How to Be a Better Human - The secret to making new friends as an adult (w/ Marisa G. Franco)

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Making friends as an adult can feel like a baffling obstacle course. Why was it so much easier to connect as kids? To help you find well-rounded and fulfilling friendships, psychologist Marisa Franco discusses science-backed tips on how to make (and keep) friends, like the optimism-inducing "acceptance prophecy" and the shame-reducing "theory of chums." Learn more about the power of platonic love and how it can help you experience the full richness and complexity of who you are.This conversation, hosted by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was part of an exclusive TED Membership event, and later published on TED Talks Daily, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. You can find more episodes wherever you're listening to this or visit ted.com/membership to become a TED Member. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, everyone. Chris Duffy here. We have something a little bit different for you today. This is an episode of TED Talks Daily, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. Every weekday, TED Talks Daily brings you the latest TED Talks from the world's leading thinkers on every subject imaginable, from artificial intelligence to how to build emotional resilience and everything in between. It's always helping me to learn and think about the world in different ways. And you can find TED Talks Daily wherever you're listening to this. And we'll be back with How to Be a Better Human episodes next week. You're listening to TED Talks Daily.

I'm your host, Elise Hu. I don't know about you, but something that gets a lot harder for me as my life has gotten crowded with responsibility is to nurture my adult friendships. But platonic friendships are so crucial to our well-being. And today, psychologist Marissa Franco shares how to make new friends, keep them, and focuses on all the ways making an effort will bring deeper fulfillment. This is from a 2022 TED membership event where she's in conversation with TED Current Events curator Whitney Pennington-Rogers. Hear them after a short break. Now, as an expert on friendship, I'm up against a lot because of the hierarchy that a lot of our cultures place on love, right?

With familial love at the top, with romantic love at the top, and with platonic love, friendship love really at the bottom. And with so many countries, people feeling so lonely and so disconnected, I believe that if we leave friendship at the bottom of this hierarchy, it's like there's gold at our feet that we're treating as concrete. And so why are friendships so key? Well, our bodies have always known that we need an entire community to feel whole. And just being around a spouse, for example, only surfaces one side of ourselves.

So maybe the part of me that likes to garden or do yoga will begin to wither away if my spouse, for example, doesn't like these activities. But then when I'm around a friend, I can garden and plant my pothos with them. And I'm around another friend that I can garden and plant my pothos with them. And I'm around another friend that I can downward facing dog with. And I feel my entire identity accordion outward unfold and fan out. And I experienced the full richness and complexities of who I am when I have an entire community to bring that out in me. And so that's one of the reasons why friendship is really important. But I think there's two reasons why we tend to really devalue it.

One reason is because we just don't know how to make friends. So luckily, I'm going to help you with that a little bit today. But the other reason has to do with something I like to call the paradox of people. That on the one hand, we need people. They make us feel healthy. They make us feel healthy. They make us feel connected. They make us feel like our very selves, right? But on the other hand, people are really scary. They can dismiss us. They can reject us. They can actively harm us. And so this sort of dilemma that we face, that the sort of entity that we need the most is also the entity that can harm us the most.

And how we walk across this tightrope handling this paradox of people says a lot about our ability to make and keep friends. Because if we find ourselves stuck in the place where we mistrust people, where we see people as potentially rejecting us and harming us, it's really hard to foster connection. And this really materialized for me one day when I had bought an apartment and I was really excited to make friends with my neighbors because I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be here for a while. And I see a couple of my neighbors in the hallway when I'm walking home into my apartment with my ex at the time who was living with me. And I walk right past them, right? Because paradox of people, I'm scared of them. They might reject me. They might see me as weird if I try to introduce myself. So I scurry into my apartment and my ex, he pushes me back into the hallway to talk to my neighbors

and says to me, you know, you're writing this book on friends. What would you tell other people who are in your situation? And so as I'm sort of stumbling back into the hallway, I'm thinking about a few things that I have learned through studying friendship so intensely. And so two observations that I have on friendship and two takeaways for what we can do to make and keep friends. First observation, friendship does not happen organically in adulthood, right? And in fact, one study found that people that think that it happens based on luck are actually lonelier five years later, whereas people that see it as happening based on effort are less lonely five years later.

So what did that tell me? That if I was just there hoping that my neighbors would someday try to be my friend, it probably wouldn't happen, right? And so I would need to make that effort in order to be able to make friends. But second observation that I have based on reading all the research on friendship is something called the liking gap, which is a phenomenon wherein when strangers interact and predict how likely the other person is to like them, they underestimate how much the other person is to like them. They underestimate how much the other person likes them. So this research really suggests that we're less likely to be rejected than we think,

which leads me to my first takeaway for making friends. If you want to make friends, you have to assume that people like you, right? The reason is when researchers told people, hey, you're going to go into this group and based on your personality profile, we predict that you will be liked. This is completely bogus, a total lie. But they found that when people went into this group of people, they became warmer, open, more friendly because they made this assumption. And so indeed it became this self-fulfilling prophecy called the acceptance prophecy, that when we assume we'll be liked, we make it more likely that we actually

will be liked. Whereas other research finds that people that tend to assume that they're rejected, even when the circumstance is ambiguous, like my friend, maybe they're just like hungry or something rather than that they hate me, right? Those people that go straight to, maybe they don't like me, they actually become cold. They actually become withdrawn and they reject people and then they get rejected in return. So I'm thinking of these things in the hallway, you know, right by my neighbors. I'm thinking that, you know, I can't wait for this to happen organically. Okay. I'm afraid they're going to reject me, but that's less likely to happen than I actually think. I'm thinking I should assume that they're going to like me. And then one last thing I had to remind myself of was to overcome something called covert avoidance, which is our tendency to show up around other

people physically, but check out mentally, right? Like you're like hanging out with people and you're on your phone, or that would look like me just standing in the hallway, hoping that my neighbors talk to me. And so to make friends, you have to overcome covert avoidance by not just showing up. I showed up in that hallway, right? But you also have to engage with people when you get there. So I ended up approaching my neighbors and saying, hi, I'm Marissa. I just moved into 103. It's really great to meet you.

And we start chatting. It's really great to meet you. And we start chatting. And at some point, you know, I asked them, like, is there a group where we can keep in touch? I'd love to, you know, chat further. And they tell me about their cat group that they have for cat parents in the Drew. And I don't have a cat, but, like, I'll take connection when I can find it. So the cat group became half cat group, half social group. I'll take connection when I could find it.

So the cat group became half cat group, half social group. And I think sometimes we think that, you know, a tiny act, something small like saying hello can't have colossal consequences for our life. But when we can lean into the sort of positive side of the paradox of people, when we can initiate and assume people like us, right? It can have colossal consequences because since I said that hello, me and my neighbors, we met up and we hung out every Friday, socially distance of the pandemic in the garden behind our apartment, right? And so I think that this experience really taught me

the importance that while we all face this paradox of people, while we all face this dilemma, people, while we all face this dilemma, that if we want to make friends, if we want to connect with people, we have to be able to move away from the part of ourselves that is fearful, that is mistrustful, that assumes people will harm or reject us, and turn towards the part of ourselves that simply wants to love and connect with people and can ready ourselves to engage in these new connections with optimism and with hope. You know, my niece read my book, Platonic, and one thing that she took away from it was that for friendship to happen,

someone has to be brave. So be brave. Thank you. Thank you, Rosa. I liked all of that. And I could see in the chat that a lot of the members also really loved some of the things you shared there. So thank you so much for that wonderful talk and for those tips, which we will dive into in this conversation. And, you know, I think just to sort of start, your line of work is just so interesting. Friendship seems such a unique area to research. And I actually want to read something back to you from your book to help us understand a little bit more about just the importance of this type of relationship. You say, friendship in releasing the relationship pressure valve infuses us with joy like no other relationship.

Without needing to plan for retirement, fulfill each other's sexual needs, and work out who should be scrubbing the shower grime, we are free to make friendship territories of pleasure. So can you talk a little bit more about this and just why friendship holds such an important role in all of our lives? Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, I'll take a step back and say, like, clearly connection is so central to all of us. You know, the research finds that, for example, loneliness is more toxic for your body than having a poor diet or not exercising. Right. And and these are things that we talk about in the public health conscious, but we don't talk about social connection enough. Maybe for our UK folks, you all have a prime minister of loneliness. So it's a it's a little bit different. Right.

But when we talk about the impact of loneliness, there's actually three different dimensions of loneliness. So it's a little bit different, right? But when we talk about the impact of loneliness, there's actually three different dimensions of loneliness. There is intimate loneliness, which is the desire for someone to be very intimate with. There's also relational loneliness, which is the desire for someone that feels as close to us as a friend might. And then there's collective loneliness, which means I desire to be part of a group working towards a common goal. And this research on loneliness really suggests that, just like I said, we really do need an entire community to feel whole, because if we just focus on being very nuclear, you know, just having a spouse and that being the center of all of our connections, right, that's maybe touching on our intimate loneliness, but not our relational,

not our collective, right? And so I think a lot of us found this in the pandemic that, you know, we maybe have been home with a spouse or partner that we've really loved a lot, but we still ended up feeling lonely. And that's because like, as social species, as social creatures, like we just need an entire community to fulfill us. You touched on this a little bit in the talk. And in the book, you separate sort of the way you think about friendship into two categories. You talk about, you know, sort of a backward look at how we've traditionally experienced friendship. And then you look forward at how we could build better relationships, better platonic relationships. And so if we could just talk a little bit about sort of that first section, just diving into how we as a culture tend to think about friendship and how does this really impact the way that we actually approach it?

Yeah, so I'm reading all the research on friendship and what sort of materializes before my eyes is that our personalities are fundamentally a reflection of our experiences of connection or disconnection, right? Like in some ways, our personalities are coping mechanisms from the experiences of connection or disconnection we've received. So whether you are friendly, open, warm, vulnerable, trusting, cynical, aggressive, even violent, all of this is predicted by what your history of connection or lack thereof looks like. So how we've connected really affects who we are. But not only that, who we are really affects how we connect, right? Those people that have that history of healthy relationships, they have an internal set of beliefs within them that allows them to continue to facilitate healthy relationships. This is, if people are familiar with attachment theory, securely attached people who think others can be trusted, who think they can be vulnerable,

who think they can turn to people for support, right? And they go into new relationships with the set of beliefs and allows them to continue to create these new relationships. Whereas people who have had difficult previous relationships, those can be internalized as a belief system that then can impede their ability to foster further connections, right? Because they may think people are going to reject me, that I can't be vulnerable, that I can never feel safe around anybody, even when someone is safe, they're still holding that assumption in that judgment, right? And so what I wanted Platonic to do, because I know some people hear this and they're like, good for those people with healthy childhoods,

you know, whatever. For me, I guess I'm do absolutely not. Your work is focused specifically on adult friendships, which for a lot of the reasons you've already outlined seem like are just really challenging for us to develop. But I guess, can you talk about sort of why this breakdown happens and really when we start to see that it becomes more difficult for people to make friends in the same way as you do when you were kids. Yeah. So when I say friendship doesn't happen organically in adulthood, I don't mean that friendship doesn't happen organically in childhood. Because for children, it often does. And they have certain ingredients in their environment that really foster friendship.

So Rebecca G. Adams, she's a sociologist, and she says, you know, for friendship to be fostered, you need to have organically, you need to have this repeated unplanned interaction and this shared vulnerability, right? And so in school, we have that. We have that through our lunch period. We have that through our gym. We have that through our recess, right? We're seeing our friends. We see people every day. We're letting our guard down. We end up sort of just developing these friendships. But when you think about adults going into the working world, you may have repeated unplanned interaction with your colleagues, less so now that we're going more hybrid and remote workplace, right? But we're often not as vulnerable in the workplace. And that's why one study, and this, again, this is caveat US context. One study found that the more time people spend together at work, the less close that they feel. And so we need to recognize that as adults,

we don't have the same infrastructure we had as kids. So we can't rely on the same set of assumptions that, oh, this is just going to happen. I don't have to try. I don't have to initiate. Because as I shared from that previous research study, if we think that way for a lot of us, it won't happen. I think also just in thinking about what friendship brings to the table for you, what it, what it actually, how it benefits you, you, you have this phrase in your book where you say

connecting others makes us ourselves. And it's about much more than just the pleasure and of connection there. Can you explain a little bit about that? Yeah. So Harry Stack Sullivan, he's a psychiatrist and he has this theory called the theory of chums, which is basically that our chums or our friends earlier in life, they provide us with the sort of relationship template that we take on into our future. So it allows us to continue to connect throughout life, right? And there is some research that finds that if we connect in childhood, we have good friends in childhood, we have higher self-esteem in adulthood, we're more empathic in adulthood, right? And so he kind of argues that the therapy experience is similar to the chumship experience in that with your friends, you share things that you feel like you should be ashamed of.

Right. And when you are ashamed of something, you're not integrating it into your entire personality. You're trying to push it away and suppress it and not make it who you are. And the shame can really take over your whole personality because you're pushing away this part of who you are that you think is shameful. But then so much of your personality is spent focusing on making sure nobody finds out this thing, right? And so that's why shame can be so encompassing and enveloping.

But what Stacks Sullivan argues is that when kids share this shame with their friends and their friends are like, you know, we still love you, you know, this isn't a big deal for us, right? And we still think you're amazing. And we accept that about you, right? We begin to be able to accept it in ourselves and to bring whatever we felt shame about to see it as just part of our personalities, rather than antithetical to the personality that we want to have. And we are able to sort of relinquish all of the energies that we spent trying to push this thing away.

And so in that way, the experience of experiencing that platonic love from our friends, especially at that time in childhood, teenagers, where we're very high in shame, we're like highest in shame than throughout the whole, throughout our whole lifespan, right? That our friends are there at that time when we're so high in shame to help us integrate that and to help us connect to all sides of ourselves so that we sort of begin to become who we fully are. It's just so interesting how much vulnerability and shame play into this. And in a way, it seems like on the one hand, as you get more confident, you start to lose some of the ability to make new friends, but also using that confidence leaning into it to actually make the friends is what you need. So it's fascinating. Well, I want to dive into some of the member

questions we're receiving because they're also really interesting. So Ted member, Arnaldo, of questions we're receiving because they're also really interesting. So TED member Arnaldo, they ask, married people often complain about lack of time to cultivate friendships outside of the marital circle. What insights have you gained in your research about the effect of outside friendships in a couple's relationship? Ooh, I love this question. I think that having outside friendships is necessary for having a healthy marriage. I do. And this is where I'm coming from with that. The research basically finds that if I make a friend, I'm not only less depressed, but my spouse is too. It also finds that when you get into conflict with your spouse, it negatively impacts your release of a stress hormone cortisol, right?

But if you have quality connection outside of that marriage, that doesn't happen. Your cortisol release is normal, right? Other research that finds that, particularly for women who tend to have more close intimate relationships, when they go through difficulties within that partnership, they are more resilient to it when they have this outside support, right? And so it's just like, if I can access this other person to center me during times of stress in my marriage, I can return to that marriage in a centered and grounded way. And that's a resource for me. And it's a resource for my spouse, where we see that people that only have that close connection with their spouse, they have high rates of what's called concordance, which means that however your spouse feels is kind of how you feel. Their sort of energy affects you a lot more when they're the

only person that you're looking to for support. And so what happens is like the natural ebbs and flows that can happen in a marriage, they're so much more impacted and they're so much more devastated during those times of ebbs because they don't have that support outside of the relationship. So I think sometimes we see, we think of like, oh, are my friends a threat to my spouse? My spouse is spending time with their friends. They're not spending time with me. But if we understand more broadly the importance of friendship and how it makes every other relationship in our life better, we will see that there's actually synergy between these relationships that my friend having a, my spouse having friends outside of this relationship is what makes them a better spouse for me. So, so much of it has to do with the way we just think about the role friendships

play in our life. Well, we have lots of questions that are coming in about sort of the steps to actually making friends. And I think before we get into some of the, those specific questions, I know you in the talk, you sort of shared, you started with two tips, this idea of first assuming that people like you and then overcoming what you call a covert avoidance or that urge to sort of mentally check out when you're meeting someone new. What are some of the other ways that you recommend people try to build, use tools, excuse me, that people use to build new friendships. Yeah. So I can walk through my own experience of making a bunch of friends and share this in a

story. I went to Mexico city alone and was there for 10 days and was like, okay, if I spend 10 days here and don't make any friends, I'm going to be very lonely. So how did I make friends when I was there? First, I went to a coffee shop. I heard another American there and I knew, you know, he's less likely to reject me than I think. I also knew the research on transitioners, right? People that are in times of transition are most open to friendship. So people that are traveling, people that have just moved to the city, people that have just started school, people that have just retired, right? Those are the people to try to connect with versus, you know, someone who's been here for a while and already has an established network. So I knew this guy's a transitioner and he's less likely to reject me

than I think. So I'm going to engage with him. And I asked, you know, where are you from? Like, I'm from the US too. We start chatting and I end up inviting him to a meetup that night. And it's like a language exchange meetup. And at that language exchange meetup, I meet someone else who's cool. And I say, you know, do you want to come to this Lucha Libre wrestling match with me? And he said, yes. And I think, you know, what I realized too, from the research on friendship, I used to think that making friends was about being interesting, being smart, being insightful, being charismatic, being entertaining. But in fact, people report that this entertainment factor is the least important quality they

look for in a friend. And the most important quality that they look for is someone who makes them feel like they matter. So for me, if I want to connect with someone, it's not about me trying to impress them. It's about me trying to make them feel valued and, you know, say hello to them and engage with them and tell them what I like about them and tell them what I appreciate about them. Right. Like, you know, there's a study that looked at friendship, budding friendship groups for like 12 weeks, which of these pairs ended up becoming friends. And it was the ones that shared

the most affirmation and affection towards each other. Right? And so it's, and just to go even deeper into the research rabbit hole, there's a theory called risk regulation theory, which indicates that we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on our view of how likely we are to get rejected. So when we show people, I like you, we're telling them, hey, you're not going to get rejected if you try to be friends with me. And that makes people really want to feel safe, really feel safe connecting with us, right? So I was both engaging with these people and I was trying to make them feel loved and tell them how great I thought they were and how happy I am to meet them as I reached out to them. And then I went to my Spanish class, which if you

don't have any friends, what I recommend is that you join something that's repeated over time. And remember I said, repeated unplanned interaction, shared vulnerability is that infrastructure that kids have for friends that we lack as adults. So as adults, we really need to recreate that infrastructure. And so if you join like a social group that's repeated over time, turn your hobby into a community, right? That's a really important way to make friends. So for me, it's I want to take the a group that meets around this hobby. Because when you find something that's repeated over time, what happens is something called the mere exposure effect sets in. The mere exposure effect describes our tendency to unconsciously, completely unconsciously like people just because they are familiar to us. So for example, this researcher found that when he planted women

into a large psychology lecture, at the end of the semester, none of the students remembered the woman, but they reported liking the woman who showed up to the most classes 20% more than the woman that didn't show up for any, right? Nobody remembered her, but they liked her a lot because they had seen our face. Like this is our brain, right? And what I think the other implication of mere exposure effect is in the beginning, mere exposure effect hasn't set in. So it's going to be awkward. It's going to be weary. You're going to feel uncomfortable, right?

Maybe a little distrusting. That's not a sign that you need to stop showing up. That's a sign you need to keep showing up because when you continue to show up, they're going to like you more. You're going to like them more, right? So I joined that Spanish class that was repeated over time. Every day in Spanish class, I would ask people to go out to lunch with me. We'd go out to lunch together. Then we went to Lucha Libre together. You know, of course I was only there for 10 days. So there's only, I can only go so deep with, with folks, but, but in general, when you join this,

this event that's repeated over time, you want to start generating exclusivity with someone in that group. Exclusivity means you develop memories and you develop experiences with one person in the group that you don't have with other people. So pick whoever in the group that you really liked and ask them, oh, would you be open to getting coffee, getting tea before or after our next group? Like I love to hang out. And those are like the budding stems of friendship. And luckily, if you're in this group, right, you don't have to put in as much effort.

And you had your tea and now you're going to just continue to see them over time. And you have the wheel start moving for friendship and connection. So TED member Celia actually is curious about virtual friendships and sort of how all of this plays into it, especially to some of the points you're making earlier about the pandemic. You know, for people who have met on social media only as opposed to in real life, they ask, is it possible to have a strong virtual friendship? How important is in-person connection or getting together in real life? Yeah, so this is such a nuanced question in some ways, right? Because it's such a both and. We know from the research that in-person connections tend to be stronger than virtual connections, right? But I think that that research, it doesn't account for certain

communities, like people with disabilities, people with severe social anxiety, even older people that aren't as mobile who tend to find connections online. And even though, you know, the online connections tend to not be as deep as in person, they can get deep if you're practicing the same skills that you could practice an offline connection to establish deeper relationships. So for example, like the research finds that if you're just passively scrolling on social media, doom scrolling, it makes you more lonely. It negatively impacts your mental health and well-being. But if you're engaging actively on social media, I'm posting, I'm commenting on something

that you shared, I'm saying congratulations to you, that's actually linked to less loneliness and is something that actually makes us feel more satisfied in our relationship. So if we want to have deep virtual connections, it's certainly possible, but we have to bring those same principles that we use in offline connections to create more intimacy, like things like being vulnerable with someone, being generous with them, or showing affection towards them. That also works online. They feel like they like one another more. But when you're vulnerable with someone who's avoidantly attached, that doesn't necessarily happen. The avoidantly attached person doesn't like you more because you're vulnerable

because they have their own wounds around vulnerability, right? They've learned that it's not good to be vulnerable. I shouldn't be vulnerable. Like that's the implicit message that they have that really inhibits their ability to connect. So what the implications of this, I think is that if you're vulnerable and it doesn't go well, and it wasn't from a place of fear, remember that it's not always your fault, that other people have their own issues that they're dealing with, which may lead them to respond to your vulnerability negatively. And that doesn't mean that you did anything wrong. I mean, I think if you continue to try to your vulnerability negatively. And that doesn't mean that you did anything wrong. I mean, I think if you continue to try to be vulnerable with this person who's shown you that

they can't handle it, then I think you should try to pivot, right? But just because someone responded dismissingly to your vulnerability, it might mean that they have their own issues to work out. Well, you know, I think in sort of thinking about how to make friendships work well or to be really good at this, the process of doing this, there's a popular excerpt from your book that you shared in The Atlantic where you talked about the concept of super friends. What makes someone a super friend and how can we all strive to be super friends? Secure friends, aka super friends. AKA super friends. These people are secure with themselves, which means that they don't have to try to use other people as a tool to fulfill their sense of self or to help them escape threatening emotions or feelings. So they're able to really humanize other people fully.

And the research on securely attached people find, and again, these are the people that have a history of healthy relationships, but there's also earned secure, which means you've might not have had a history of healthy relationships, but you've done the work on yourself to develop a sense of security, right? So remember, this isn't, this isn't, nobody's doomed by their attachment style, but what qualities do we see in them? They're more likely to initiate friendships. They're more likely to maintain friendships. They're less likely to dissolve friendships. They're more generous towards other people because again, they fully humanize other people. Like in securely attached people, they sometimes perceive other people through the lens of their own wounds, right? So anxiously attached people, it's like, you need to prove to me that you value me and you love me

because I'm so afraid that you're going to abandon me. And then I can try to control you and make you do this, this, and this to show me that you really, really love me. Right. And so they're not fully humanizing another person because they're almost seeing that person as a tool to fulfill their sense of self. Avoidingly attached people, they just think everybody's out to harm them and that everybody's sort of untrustworthy. So they almost see other people as threats. So they don't fully humanize them, people for their beauty and the sort of resources that connecting with another person can bring you. But these securely attached people, they tend to assume other people like them. I talked about something called pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. It's the idea that the universe is

commiserating for your success and for your well-being and that you can trust people. They're comfortable with vulnerability. They're more empathic. They're comfortable sharing their needs, but also fulfilling the needs of other people. They're more responsive to the needs of other people. When they engage in conflict, it's all about perspective taking. They're not like, you do this and otherwise I'm going to be pissed off. They're like, these are my needs. What are your needs? Let's figure out a way to collaborate and figure out something that will work for both of us. So they tend to be quite healing friends. They tend to be, I talked about avoidant being low effort, low reward. Anxious is high effort, low reward.

Secure is high effort, high reward when it comes to friendship. And then what about friendships that where there's not necessarily a difference in value, but maybe a distance, whether that's a physical distance has been created or some sort of emotional distance because your life has changed in some way. How do you suggest people go about maintaining and nurturing those types of relationships? So there's research on long distance friends that finds that we are helped when we perceive our friendships as flexible, not fragile. So when we perceive that, oh, I haven't talked to this person in a few months, I'm going to assume that friendship's asleep, not that it's dead, so that I can reconvene this friendship at any time. Right. So it's being able to recognize that our friendships ebb and flow. And when we're at an ebb, that doesn't mean, okay, I'm never going to contact this person again because the friendship is officially over, right? We assume that this ebb is part of the

normal process to flow again. So that facilitates us being able to re-engage in the friendship at any time. So Whitney, basically this all goes back to, I really think this tip, right? It's so, it's such a, it's such an all encompassing tip, right? Because what I'm basically telling you is to assume people like you, right? Like when you're, you don't talk to your friend a while, assume that they're still interested in being friends with you. Again, this isn't about, you know, being delusional. If someone's clearly indicating that they're not interested in a friendship with you, then move on. But if it clearly indicating that they're not interested in a friendship with you, then move on. But if it's ambiguous and you're like, I'm not really sure,

we haven't talked for a while, but they haven't necessarily rejected me or they still are responsive when I reach out to them, you want to make that your running assumption in response to ambiguity because again, having that assumption really facilitates continued connection. You know, this concept of making friends as an adult, it's something that I have been thinking about so much. And I was so fascinated by that concept of the paradox of people. That is so real. It's something that I have thought about but never had vocabulary for before.

You know, getting language for these things that we experience and seeing the world in a new light, that is exactly why I love TED Talks Daily. And so for more great ideas that ignite your curiosity, you can listen to TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. They have new episodes every weekday. And for more episodes of How to Be a Better Human, we'll be back next week. Thanks for listening.