How to Talk to People - How to Start Over: The Misgivings of Friend-Making

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

In the post-social-distancing era, some of us can’t remember how to make a new friend. But for many, making friends has always been a challenge—left as an unfulfilled desire without any clear course of action.  In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore the barriers to friendship formation in adulthood, how to navigate conflict, and why starting over as a better friend begins with getting out of our own heads.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.  Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Monte Carlo (“Ballpoint”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”), and Sarah, the Illstrumentalist (“Building Character”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In childhood, I was so insecure. It was made very clear to me by my peers right away that I was not cool and I would never be cool. And there's nothing I could do to be cool. So you just have to accept whatever people are willing to be friends with you. It's really strange that we don't get any, I feel like any kind of even lay education in friendmaking. I mean, there's like Cosmo for like how to get a guy to notice you. But like you don't get any kind of like tips on like making friends. And so it's really hard, especially for someone who never had a lot of friends, because you can't just like repeat what worked in the past because nothing worked.

Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at the Atlantic. This is How to Start Over. Today, we analyze a relationship that many of us need more of, but struggle to keep around. Friendship. First, our in-house friendship expert will share her insights on friendship from years of. of reporting. There was this guy who was Marie condoing his house. Again, the year was 2019. He found a sweatshirt that he had stolen from his best friend in high school 20 years ago. And so he texted the

friend and was like, hey, I would like to give this sweater back to you 20 years too late. And it turned out that they had been living a few miles apart from each other that whole time and just like never hung out. And then we talk about the science of making friends as an adult and how to get over some common hurdles to friendship. So one of the things that's unfortunate is although we keep meeting a lot of new people, we don't necessarily find people who are open to the possibility of friendship at all. Being an introvert, like I feel like I never really want to go out and I never really want to meet new people and I never really want to talk to people.

But once I do, I'm like, that felt really good. I should do that more often. I'm just curious if there's a way to make the process of that. a little simpler and smoother because I'm guessing for introverts, there's just a lot more thinking that goes on before you engage in that social interaction or you go to the hangout or you go to the drinks. Like what's kind of going through your mind before you have to meet up for a social engagement? It's like I'm probably not going to like these people. They're probably not going to like me. We're not going to have anything to talk about. I don't really have

anything to say. I'm so boring. Why am I so boring? I decided to become a journalist so that I would not have a boring life yet. Here I am being really boring. I'm feeling kind of depressed. Are they going to pick up on that and think that is like a sign that I don't like them even more than I already naturally don't like them? I have a lot of ways to talk myself out of things that aren't just like hiking and listening to music and watching TV. I will say I think a great friend can be like such a salve you can feel so like known and like loved by having a really good friend. I also think that finding and making and keeping a really good friend is very, very, very hard. I don't know. There's just more filtration that goes on in friendships.

Like you're trying to present your best self because I think people know that friendship is pretty transient. There's a certain volatility to friendship that we've discussed on the series before. Romantic relationships, there's a sense of obligation. The commitment is different. There are at least some unspoken rules about how it should go, where a friend's is so subjective that if a friend is like, hey, I'm going out of town for the summer. Like, I'm not going to see you for three months. You have to be like, okay, great. Like, enjoy your vacation. You can't express the need for them to stick around, if that makes sense.

Yeah. It's very awkward to tell a friend, I will genuinely miss you. Like, you play a role in my life. It's not easily replaced. I hope I play a role in your life too. Like, that's, I don't know. I think people who are really good at making really, really good friends, have like this skill and this ability that I just, that I am still working on that I don't really have yet. I'd been reporting a lot about friendship and it was something I was really interested in, particularly because it tends to get less attention than other kinds of relationships. A lot of the scientific literature on relationships focuses on romance or on family, parent-child relationships and there's a really small but mighty subset of researchers who study friendship.

Julie Beck is my friend and colleague and a senior editor at the Atlantic. She recently wrapped a multi-year reporting project called The Friendship Files, for which she interviewed, well, friends. How do you make a friend as an adult? And I say that literally because I don't think I know how. And like as I've gone to therapy more and more, my therapist is like, yes, I don't think you know how. And so I would like the answer to that question. I hate to say it depends.

Making friends as an adult is just different than when you're young. Like when you're young, you are literally trapped in a building all day, every day with a bunch of potential friends that are also bored. I mean, one of the main ways that people tend to make friends is just whoever you're spending time with is, more likely to become a friend. And so for kids, that's school. For adults, that's often work. People that I've interviewed for the friendship files have said that they were really surprised to make some of their closest friends in midlife. They're like, I thought the friends I had were the friends that I had. And then through whatever avenue it was, you know, for some people, it was like a parents group. For some people, it was, you know, there was a fantasy baseball camp that they

went to and now they're all best friends with their fellow campers. So I think, think it's just kind of like paying attention for opportunities when you connect with somebody and then having the intention to pursue that. There are a lot of people I spoke to who kind of blur the lines of friend and family. For instance, I interviewed this group of stay-at-home dads and they all parent their kids together and their families go on vacations together and all of these things. I also interviewed two couples who bought a house together, and one of the couples has a young daughter, and the other couple that lives with them is really involved in her life, and they have chosen to make homeownership a more communal experience. Another woman I spoke with

was a surrogate for her best friend and actually had her best friend's babies, and it turned out to be quadruplets. So it was maybe more than she bargained for. But in that case, case, her kids call the woman who gave birth to them, like, on to whoever. And she's super involved in their life. What are some of the barriers to making friends? As I have tried to make friends for my personality article, like, I felt so awkward and like basically like a five-year-old on the playground and being like, do you want to be friends with me? And like, like, there was, I would literally rather do anything else than ask another adult that question. I'm wondering if that's a universal feeling or like, or what?

I think it's fairly universal. I think much as with romantic dating and not to make too many parallels, I think there are like slow burns, right? And then there are instant connections. And if you instantly click with somebody, like, that's great. And I have heard a lot of stories about that from the friends that I've interviewed. But I think a lot of times friendships, especially as an adult when you're kind of fitting things in your skin. schedule, it does end up like dating where maybe you go on several awkward rounds of drinks,

but you kind of like them, but it's still awkward, but you like them enough to keep showing up, and eventually you get more comfortable, and it becomes easier. So let's say you want your friend or friends to play a more significant role in your life. So you want to level up from having coffee once a month to maybe not surrogate quadruplets, or you want to go from group hangs to solo hangs. let's start slow. Or you would just like to increase the frequency of the hangs. What are some ways to kind of increase the intensity, not to be weird, of a friendship

without making it weird? One piece of advice that I heard is that you just need to reach out and you need to reach out probably more than once, especially as an adult because friendships do tend to fall by the wayside and midlife. Like that's something that's kind of been documented. People get busy with work. people get busy with their, you know, family responsibilities. And because of the way society, you know, sort of prioritizes friendship, many of us, that's the first thing that we will drop if we

just simply don't have the time for everything. And so I think people really appreciate it when someone else takes the initiative of setting something up a time to socialize that they didn't have to put any energy into. I know I personally tend to get discouraged. If you're not, I try to set something up with someone and it falls through or they flake on me or something came up and it doesn't actually work out. But I think maybe we read more into that than we should because life is so busy. And if you really do want to prioritize friendship and level up that friendship, you might need to reach out multiple times and just know that you're not being annoying. It's probably really appreciated. So from all of your reporting and all of your interviews,

What are some of the most creative ways that you've seen people make friends and keep friends? And, you know, I'm hoping maybe listeners can steal some of these ideas for themselves. I think as of when this podcast will air, I'll have done 100 interviews with friends, groups of friends. And there have been a lot of interesting ways that people have met. There was this guy who was Marie Condoing his house. He found a sweatshirt that he had stolen. from his best friend in high school, like 20 years ago. And so he texted the friend and was like,

hey, I would like to give this sweater back to you 20 years too late. And it turned out that they had been living a few miles apart from each other that whole time and just like never hung out. Sometimes it's been circumstances beyond people's control. Like the most creative one I probably have heard was an interview I did recently where this woman decided she wanted to create an arranged friendship group. like basically like arranged marriage. You know, she came from a culture where arranged marriage was common and said that, you know,

she knew tons of relationships that had done really well that started in that model and she wanted to bring it into friendship. So I guess what she did is just kind of go up to women that she knew casually or one of them was someone she met like at a conference and just ask them if they wanted to join this arranged friendship group and they all said yes. And then they had like a ceremony, like they all got together at her house and they had a ceremony where they essentially said like, we are committing to be friends to each other and like that's what this means. So they sort of started from the premise of like, okay, I'm going to show up for these people who I may not even really know that well and let it grow from there. What I've observed in my interviews is when I speak to groups of all male friends, they are so hungry. to tell me how much they mean to each other. Like, they just feel, like, it feels like something that they maybe haven't had a chance to say as much or that nobody has asked them. Like, they just seem like very, very eager to, like, talk about how deeply they love their male friends.

And not that the women friends I speak to don't also love each other deeply and tell me about it, but I think they're more used to having that conception and talking about their friends that way. Like, of course I love my friends. like, of course they're this important to me. And I think that our society has more of an expectation with male friendships that they are shallower or, you know, there are studies about how they're based around activities and not around shared intimate moments. And maybe that's true. But I do think that the male friends I've spoken to have gotten emotional and, like, wanted to tell me about how important it is.

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And is there anything we can do about it? Am I the only one struggling to make friends in my 30s? So I think people are responding to the idea that it was easy to make friends, but they're forgetting that their whole life was kind of built on this idea of easy access to people who might be open to developing a friendship. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, walk me through not only what it takes to make a friend, but how to maintain a good one. Jeffrey helped me realize that being a good friend to others is equally as important as knowing how to keep one around. So I generally look at this idea that there is a period of time between adolescence and young adulthood from basically 15 to 25 years of age, where you are going to get the most relationship partners

are going to have it in your entire life. During that time you're going through developmental changes where it becomes really important for you to figure out whether or not you're going to pursue a certain career, whether you're going to be a certain kind of person, you're exploring your sexuality, you're exploring your sense of identity. But there's another piece there, which is that period of time is marked by an incredible number of people around

that could be friends. You're surrounded by same-sex friends in your sports teams and in all of these different school environments. You're going to have more cross-sex friendships at that period of time than you may never have again. and during that time between 15 and 25, you have time on your hands. And then from that point on, you actually begin to lose friends over the rest of your life. Oh, no. Oh, my God. That's so depressing.

Yes. Oh, no. Wait, okay. So I want to really unpack that. So I have been trying to make new friends as an adult. What are some of the, you know, in the academic literature, or from what you've found, what are some of the barriers to making friends as an adult? It's actually one of the things that's kind of scary, it's given no, no, right? Is that we actually lose about a friend per decade of our lives after 30 years old. So one friend per decade.

We know from several different research studies that the reason that people tend to actually lose their friends in their midlife has to do with really important accomplishments in their lives. They get married, they have children, you know, they find someone they want to settle down with and share their space and time with. They find a career that takes them across the country. So study after study has confirmed the idea that those are barriers to friendship is moving away, getting married, having children, and becoming really dedicated to your career.

I'll push against the possibility of forming new friendships. And this is also in a context where amount of time that you have goes down, right, because you're spending more time with people that you love, that you've met in your relationships or maybe through your children, but also more time that you're spending with people who are of many different age groups at work, many different sort of backgrounds. And all of them don't necessarily have the time that it takes to make a friend with you.

So one of the things that's unfortunate is although we keep meeting a lot of new people at that period of our lives, we don't necessarily find people who are open to the possibility of friendship at all. Wow. Okay, so here's something I have been struggling with is how do you actually make a friend as an adult? And I ask this, I know it sounds like, you know, what are you from Mars? But it's like I, you know, I feel like in high school or in college, you know, you bring a frisbee to someone's dorm room and you're like, hey, want to toss this around? Like, hey, want to go to that Sigma Chi party on Friday?

You know, like, it's kind of like you just have a lot more opportunities to spend time together. But now it's like, are you free on Thursday at 7.30 p.m. And like, can we meet at this bar? And like, do you have child care? I can't find parking. You know, what are the best practices for making a friend as an adult? I don't know. I think people are responding to the idea that it was easy to make friends,

but they're forgetting that their whole life was kind of built on this idea of easy access to people who might be open to developing a friendship. Yeah, the solution is to quit our jobs and go like live on a commune, I think. I'm kidding. If you can find a way to sustain life that way, let me know. I find myself more drawn to people who have similar experiences as me just because like a lot of our friendship is going to be like getting drinks and talking about what we're going through. If we have nothing, no shared experiences in common, I feel like it's going to be

harder for us to really make those friendship bonds. But I don't know, have you found that as well? I would say that similarity is a crucial crucial force. It doesn't matter what time of life, even very small children prefer similarity of activities and bringing them together. But I think adult friendships are different in the ways that you mention because what's not common is for people to have a shared experience that's external to them, there is one key suggestion that I would add to that that you didn't mention. There's a lot of really good reason to think that people are able to make friends if they actually go join organizations or do things that are by choice, right? So, for example, I took up Taekwondo seven years ago because my son and I did it together and I liked it so much, I stayed with it. And the people who are there I see a couple times a week.

Most of them are people who have been around for several years. I talk to them a little bit, but mainly we do the exercise and activity together. But I would count some of those people as my friends and they're new friends. And it's great as they're people I don't have to talk about with work. I don't have to just kind of have those conversations. Instead, I can kind of just get to know them on their own terms. So I think what's kind of important about that is that you can take active steps that aren't like, I have to pick a friend, which is tough.

Instead, you can say, I'm going to go do things that there are people who are going to be there over and over again, and they're likely the same people. that's an opportunity to make friends. I think a lot of people have this idea that I would like more friends. This is something that I want, but it's really hard to prioritize making friends. And I'm wondering why it's so hard for adults to prioritize that. Even though I research these things and I've spent over a decade thinking about friendship and writing about it, I have to like remind myself too.

I actually have on my list of things to do like write friends or make an appointment. I do not lack for outstanding friends in my life, and I feel very lucky. But I'm also cognizant of the fact that this takes a constant level of work. And it's a kind of work that's actually not dissimilar to the kind of work you have to put into building a really good nutritional habits for your health or building really good exercise habits. It's rewarding. It's extremely good for your life satisfaction, your well-being, and your health in the long run, but it's still work.

Most of the time we do what's called negatively forecast. It's a negative forecasting error, meaning we expect something. that is going to be much less pleasant than we actually are in practice. With a friend that's similar, you're like, oh, man, I have a hard day at work. I don't want to go out. I got to go find parking in D.C. and it's a freaking mess. But then you go out and you're with them like, oh, my God, I'm so glad I did that. I am happy that I spent it.

And my research would suggest for days afterwards, you carry the benefit of having connected with somebody with you. I think that in some sense, it's absolutely normal that people feel these ways. and it's even more understandable that they feel that way when they're doing it online or on the phone. But I think the fact that some conversations are just hard to catch up on has a lot to do with the idea is

it's easier to be in touch with people we're in touch with than to be in touch with people we're not. So one thing I'm wondering about is if there's any research from you or anyone else on how to tell if someone wants to be your friend. Like, what's the difference between someone saying, yeah, I'll get coffee with you

and like you have a good coffee and you're like, great. And then you ask them out, I mean, should you ask them out again as a friend and like twice in a row or should you wait for them to ask you? It's very confusing to me. Yeah. You know, one of the other ones that's really confusing is in the United States, we're constantly saying, oh, we should get together or I'd love to do this again sometime.

And you can't tell if people mean it. You're like, maybe they mean that. I don't know if they mean that, you know. And then they certainly don't follow up, which suggests that they didn't mean it. So it's really confusing to actually know what are the signals that says this person is available to continue to work in that relationship. I think in some ways one way to think about it is that it kind of doesn't matter. And what I mean by that is that if you had a good experience with someone and you, by choice,

went and had coffee with them and you enjoyed that interaction, you should do it again. Like, it kind of doesn't matter whether or not they initiate or you do. One thing I've become very sensitive to as I've studied these things is that there's a large group of people who really, really appreciate being asked, but are really terrible at asking. So I think in some ways it's good not to get too caught in our own heads about what's the right set of protocol and instead recognize that prioritization of it simply means you keep doing it and even if it's not perfect. Wow. Doing things even if it's not perfect is not my strong suit. But I will aspire to that. So one of your most interesting studies is about the number of hours that it takes to actually make a friend. So I was wondering if you could talk about what you found a story. as far as like how long it takes until someone is technically your friend with a capital F.

So I did two sort of studies, one that looked at this idea of people who had geographically relocated in the United States, usually for work, sometimes for other reasons, and asked them in the last six months. So they had to have moved within six months. In the last six months, have you met anybody new? And if so, how much time you've spent them this week and how much time do you spend with them on a usual week? And then what kind of relationship do you have with them?

And the other study I did was on college freshman here at the University of Kansas. And I got them within two weeks of when they arrived at KU. And then I said, first, who have you met, right? Who do you think has potential in terms of people that you've met in terms of developing friendship? So I looked at kind of a natural progression of friendship over that time. So it takes somewhere between 40 and 60 hours to develop a casual friendship. And one really critical thing I want to get across is it is not the case that 40 to 60 hours with somebody means they're your friend. Absolutely not.

in both samples there were cases in which that people spent hundreds, hundreds of hours with someone and said, this is just a workmate, right? We work together, we're not friends. Or this is still just an acquaintance, even after all of that time together. Time is not, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition for developing friendship in my argument. The other thing that I'd say is that varied a lot. So that 40 to 60 hour range is a range that said that essentially you didn't see people saying, this is my casual friend before 40 hours,

but you were more likely to find it after that period of time. The big one was spending time hanging out just for the sake of their company, like eating and drinking together. Yeah, so I wanted to move on to a burning topic for me and my producer, which is how much you should tolerate friendships that have serious flaws. There's this kind of like strain of thinking now

that it's like you need to take care of yourself and avoid, you know, toxic people or codependent friends. Are you of the school that, like, just kind of accept that people are human and they have flaws and you have a history with someone just try to stay friends with them? Are you supposed to kind of reevaluate your friendships and be like, this person is really not the right friend for me? How much are we kind of supposed to unconditionally accept or love our friends? You know, one argument is the very definition of a friend is being there,

when they need us. So if they need you and you're able to be there for them, you know, it may make an enormous impact in their lives. I mean, I would just consider the fact that there are people out there who's like there's one in nine Americans who have no one in their lives who they would name as a close person they can confide in or they can really rely on beyond someone who is related to them or married to them. So there's a lot of people out there who are in need of friends. So in some sense, I think it is important to keep in mind that too much discourse that says that we should only focus on ourselves and our own needs and otherwise, may kind of muscle out the realities that there are people who are struggling with serious issues of loneliness and

isolation. There are people who, you know, like all of us, kind of suck. We're not great people, but people deserve to have friends, you know? And I might point out is when people need you is also probably when they're at their worst, you know, they're probably not reciprocating conversation, right? So you're doing all the listening and they're doing all the talking. they may be going through a really bad period of time where they're self-focused or they're making bad choices and you kind of want to tell them to knock it off and quit being an idiot. So I think what's really hard about this is that on one hand, I really do worry that we don't want to build too much of a self-focused attitude

about kind of avoiding toxicity or cutting everybody out in our lives to forget the realities that we're all imperfect. We're all kind of lousy sometimes. So too much self-focus may forget the idea that what really makes people happy in the long run in the life satisfaction kind of way not in the near term it feels good kind of way it's kind of enduring through another person's struggles yeah i mean that's such a good point and i wonder what the line is between being a therapist and being a good friend i don't know do you do you know if people should sort of say i get that you're having a really hard time right now but you're

completely dominating our conversations and i'm having a really hard time enjoying our get-togethers? Is that a reasonable thing to say? One of the very first studies that I did was on gender differences in friendship expectations. And one of the things that I was really inspired by in that was the idea that there are different kind of priorities that more masculine and feminine ways of behaving in friendship really kind of occur. And I use the words masculine and feminine here to not say masculine is only done by men and feminine is only done by women, but these are two ways of being in friendship. And a way of being in a masculine way of knowing is one who's going to like cut to the chase,

but also do things like prioritized having a good time and not taking things too seriously and brushing off problems. But it also comes with the downside of a lot of times people being dismissive or diminishing of another person's hurt. Feminine ways of knowing and friendship, particularly, involves that self-disclosure, that comforting and that buffering of stress that comes from really good friendship. But it comes with a risk, which is what's called co-rumination. and a lot of times you'll see two people who are over problem focused, going back over the same problem over and over again. So both ways of being in friendship have value,

but both ways of being in friendship actually are diminishing. So in the case of being able to find that balance where you cut someone off, I would say in both cases it's possible. We were both wondering, my producer and I, we're both wondering whether you should ever break up with a friend and if so what the right way to do that is. I know people who just ghost their friends. I know people who send a long email.

You know, what's your take on this? Yeah, I mean, I think people should break up with their friends. I do, actually. You know, the first thing I'd say is, like, there are certainly transgressions beyond the pale. You know, the most common ones are, like, true violations of your privacy or your confidentiality, you know, basically sharing your secrets with other people. Difting away is actually pretty normal in friendships.

And I know people hate being ghosted. but I'm of the opinion that a lot of times being able to be, you know, kind and still compassionate towards another person, but not necessarily being like, here is a letter of my grievances and I want to address them. I'm not sure that that necessarily is going to get you where you want to go. And it may just end up being something that in the long term says things more directly and more hurtfully than you may have ever wanted them to be said.

Yeah, what's the best way to, like, I guess do conflict resolution within a friendship? Because friendships are relationships of choice, rather than ones that we are obliged or legally required to have like a married partner, we don't actually have to go through the process of fixing our conflicts with our friends. They don't have those open conversations. Instead, they tend to stew on things that they're upset about. Open communication about the things that hurt you, especially if there was something that they could apologize for or something that they may have not intended, it's good to start out with this idea of, yeah, I'm hurt, and I don't want to lose your friendship over. this, but it's been bothering me. You want to give people an opportunity to explain themselves and treat them with the kind of trust and integrity that your friendship deserves, meaning you want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn't do it intentionally or hurtfully, but may have done it

neglectfully or in a way where they weren't paying attention to your needs, which is human. However, if it comes to pass during that conversation, they don't want to take any responsibility for it, or they start kitchen sinking you, you know, start blaming you for all the ways that you're wrong. And otherwise, that that may be a pretty clear moment in which that the relationship can't be repaired. But if it's really something that they actively did to hurt you, that's a little different, right? That's different than they're bad at keeping in touch or they're always talking about themselves or they're kind of, you know, they're not being fully present because they're distracted or really not available to me and the way I'm available to them. Is it worth something to actually bring up?

Because chances are any conflict is a two-way situation. Right. You want to give them an off-ramp. Totally. I like that as an idea of an off-ramp. You want to be able to de-escalate as fast as it escalates. And an off-ramp may just simply be, you know, I know that I wasn't great or I wish I hadn't said that or I went too far. So those are all very useful kind of off-ramps to make another person feel as if that they're being heard or at least have a chance to apologize. Well, this has been so profound and helpful. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. These things are personally really important to me. And I feel like in some ways I'm kind of an evangelist for friendship. Yeah, we could really use that these days. What are some universal principles of friendship that you've learned by doing this project? Like, what can we do to be better friends to each other?

I kind of landed on six forces that help people to form friendships and maintain them throughout the years. Accumulation is the most obvious one, just simply the amount of time you spend with people. Attention, which is really just paying attention to when you click with someone, And many of the people who I spoke with found friendship in unexpected places. For instance, there was a woman who stayed friends with her ex-boyfriend's mom for 30 years, and they're very close. And then I also added intention. So attention only gets you so far. You really have to deliberately act.

I think a lot of times we have to court our friends a little bit, woo them a little bit. And even once they're established, we still need to put that effort in to make sure that they continue to grow. Another force that I noticed in a lot of friendships is ritual, just the effort of scheduling things. And that can be as simple as like a dinner party, a book club, a monthly hike. I talked to some friends who've been playing the same Dungeons and Dragons game for 30 years. The next force is imagination. Friendship is often on the sidelines of our culture, playing second fiddle to romance into careers. There are a lot of people out there who are imagining something different for themselves.

If you don't want your friendship to sort of default to this norm, I think it does require some imagination and some creativity. And that doesn't mean that you have to buy a house with your friends or, you know, raise your children with your friends or, you know, raise your children with your friends. or be a surrogate for your best friend. And then the final fourth is grace. And the way I think about that is everything that I've set up to this point is an ideal. We can't always live up to that. Forgiveness and the space that we offer each other to be imperfect and not to resent or judge each other when life gets in the way.

And then I also think about grace in the more spiritual sense of just a gift that is so huge and profound that you could not possibly deserve or earn it. And I do think that friendship is that. The wonderful thing about some of the friends who I spoke with is, you know, they love each other so much that they nominated themselves to be interviewed about how great their friendship is. And they would still say, yeah, we don't see each other as much as we would like. We don't talk as often as we would like.

That was not a one-to-one indicator of how important that person was to them, right? how often we are able to see someone isn't always commensurate with how much we actually love and care about them. It was an area of my life that I really struggle with. And it was funny because I was recently hanging out with a friend who were only friends because she made 100% of the effort and like lucked me out of nowhere was like, hello, I would like to get drinks with you. You seem cool.

We got drinks. She did that like probably like five more times. So now we're friends because of her. I was like complaining to her. I was like, it's really hard to make friends in D.C. And she was like, it's very easy to make friends in D.C. She's like, I've initiated every hangout we've had. That's how this happens.

She's like, I think it's hard for you to make friends in D.C. And it's honestly because I don't try very harder. Like, I have not been in the habit of trying very hard. Is there anything from that friendship that you took away and maybe eat? Now that you ask. Definitely she, like, provides a good. blueprint for how to make someone your friend. But also, I always thought, like, people will be annoyed at me if I asked them to hang out too much. I was never annoyed at her. I was always,

like, really happy to be asked. It's, like, nice to be wanted. And, like, I feel like I totally underappreciated that nice to be wanted feeling that people get when you ask to be around them. That story was just interesting to me, because it seems like she clearly, like, is very well-versed in friendmaking and is so comfortable with it, that, that's, you know, Not in an inconsiderate way, but she didn't think through how it would make you feel or how it would be on the receiving end. She was just like, I need to make a friendship happen. And I really like this girl, Olga, and I'm going to make it work for me. I just think the two opposing approaches to friendship were really interesting.

I mean, thank God for people like that, because otherwise I would still be like a hermit. And she also introduced me to like a whole bunch of other people. And like, I just like sit in my house and look at Netflix until someone invites me to go do something. I kind of reached this point. like this sad little four-year-old, like wandering around D.C. asking people if they'll be friends with me. I will gladly be friends with you, Olga. You don't have to ask and wander around. Thank you. That's all for this week's episode of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ibaid. Fact check by

Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. special thanks to Adrian LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.