get, you know, they back away, right. That's the self-compromation bias of our attachment style. So I learned throughout writing this chapter just how to bring things up in a way that's loving in a way that can can cause healing. It's funny you say that because like I was more than willing to tell my old roommate that I was pissed off that he left and I told him, I was like, "Yeah, I'm a mad man. I'm upset because you left and I loved having you here. I missed you. That's why I was mad at it." I mean, and it was not one of those things that was, you know, like attacking him about it. It was just like, yeah, I'm pissed that you basically ditched us for four months and, you know, basically let this world take over your life. There's something else that I want to ask you about, and that is sort of maintaining friendships over time because one of the things that happens as we become adults is, you know, people have kids, people get married, people move away, whatever it is. And I want to bring back a clip from my conversation with Lydia Downworth, Tiggleson. It's just much harder to maintain a relationship when people move further apart, but it's not impossible. So it really depends on motivation again and how much it matters and how I think what does happen is to be generous. We'll say that people get busy and then they get caught up with the new people in their life or their work, and the longer things go when they haven't seen someone, the less connected they feel, the less up on the day-to-day of their life, that person is. And so it's natural that it can fade away sometimes, and it's not actually the end of the world. This is one of the things I think is important. So when you said that it didn't feel reciprocated in the same way, that's the critical juncture where you consider yourself, maybe this friendship isn't sustaining me in the same way, and I'm going to let it go, or I'm going to shuffle. The analogy I like to use is that if you think of your friends, as you've seen in the book of concentric circles, the people closest to you and then a little further out, a little further out, when you have a friend like that, it does mean that you have to not be friends with them anymore, but you shuffle the furniture of your friendship to an outer room. So I think that the reason I wanted to bring that back is because I thought about it in the context of anger, and you say there are sort of no absolutes when it comes to salvaging a friendship. Yeah, yeah, and I like what Lydia said. I definitely agree with her in that we just tend to see it at friendship as so binary, like we're friends, and if there's a problem with the friendship, now we're not friends, instead of seeing it for the spectrum that it is. We're friends and we have this problem and maybe it means that we may attain this friendship, but at a different level of intimacy than we had before. And I also liked how Lydia mentioned that it's normal to lose friends, actually every seven years we lose half our friends, one study finds. Yeah, so if you've lost some friends, you're not alone. I think what's unfortunate is that it's not a grief that we validate losing a friend because of how we trivialize friendship. And so it can trigger what's called disenfranchised grief, which means our grief gets more complicated and prolonged because we think it's illegitimate and we don't validate it within ourselves. So it gets really hard to grieve friendships, even as we're losing them. But one last point that I wanted to make about maintaining friendships over time because, especially long distance, you know, there's this cool study that talks about how long distance friendships thrive more when we see them as flexible and not fragile. So it's the assuming people like you think if I haven't talked to you in six months, me being able to assume this is a flexible relationship. So I assume we're still friends, even if you haven't talked for a little while, can really help to maintain the friendship versus me assuming we haven't talked for six months. So it's over and that's going to impact my behaviors because now I'm not going to reach out anymore. Well, I think that makes a perfect segue into the final part of the book where you talk about generosity. I'd realize that so many people, I mean, myself included, we tend to be martyrs in our friendships. We give and give and give without really allowing ourselves to receive or, you know, the opposite. You're the kind of friend who's always there when you need somebody. Yeah. Yeah, and that was, you know, I think a surprise throughout my book, this idea that these unmitigated givers who give and give and give, not only do they experience less poor mental health, but they actually experience poor relationships because, you know, actually, according to the science, when you give and you feel obligated, people actually feel worse receiving it. Like people can sort of pick up on it in some way, right? And so I kind of argued for a little bit more of a middle ground between just being a taker and being an endless giver. I argue for like this idea of mutuality, which means I consider my needs and your needs and I prioritize what's most urgent. Right? So if I need something from you, but you're like, I don't know, studying for your boards, like your medical student or something, I can be a little bit more flexible. But if you're, you know, if you're at a time in your life where you have a lot more freedom, I might expect a little bit more. Like for me, mutuality means my friends that have tiny babies. I'm like, okay, I'm going to be a little bit more flexible. I'm not going to expect the same, you know, frequency of hanging out that I usually expect. Or I'm going to be a little bit more flexible about when to see you because I know your life circumstance and my life circumstance is yours are a lot more constrained. And so that's, that's how I view mutuality. It's, it's not, again, absolute like I'm always going to be showing up for you, or I'm never going to be showing up for you. It's, I'm going to try to show up for you based on the circumstances and what I have to give. And hopefully because you're invested in mutuality too, when I can't show up for you because of what's going on in my life, you can validate and appreciate that because it's my way to refuel. So I have more gas for this friendship in the long run. Yeah. Wow. Well, I can see why Smiley referred you as a guest. This has been absolutely fascinating. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? Oh, this is a really good question. What makes someone unmistakable? I think it's a deep sense of authenticity, a deep sense of self-expression. The truth or essence of who they are is conveyed in how they interact with the world. Beautiful. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and sharing your insights and doism with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything you're up to? Yeah. So the book is called Platonic, how the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends and you can buy it wherever books are sold. And if you want more friendship tips, I'm on Instagram at Dr. Marissa G. Franco, D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. I also speak on connection and belonging and you can reach out to me on my website, www.DrMarissaGFranko.com. And then there you can also take a quiz that assesses your strengths and weaknesses as a friend and gives you some suggestions as to how to improve your friendships. Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. We all have dreams, dream home renovations, dream vacations, or sending our kids to their dream colleges. But finding straightforward ways to turn those dreams into realistic goals, that's where things get tricky. Merrill understands that. That's why with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. And having the bullet your back helps your whole financial life move with you. So when your plans change, Merrill is with you every step of the way. Go to ml.com/bullish to learn more. Merrill, a bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner and Smith Incorporated, registered broker dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC. Have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity? Well, what if you could turn that fear into create a fuel? We've just published an amazing new ebook called "The Four Keys to Success in an AI world" and this is more than just a guide. It's a deep exploration into the human skills that AI can't touch. The skills that are essential for standing out and thriving, no matter how much technology evolved. We're talking about real differentiators here, like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and much more. Inside you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills, whether you're a creative person, a business person, or just simply someone who loves personal development. 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