How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S16, BONUS EPISODE! FRIENDAHOLIC: Confessions of a Friendship Addict - an exclusive extract from my new book,

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

SURPRISE! I thought I'd treat you to another bonus episode - not a conventional How To Fail but an exclusive extract from the audio version of my new book, Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict which is published today. I hope you enjoy it - and if you do, feel free to order a copy here.Thank you so much for listening to this season of How To Fail. I appreciate you!--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to a very special and somewhat unconventional episode of How to Fail because there is no guest and I'm not going to ask about three failures but I am going to introduce you to my new book Friendaholic Confessions of a Friendship Addict. And this is an exclusive extract from the audiobook of my new nonfiction work. And I wanted to give you a little bit of context for it because I consider you all my friends, How to Fail listeners, especially the listeners who have been with me since the start

of this extraordinary and unanticipated journey in July 2018, that's when the podcast launched, you know me so well because How To Fail gave me the chance for the first time professionally, it feels like, to show up as my real self, to really embrace that flawed authenticity that I think I'd been searching for for so long. And I'd felt a slight disconnect when I wasn't able to live in the fullness of that imperfect truth. So it's just a way of saying that I appreciate you all so much. And sometimes I'm very lucky and people will recognize my voice or they recognize me in the street and they will come up to me and say, I feel like I know you. I feel like we could be friends.

And sometimes the person in question is a bit apologetic about that and they think it sounds a bit creepy. What they don't know is I'm an extremely needy person and I love all compliments and I feel so seen and touched. But it goes deeper than that as well, because actually, you do know me. If you listen to this podcast regularly, we absolutely could be friends. I mean, unless you hate what you hear, in which case we probably couldn't be. But if you keep listening and you like it, you do actually know me and you probably know me more and deeper than many other people I have met along the way, because podcasting is such an intimate and beautiful form. And it does feel very confessional because I can be here talking into my microphone at my desk in my home in South London, and I can reach the ears of you

wherever you might be, whether you might be getting the bus to work in the morning, whether you're on a beach in Australia. Shout out to my Antipodean listeners because I value you so much. You might be on a long car journey with a loved one. You might be in your kitchen getting ready for dinner. You might be in the bath, in which case I hope you're not holding your phone. I hope it's safely outside of any proximity to water. But there's an immense privilege to that, which I never take for granted. And it means that I'm part of your life and you're part of mine because this wouldn't exist without you. And because I am really honest in the podcast

and because my amazing guests are really honest and really vulnerable, I do feel that we can be friends. And I feel a real degree of closeness with you. And I'm so thankful for that. So that's all a long winded way of saying that I wanted to share this extract with you. Because it's a book about friendship. In many ways, it's a love letter to friendship and you are my friends. But Friendaholic is also more than that. It was an attempt to give friendship a language because as I often say on this podcast, friendship is overlooked by society. And for millenn millennia romantic love has been elevated and that's the thing that we write songs about that we dedicate poems to and actually platonic love

for many of us myself included has been one of the most consistent and giving loves of our lives and yet we don't have a vocabulary to express that. And we also don't have that many social rituals to show what our friends mean to each other. There is no such thing as friendship dating, going steady, a friendship marriage or civil partnership. And maybe there should be. So that was the starting point for an exploration of friendship, what it means to us, and really asking questions about what we want our friendships to be, because it's a term that is so diffuse and all-encompassing that sometimes we can mean vastly different things by it, and we can find ourselves in platonic relationships where we have very different expectations of what that friendship

will be. So it's an exploration of all of that. And I look at the history of friendship. I look at what people like Cicero and Aristotle said about friendship. I look at the various academic studies around friendship. There aren't that many of them, again, because we have a tendency to elevate romantic love in academia as well. But I chart the course of all of that. I look at why we make friends, why it's necessary and also interestingly whether it's bad for our health not to make friends at all but whether it's also bad for our health to make too many and I look at my own relationship with friendship which is as someone

who grew up feeling like she didn't fit in so again as I've mentioned on the podcast before most notably on the podcast before most notably on the episode with Jamie Dornan which you might like to check out in the back catalogue you can hear I speak with an English accent but I actually grew up in the North Violand in the Derry girls era and I grew up just outside Derry went to primary school in Derry but it was at secondary school in Belfast I really felt the lack of any tribe. And actually, as an adolescent, that can feel very, very unsafe. And I think that what happened after that is that I spent many years overcompensating for that feeling of loneliness. And I felt that friends was the key. I just needed to make more

and more and more friends, more and more and more connections. And somehow I would become acceptable to other people, but also to myself. And actually, it didn't really work out that way. I was lucky enough to forge some really beautiful friendships, but there were also friendships that possibly didn't serve either party and weren't particularly healthy. And it all came to a crunch point during the pandemic, because like many of us, because like many of us, my diary emptied out overnight. And I realised who I missed the most. And I also realised who I was spending most time with. And the two things didn't coincide. Actually, my truest friends, those closest to me who knew the real me, they were the ones who were generous enough never to place that many demands on my time. And the knock-on effect was that I wasn't seeing them enough. And I thought, well, this can't be right. And why has that happened? And I need to rebalance it. So that was the starting point for this narrative journey.

And the structure of Friendaholic, I mean, you'll hear how it starts because that's the extract, spoiler alert. But it starts off at this point when the pandemic hits and I'm re-evaluating. And as part of Friendaholic, obviously it was incredibly important to me to write about my friends, but not in a one-sided way. I also wanted to give them the chance to explain what friendship meant to them. So I have five chapters where I interview real life friends of mine, each of whom represent some slightly different aspect of friendship to me. So you'll hear from Joan, who is my wonderful, beloved friend in LA, who just so happens to be 20 years older than me. And it really has given our friendship this beautiful flavour because I can lean on her wisdom and her life experience.

You'll hear from Satnam, who I was set up on a romantic date with, but we realised quite quickly we were probably better off as friends than anything else. You'll hear from Charmaine, who is actually Satnam is as well. Charmaine and Satnam are former guests on How to Fail in some of the early seasons. So you can go back and listen to them in the back catalogue. Charmaine is my friend who brings loving clarity to our relationship in a way that I find so amazing and empowering as someone who is quite conflict avoidant. To understand how you can be clear, but how you can lead with love is extremely important for someone like me. You'll also hear from Clemmie. Gosh, she's a former guest

as well. It sounds like all I do is interview my friends, which isn't a bad way to spend a live visit. You'll hear from Clemmie, Clemency Burton-Hill, who is a dear friend who went through something really unimaginable in January 2020. She had a brain hemorrhage, a massive stroke, and she had to relearn how to live much of her life. And that included relearning things about friendship. And then you'll also hear from Emma, my best friend, Emma Reed Terrell, co-host of my other podcast, Best Friend Therapy, who is just a wonder in all respects, and a therapist. So we have a really fascinating conversation, not only about our friendship, but also about attachment theory as it pertains to friendship and what we can offer each other if we have different styles of attachment.

friendship? What happens when someone ghosts you? How to identify frenemies or toxic friendships? Whether we should have friendship contracts? And yes, I do refer to the iconic scene in The Real Housewives of Atlanta, where Cynthia Bailey attempts to get NeNe Leakes to sign a literal friendship contract. And then interspersed with those thematic chapters, there are what I call the friendship tapes, which are verbatim interviews with some fantastic individuals who have completely different life experiences from mine. And therefore, I was interested in hearing what they thought of friendship. If they'd been through something I couldn't possibly hope to experience or understand, if they'd been through a life-threatening moment, if they were a marginalized person, if they were an 80-something-year-old gay man, how did they remember and how do they perceive

friendship and how important is it to them? So there's lots of really interesting and beautiful perspectives there, including from a neurodivergent Iraqi woman and my 10-year-old honorary godson, Wilkie Bobin, who had some very, very, very wise insights. So that really is friendaholic. And I wanted it to feel like a friendship in a book. And I hope that that is your experience of it. If you would do me the honour of buying a copy, pressing pre-order. I would be so, so delighted and I hope that we can continue the conversation. And really, I didn't pretend to have any or all of the answers in Friendaholic. It's just a starting point to ask some questions, to check in with ourselves about friendship health in the same way as we do mental health and physical health. And actually,

it was incredibly cathartic for me. So some of the friendships in this book that I recount went awry and they're no longer an active part of my life. I did anonymise all of those individuals. They won't know who they are. That was extremely important to me. I'm very protective of all of my friendships. Everyone who appears in the book under their own name gave me the permission to do so. But I wanted to tell the truth about friendship. And so I had to excavate some really difficult memories and I had to hold myself to account and talk about my own failures as a friend. And actually, what that process did was it left me feeling such love and fondness for those former friends of mine and the experiences we shared together, the life phases we shared together. Because I firmly believe that any relationship, including a friendship, is not a failure simply because it ends.

Actually, those connections have forever changed our personal landscape and it's a bit like a volcano a volcano can be active and it can also be dormant but it will forever have changed that landscape and be part of it and actually I therefore still have a relationship with those friends who were part of my past life, even if I'm not speaking to them every single week. And also the great thing about life is that there's an opportunity for those friendships to come back in a different form. Some of the older people that I spoke to, that had happened to them. They'd had terrible friendship breakups. And then a few years later, they'd reconnected and their friendship was stronger because of that experience of rupture and then repair.

So that's Friendaholic, Confessions of a Friendship Addict. It's out on the 30th of March. And I hope that you enjoy reading it. And I hope that the next time we see each other on a street somewhere, you know that you really are one of my friends and that's how I consider you. Thank you so, so much for listening and enjoy the extract. I was once told about a man who despised small talk. If he found himself at a party, he would never ask about someone's job or comment on the weather or inquire how long it had taken a guest to get there and what route they had taken and did they avoid the traffic on the A40? Instead, his opening gambit was always, aside from work and family, what's your passion?

When I was first told this story, I admired the man's inventiveness. But I couldn't immediately think of how I would answer. What was my passion? As a teenager, I had been taught the importance of having hobbies to put on your CV in order to show you were a well-rounded person. I'd struggled to scrape any together. I went to one salsa class and hated it, but I whacked it on my CV to placate the careers advisor. My father had taken me abseiling as a child, so I added that into the mix. I played the trumpet and put that down too. Film, I typed,

because it's true that I did like going to the cinema and ordering a medium bucket of sweet and salty popcorn. The result was that any prospective employer would consider me a well-qualified salsa dancing, trumpet playing, cinema going abseiler. But I couldn't say that I felt passionate about any of it other than the popcorn. Besides, a passion is different from a hobby, isn't it? The former can be a concept, a feeling, a person. The latter involves some form of activity, occasionally with crampons. Then, two years ago, the answer came to me with sudden clarity. We were living through a pandemic, and like millions of people around the the globe I went from having an active social life to none at all I missed my friends with startling acuteness

I missed their faces, their hugs, the smell of their particular perfume I missed our chats I missed making sense of things by talking to them I had discovered my passion. It was friendship. My friends had seen me through life's unexpected turns. They had been there to support me through breakups, fertility issues, marriage, divorce, miscarriage,

job changes, home moves and more. They had given me support and kindness and good advice. And when things had gone well, they'd celebrated with me. We had laughed and cried and walked hand in hand through both hardship and success. There wasn't any language I could reach for to describe precisely what they meant to me. Most of the vocabulary around love had been co-opted for romantic relationships. I told my friends I loved them all the time, but of course I wasn't in love with them. It was more nuanced than that.

I was passionate about them. Like many passions, it had grown to obsess me. Looking back, I realised that I loved the feeling of connection so much I came to rely on it. I sought out new friendships again and again and again. I would meet a person and instantly want to bond with them in some small way. We would fall into conversation, and I knew that if I listened closely enough, I would be able to find something we had in common, a shared sense of humour or a mutual liking for a particular book or song or TV show. I would get a buzz from that moment of exchange,

a hit of pure friendship adrenaline. In that moment, I would feel worthwhile and liked and accepted. I wanted more of it. Then I needed more of it. Then it became something I relied on for my own self-worth. I must be okay, the reasoning went. I've got so many friends. At some point in my late 30s, it started to feel unsustainable. I found myself unable to keep up with all my friendships in the way that I wanted to. There wasn't enough time to be there for everyone and still maintain a functioning life. It meant that I became a conspicuously less good friend because I was spreading myself too thinly. I was trying not to let anyone down, which ensured inevitably that I did. I said yes to invitations and dinners and

shopping trips and weddings and birthdays and baby showers because I was worried a friend might be disappointed with me if I didn't. I was indiscriminate in my attentions. The most important thing, it seemed to me, was to keep saying yes in order to keep the friendships afloat. If I didn't manage that, I would be deemed unlikable. I would be excommunicated from the circle of the sociable. And if I had no friends, I would have to look honestly at myself. I would have to confront the existential loneliness of the unlovable.

That felt scary. It turns out I wasn't just passionate about friendship. I was addicted to it. I had a physical and emotional dependence. I had an urge to pursue it, even when it came at a damaging cost to my own peace of mind. I was, in short, a friendaholic. You might be listening to this and thinking, well, too many friends hardly seems like a problem. You might be reaching for your metaphorical tiny violin and your imaginary crocodile to cry the requisite tears. And you'd be partially right. Having a wide circle of acquaintances can be a wonderful thing, especially when the alternative is enforced isolation. There are those who suffer from crippling social anxiety, who have communication difficulties or live with an array of mental health conditions. They can struggle to leave the house, let alone make friends.

A 2017 report published by the counselling service Relate found that 13% of people have no friends at all. A lack of social interaction can be just as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and it can be twice as harmful to your life expectancy as obesity. But if having no friends decreases the quality and length of your life, having too many friends also has a negative impact. Researchers studying adolescent friendships have found that those with either too large or too small a social network both have higher levels of depressive symptoms. People aged 50 or over from across Europe display a similar pattern. Depression is minimised when individuals have four to five close relationships and engage in social activities on a similar pattern. Depression is minimised when individuals have four to five close

relationships and engage in social activities on a weekly basis. Any more than this and the benefits decline, disappear altogether or become actively disadvantageous. This downward spiral is especially marked in those who have seven or more close relationships. The demands of maintaining those friendships were linked to an upswing in depressive symptoms. And while there is a widely held assumption that someone with lots of friends must be a person worth being friends with, it turns out the opposite is true. People prefer to befriend someone with a relatively small social circle, rightly intuiting that if someone has an overabundance of friends, their ability to reciprocate in any meaningful or reliable way will be severely diminished. All this time,

I'd been busily making and maintaining connections, and I'd actually undermined the thing that was most important to me. I'd become a worse friend to the few who really counted, in my desperation to be accepted by the many I barely knew. It wasn't, in fact, that I had too many friends. It was that I'd misunderstood the fundamental concept of friendship, which is that it should be stable, reciprocal, and attentive. And for the purpose of clarity, my definition of a friend is someone you voluntarily want to spend time with, to whom you are not attached through familial bonds, and with whom you don't have a sexual or romantic relationship. A true friendship, to my mind, is founded on mutual respect, support, affection, and kindness. You can't be those things to everyone who enters

your orbit unless you first work out a way to reconstruct the space-time continuum. But understanding that you might be addicted to friendship does not mean you know how to cure yourself. I had no idea how to course correct. I did not know where to look for resources, for understanding, or for a lexicon of friendship itself. I didn't really know what friendship was. It was a term so diffuse as to be rendered almost meaningless. Yet, for me, it simultaneously encapsulated all that was most meaningful, and this also rendered it beyond the grasp of mere words. So I did what I always do

when I try to make sense of the world. I spoke to my friends. This book is the result. It is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and provide some of the words. It is a journey of discovery with a starting point of curiosity, and as such, it will not have all the answers. It might not have any. But I hope it asks some interesting questions and contains some thoughtful jumping-off points for bigger conversations. There are so many ways to be a friend that it's impossible to do justice to them all, especially because attitudes to friendship diverge according to background, upbringing, age, and geography. Ghanaians are more likely to advocate caution towards making friends

and to emphasize the need for practical assistance, for instance. Americans, by contrast, have larger friendship networks and are more likely to emphasise companionship and emotional support. Chinese adolescents are concerned with the moral quality of close friendship, whereas their Western counterparts focus predominantly on interaction, intimacy and keeping promises. The British and Australians value friends who are alike in outlook, with whom they can bond over similarities. In India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, people are more likely to say that a large social network is an essential quality to have in a best friend. In Kazakhstan, the 19th century poet and philosopher Abai Quinnabaila had this to

say about how to recognize true companionship. A false friend is like a shadow. When the sun shines on you, you can't get rid of him. But when clouds gather over you, he is nowhere to be seen. Friendship is highly valued in various religious traditions. In Islam, the importance of surrounding ourselves with good company is emphasised as a necessary social and spiritual construct. The Hadith encourages us to try to have as many as possible true friends, for they are the supplies in joy and the shelters in misfortunes. One of the foundational principles of Christianity is to do unto others as you would

have them do unto you. In the Gospels, Jesus prepares his disciples for his impending arrest and death by saying that greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. In Buddhism, a true friend is someone with the compassion and courage to tell us even those things we would rather not hear, with the Buddha quoted as saying that admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. But if most religions agree on the virtue of friendship, the approach to it differs according to age group. Gen Zers, born between 1996 and 2006, and Millennials, born between 1979 and 1995, are more practiced in the art of internet friendship. 33% of them feel loved after interacting with a friend online,

while only 18% of those born between 1944 and 1964 feel the same. There is no single work on friendship that could accurately convey this multifaceted magnitude, which is why this book is, by necessity, a personal take. This means that my perceptions are informed by my life, which, broadly speaking, has been a very fortunate one. I am grateful to live in an era when past injustices and systemic inequalities are beginning to be addressed, and I wholeheartedly support the idea that people like me must be aware of privilege and the advantages it has given us. Part of this privilege means acknowledging that I cannot convey every different experience of life with equal authority, and it would be ham-fisted of me to try. Where necessary,

I have asked for contributions from individuals who can speak far more eloquently to the things I cannot. We should all be allowed to tell our stories, and stories by their nature are specific. So yes, this is a personal book with personal reflections, insights, and research. Along the way, I've been lucky enough to interview a great many people with wise and interesting things to say, including five of my dearest friends, each of whom represents some different, integral aspect of what friendship means to me. You'll meet Joan, Satnam, Charmaine, Clemmie, and Emma. And there are first-person glimpses into what friendship means to others, from a neurodivergent Iraqi woman to a paraplegic filmmaker in her 30s and an 80-year-old living with a terminal illness.

They all have their own extraordinary stories of friendship to tell. As do you. Perhaps the following chapters will inspire you to tell them. All of which is to say, I hope this book is encompassing, inclusive, generous and wholehearted, that it keeps you company and entertains you. I hope you are seen in its pages and that it helps you understand your own passions. I hope, in short, that it feels like the best kind of companion. And if it doesn't, that's okay too. As I'm learning, we don't have to be friends.