Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Marisa G. Franco on How to Nurture True and Deep Connections EP 207

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Today I talk to Dr. Marisa G. Franco (@drmarisagfranco), a New York Times bestselling author, professor, and psychologist. She communicates the science of connection in digestible ways and is passionate about sharing research with the people it could help the most. Dr. Franco is the author of the NY Times bestseller Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends as an Adult. Purchase Platonic: https://amzn.to/3zmTZ83  (Amazon Link) Brought to you by American Giant (get 20% off using code PassionStruck at https://www.american-giant.com/). What We Discuss with Dr. Marisa G. Franco Dr. Franco generously shares her deep understanding of how to nurture true and deep connections. She explains why our connections underlie everything—our motivation, career, health, and sense of who we are. We discuss how to make and keep friends in a world that is filled with distraction, burnout, and chaos.  Why we as a society place more emphasis on romantic love at the expense of other relationships and the sciences that is behind the bonds we form between us—for example, why your friends aren't calling you back (it's not because they hate you!). Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/marisa-g-franco-nurture-deep-connections/  --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/Temggvj7TCc  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Dr. Nate Zinsser, a West Point performance psychologist? Catch up with episode 204: Dr. Nate Zinsser on How Do You Create a Confident Mind ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the PassionStruct podcast. Simply knowing about your attachment style contributes to changing it according to research. Other studies show over a lifetime it's actually more likely to change than to stay the same. And Platonic is just all about the science of how you can change your attachment style, how you can change that internal hardware to become more secure so that you'll be able to develop those healthy relationships no matter what happened in your past. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their

wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 207 of PassionStruck.

Recently ranked as one of the top 50 most inspirational podcasts, 2022. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly. But listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would like to introduce this to our friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs at passionstruck.com, slash starter packs, or on Spotify. And these are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here

on the show. And in case you missed my episode from earlier in the week, it featured Jeremy Utley, who's the director of executive education at Stanford's D-School, an author of the brand new book that released earlier this week, Idea Flow, the only metric that matters. My episode from last week was on digital addiction, how it's impacting human connection

and five different ways that you can break free from it. Please check both them out and if you love today's episode or any of those other ones, we would so appreciate it if you gave us a five-star rating and review, which goes such a long way in promoting the popularity and reach of this podcast. Now, let's talk about today's episode. Have you ever wondered how to make and keep friends in a world that is filled with distraction, burnout, and chaos? Why do we as a society place more emphasis on romantic love at the expense of other relationships? The science that is behind the bonds that we form between us, for example.

Why your friends aren't calling you back? It's not because they hate you. Why does making friends like cultivating any other relationship require so much effort? What is the importance of understanding your attachment style and is understanding that style, he to know him what's working and what's failing in your relationships? Dr. Marissa Franco joins us to discuss all these topics and so much more. Marissa is a New York Times best-selling author of the new book, Autonic, a professor and psychologist. She communicates the science of connection in digestible ways and is passionate about sharing research with the people who could use it most. She is an assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland. Thank you for choosing PassionStruct and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey

to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so excited today to welcome Dr. Marissa G. Franco to the Passion Struct podcast. Welcome Marissa. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you. for having me, it's a pleasure to be speaking with you. Well, I love to get the audience to know our guests and I usually open up my interviews with this question. We all have defining moments or seasons in our lives. How did you find your passion to not only become a psychologist, but to focus on the study

of relationships? My focus on friendship came out of personal experience, and I would say regret, as to how I had perceived friendships. I went through breakups in my young 20s, and I felt so bad and so depressed, so I decided to start this wellness group with my friends, where we met up, we cooked, we read, we did yoga together, and it was so healing. And it wasn't healing for the wellness per se, but more so, just being in community

with people that love me, who I loved every week. And I realized through that group that, wow, I think I took these breakups so bad because of how I perceived love. I always felt like romantic love was the most supreme form of love, that it was the love that made me worthy. It was the only love that was legitimate, and that there was no love in my life without romantic love. Here I was being surrounded by a beautiful community and discounting the importance of that and the meaning of that.

And I felt like my experience had reflected a larger culture that has placed such a hierarchy on love. And I think it's no coincidence that we're all so lonely. And to me, it doesn't make sense in such a lonely society to throw even a morsel of love away, to not see platonic love for its death and its beauty. And so I kind of just wanted to be part of the culture of leveling the hierarchy we place on love.

So that's why I wrote Platonic. Well, I wanted to congratulate you on being a New York Times best-selling author. That is phenomenal news. Well, I think before we dive deeper into your book, Platonic, the audience might be wondering, and I often have this question myself, how did you come up with the name for it?

I feel like I was just reading so much on friendship. At first, I was like, maybe I'll call it friends, like minimalism, but I started reading about friendship a lot and the history of friendship. The ancient Greeks, they really loved friendship. Like if they had a hierarchy, friendship would be at the top, not romantic love, right? And so the word platonic actually comes from Plato,

the philosopher and all of his views on friendship. And when these ancient philosophers, they use the term platonic, they used it with such reverence. Like I talk about this Italian scholar, my Celio Finochi, I think I'm getting his name right. And he talks about how platonic love is a love so deep, it transcends the physical body that because platonic love doesn't involve sex, that's actually an offering, right, is signifies that

this relationship is so deep and so profound that even when we don't have sexual acts, we still want to stay in it. And so I guess when I saw the term platonic being used, it was used with so much more reverence than how we use the term friend nowadays, especially with social media really eviscerating the term friend in general. We don't have any clarity on it. That was why I really love the term platonic. Yeah, well, I found an interesting name for the book.

It really plays into what we're going to discuss today. But it's also interesting to me that platonic love is the lowest rank of the hierarchy that culture places on love. Why is that the case? John, it wasn't always the case. Before the 1800s, people got married in the Western world. Not for love. They got married in the Western world. Not for love. They got married for resources.

They looked for a spouse whose name was respectable, right? Their family chose this person for them. In 1800s, the genders were considered so distinct from each other that the idea was that you can only find deep love with your friends who are the same gender as you. I talk about in the book how romantic love is different than sexual love, even though we tend to conflate those things. Sexual love, I want to have sex with you. Romantic love, I idealize you. I think you're the greatest thing ever. I'm

thrilled by you. I yearn for you. I'm passionate about you. Passion is key to romantic love. And that has always been a part of friendship. Still is today, I would argue, especially if you talk to two women talking about their best friends, you know, you'll hear things like soulmate. So at that time, people really had hold hands with their friends, shared beds with their friends, wrote love letters to their friends, Frederick Douglass saying, well, my friends were my tender point that shook my decision to leave the plantation. And then when we look back with our current lens, we're like, oh, was that sexual, right? But no, back then it was normal.

And what was different at that time was same-sex sexual interactions were extremely taboo. But it wasn't an entire gamut of behaviors that indicated someone's sexual orientation, right? Like now, more taboo to be too loving to hold hands with them, to share a bed with them. But none of this is sexual. And at that time, people understood that.

So people were in stigmatized for those behavior towards friends. They were only stigmatized for sex, sex with friends, right? And what change was around 1867, as people moved into cities, same sex, sexual acts began to increase. And there was a desire to sort of push against these. So these psychiatrists, Sigmund Freud, Richard Von Kraft-Eving,

they argued that same-sex love is not just an act. It defines someone's entire identity, and they have an entirely disordered identity. So thus, they created the concept of sexual orientation as a form of identity to market as a disorder. And in doing so, people began to conflate. If you're having exactly some of the same sex, what other things could it signify your sexual orientation?

You're cuddling with them, you're holding your hands, you're being too loving towards them. You're showing any interest in them at all. So then all of these natural behaviors that were just a natural part of friendship, so all of a sudden became stigmatized. And in particular for men, there's this fear that, oh, now if I show too much love towards my friends, I have a fear of something called homo hysteria, which is fear of being perceived

as gay, which really limits men and really has all's ability to have that deep level of intimacy with our friends. That's some interesting background. And I wanted to ask you before we start exploring the book. I like how at the beginning of it that you explain that how we learn is based both on knowledge and experience. And that's how you ended up writing the book was having the reader no an experience, the different things that you cover. Why did you think that approach was so important? Yeah, as a self-help book reader, constant self-help book reader, I realized that I can read this book

and hope that it changes my life, but reading is not the whole point. The point is to act, right? To do something differently in your life based off of this information. And when it comes to friendship, I think that if we want to level this hierarchy, we need to know how to navigate friendship. We have this hierarchy of love in how our society perceives friendship. But even if we wanted to level the hierarchy, a lot of us don't know how to make friends, how to deeply connect with people. This isn't something that we're taught, unfortunately.

And so I wanted to make sure each of the chapter has practical takeaways so that you're not only thinking differently about friendship, which I think is very important. It is very important that we think differently about friendship because how we think about things can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd be happy to go more into that later, right? But also to act differently in our friendships.

And for me to give you specific digestible tools so that you can show up differently in your life as a friend. Well, you touched on loneliness early around in our discussion and I started Passion Struct because I saw so many people throughout the world who are suffering and I think we have epidemics going on in the world

of hopelessness, helplessness as well as loneliness which you talk a lot about. And through this podcast, I wanted to teach people hope, meaning and connection, which plays right into our discussion today. Your book provides advice for alleviating loneliness, but I wanted to start out by discussing

why the number of friends that most people have is lower than ever before. And what is the cause that you think is creating almost a third of the planet feeling lonely? Yeah, it is a global phenomenon. There was a recent study that looked how loneliness had been increasing for the last decade or so. And found that in 35 out of 37 countries, there was increases and feelings of loneliness. This was specifically for adolescents in school, but why has it been increasing? Part of it, this is something that really started in the 1950s, Robert Putnam's

book, Bowling Alone, goes into this, with the creation of the television, before the television, leisure was a time to spend with other people, right? It was a public affair. After the television, leisure was a time to spend with other people, right? It was a public affair. After the television, people reported an increased desire in spending a quiet night at home. And the issue with the television was that watching TV actually made people more lethargic. So it was hard for them to get enough energy to go out and interact with people. The other issue with the television is that it's actually great because

it makes us feel connected enough to not feel like the pot is boiling over for me to have to look for someone to connect to. So it gives us what's called these parasocial relationships where we feel connected to someone we don't even know, right? And you can see how social media has done the same thing and amplified it. So with the creation of the smartphone around 2012, that's when loneliness really just started to spike. Spike, spike, spike. Why is the smartphone partially responsible for this? I mean, this is correlation, not causation. So I can't say for sure. And it's a nuanced conversation to John, because there are some ways to use technology for

connection, right? But the ways that we tend to use technology are not fostering connection. Like we find in the research that there's not really a straight link between social media use and loneliness because it depends on how you use it. Those people that use social media to create in-person connections are less lonely. Whereas those that use it to replace in person,

they're just scrolling through TikTok every night and they're not hanging out with anyone. Those people are the most lonely, right? It's the lurking behavior, for example, that makes us more lonely and compromise our mental health, where we're just scrolling. It's the engagement behaviors when we're reaching out to people and commenting on people's pages and showing affection to them, that actually can create more connection. Another issue with social media is that for our brain to process empathy and compassion, it needs to be at rest. Our default brain network, which is active when we're at rest, is also how we practice these very social emotions, like empathy and compassion.

If we're never at rest, it short circuits our ability to empathize, to read the emotions and others. And that's why another study found that when kids went to a camp where they didn't use their phone for a week, they actually reported increases in empathy by the end of the week. I think it's just that social media like technology, if there's opportunity costs, like when you're on that platform, you're not interacting with people, right? And so I think that's just really the dangerous place that we get in that really makes social media contribute to loneliness. How would you be using this time if you

weren't using it on your phone, right? And trying to make sure that social media is not replacing connection. And for a lot of us, it is because even reports of studies on the time we spend with friends for generations past, like this younger generation spending less time with friends than ever before because they have this alternative. And so there's just huge opportunity costs to social media that tend to increase loneliness. I know you studied at NYU for your undergrad and I know they have a ton of professors. I'm not sure if you ever had Douglas Roshkov as one of your professors, but I recently interviewed him and he's got this fascinating new book out called Survival of the Richest. And in it, he's talking about the tech billionaires and a lot of it is that the technology that

they're putting out is purposely aimed at individualality because they wouldn't be making money if it was more of a communal technology. But more so than that, his research has found that what they're doing with the technology is instead of having it be a help to humanity, he feels that in many ways they're trying to control humanity and our thought behavior. It's an interesting book, but I was gonna bring up bowling alone later on in the interview because you wrote about it towards the end of the book. You've talked about Facebook and social media in general.

For the audience who's out there, do you think Facebook friends, for example, are really friends? And the second question would be, is Instagram a help or hindrance? Yeah. Good question. Are Facebook friends really friends? In the way, if you just have a front-out Facebook, that you don't know in real life and you don't really interact with, but they're your friend on Facebook, I would say no. For me, I have a very high bar for friendship and people to find it differently, but I think that

there's a difference between good company and a good friend. To me, good company, I enjoy your company. I like you as a person, but that is not a good friend to me. A good friend is a commitment and an investment. It's I try to show up in your times of need. It's I celebrate you at your best moments. I affirm you. It's, I'm trying to help you in this thing called life for you to live the best life possible for you.

We have an overlapping sense of identity. So in some ways, what happens to you feels like it's happening to me a little bit. It's a commitment, just like any other relationship. Somehow, we think friendships is just positive vibes only. And we should never have any issues, right? But that's not what intimacy is. relationship. Somehow we think friendships is just positive vibes only and we should never have any issues, right? But that's not what intimacy is. Intimacy requires time, energy, maintenance, and there's no way to intimacy

without it. It's just that the rewards are so great that we're going to be willing to put in that time. I don't know why we have the script that friendship is somehow an anomaly in our picture of what intimacy is and what intimacy requires. Because I think we should stop compartmentalizing how we treat our romantic partners versus how we treat our friends. There should be a lot more overlap, right? So based on that definition of a good friend, I would say no, unless it's a Facebook friend

that does have these qualities. And is Instagram a tool for connection or not? Like I said before, John, it really depends on how you use it. If you're using Instagram to slide into someone's DMs and say, oh, I haven't seen you in a while. Like, oh, as you reminded me, I would love to hang out sometime, right? As a tool, as a platform to prime you to connect in person, you're going to feel more connected than if you didn't have Instagram. But if you use Instagram as a tool to prime you to connect in person, you're going to feel more connected than if you didn't have Instagram. But if you use Instagram as a tool to scroll through, look at pages of people you don't know, right?

As a passive recipient, rather than an active agent, you're going to feel a lot lonelier than if you didn't have Instagram at all. And so it's about using it strategically with intention. But John, I think most of us don't do that. So probably for the large majority of us who spend most of our time on Instagram simply lurking, then it's gonna make us feel more disconnected. You know, I have to tell you personally,

if I had the ability, I wouldn't use either one of them, but given the podcast world I live in, you have to promote these things and they're the best avenues, but you're right. I think you bring up some good guidance there if you're just passively scrolling through and looking at other people's best lives, which are typically just manufactured for social media. It is going to have a negative consequence on you. So I'm glad you address that. It is going to have a negative consequence on you. So I'm glad you addressed that. Well, before we came on, I mentioned to you, I had interviewed Dr. Cassie Holmes, recently

who's a professor at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. And she and I were talking about some of the keys to happiness and joy. And during that discussion, she brought up, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, the grant study that was done at Harvard, but for the listeners who might not be familiar with it, it's a study that started in 1938, I believe, with 283 participants at the time, they were all male because there weren't females at Harvard,

but they followed them over 80 years. And ironically, John F. Kennedy was one of the participants. And then to expand it, they then looked at 1300 of their offspring, and then they expanded it to look at underprivileged communities and some other areas. But I think it's the longest study that's ever been done. And what was interesting coming out of it is that they found that close relationships

more than money or fame are what not only kept people happy throughout their lives but allowed them to live longer. Can you tell me why connection affects who we are and who we are affects how we connect. Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. So I argue in platonic that our personalities are fundamentally a reflection of our experiences of connection or disconnection, right? Treats like if you're friendly, warm, trusting, open, aggressive, cynical. These are all predicted by how you've connected in the past.

It's shaped you. It's shaped you. It's like our personalities in some ways are a bunch of strategies to respond to a reality that we think we might face in the future based on our past. And that is also what is the sort of point of attachment theory. Attachment theory is basically the idea that in your early relationships from your parents but then evolving from there, you develop this template for how people will treat you. If A, then B, if I try to connect with you, you'll abandon me, or if I try to connect with you, we'll connect, right? Based on these early

relationships, if you've experienced, for example, these healthy relationships in the past, you become what's called securely attached, which means that you're going to continue to be able to connect in the future because that template is going to help you behave in ways that foster friendship, right? So if my template is, if I reach out to people, they'll be responsive and they'll accept me. The securely attached person then upon meeting new friends is going to initiate friendships. This is true. According to the science, it's securely attached people more likely to initiate less likely to dissolve friendships, right? If you're, for example, anxiously attached, which is you've had relationships where people have sort of abandoned you and you felt like you couldn't trust them to show up for you.

When you go into your new relationships, you are going to, this is anxiously attached brain, tends to perceive rejection when it's not there. And then anxiously attached people, what they tend to do is that, let's say a friend is hangry, they're quieter than usual. Their assumption is this friend doesn't like me. They become cold and withdrawn. They reject other people. And then people will reject them back because these other people feel rejected by the anxiously attached person, right?

And so there's this way that these templates actually become self-fulfilling prophecies because they filter reality for us, where we see what matches the template and we ignore what doesn't. And that's why if you had these previous experiences of disconnection, you may face continued disconnection because that's what you see and you don't really register those cues of safety

in the same way. And the ways that you will respond to that again by closing off and withdrawing will only further the sort of cycle of disconnection. It's very sad at the level of the body, right? When we connect with people, we release oxytocin, which is this hormone that also makes us more trusting, more generous, more what they call pro-social, more likely to do things that benefit our relationships, right? And so oxytocin is not only released when we've connected well, but it allows us to continue to connect well in the future because it makes us more pro social. And that is why the rich get richer as they say, the ones that have

healthier relationships can continue to develop them more easily. But John, I don't want to stay there in that place because people hear that and they're like, well, good for those people with good childhoods, like, what about me? Like, I guess, screw me then. And no, that's not the case. Like we can change our attachment style, simply knowing about your attachment style contributes to changing it according to the research. Other studies show over a lifetime it's actually more likely to change than to stay the same.

And platonic is just all about the science of how you can change your attachment style, how you can change that internal hardware to become more secure so that you'll be able to develop those healthy relationships no matter what happened in your past. Well, I heard you bring up two of the attachment styles. I just want to make sure,

because I was going to ask this question, that we just level set for the audience again, the three attachment styles that there are. Yeah, yeah. So I'll go through them and just share some traits that you might have that might signify which attachment style you have. So anxiously attached people, they tend to move very, their core fear is people will abandon me. So they tend to move very fast in friendships, get very vulnerable, even oversharing as a way to test whether people will kind of stick around. They see rejection when it's not there. They take things very personally. They it's often hard for them to consider the

other person's perspective that maybe they weren't able to come to this xyz because they had other things going on in their life rather than because they hated you as an interestly attached person, right? Their friendships tend to be more fragile. They make good friends, but it's harder for them to keep them. They're very conflict diverse because again, they think people will abandon them so they don't have conflict until it's really bad. And then they kind of blow up. That's some characteristics of the anxiously attached, avoidantly attached, right? You similarly fear

that other people will abandon you or betray you if they get too close to you, but your strategy is different. You decide to fight against that, you're just going to be alone wolf and you're not going to get too close to anybody. Avoidantly attach people. They tend to not put a lot of effort into friendships. They don't try. If they're friends with people, the other person is usually the person that's really keeping the friendship going. They are not vulnerable. Their friends feel like, I don't really know you even though we've been friends for a long time.

Like, I don't actually know anything personal about you. You'll hear them say things like, no one can be trusted at the end of the day, right? And they just kind of ghost. They suppress their emotions. So if there's any strong emotions that come up, if the other person is vulnerable, if there's conflict, they just sort of ghost and short circuit. Also, they can be very people pleasing sometimes, right? Because they don't want any negative emotions to come up.

They always want to keep the peace because they have a lot of trouble handling and working through negative emotions because nobody has helped them work through their emotions. They've experienced emotional neglect in childhood. Usually their go-to strategy is suppression. And then you have the securely attached people who assume that other people like them and want the best for them and are trustworthy and that they can build intimacy, right? They initiate friendships more, dissolve friendships less are very good at working through conflict. They don't blame, they don't attack, they try to collaborate and come to a shared sense of reality with the other person. They're generous, but unlike anxiously attached people, they also set boundaries. They try to think of what

does it mean to protect myself and to protect this other person at the same time. And they show a lot more affection in their friendships. But it just, and so do anxiously attached people, but anxiously attached people tend to do it so that the other person will like them. Secure people sort of love a lot more freely. I love because I just love you and I want to express this. Well, I just wanted to highlight for the audience that in the book, you've got a great checklist with a series of questions that the reader can go through. So if you want to study more about this, her book is a

perfect place to examine this in more detail. Well, speaking of the book, you write that we can have many friends, whereas other core relationships are finite. Why is that so important to understand? Yeah, it is really important to understand because one of the primary purposes of having relationships amongst many is that they expand our sense of our identity. It's called self-expansion theory in the research that when you hang out with other people, they help you know your identity more. They make your identity richer. They expose you to new aspects of yourself that may have been quiet until you met them,

right? They expose you to these new worlds. And if you're only around one person all the time, let's say I love baking. My husband's spouse does not love baking, right? I might not express that as deeply as when I'm around someone else who loves baking can talk about the flour and the sugar and the excited things that we're gonna bake, right?

So there's this way that if you're only around one person, you're only having one experience of your own identity. But when you're around many different people, each of them gives you a different experience of yourself. So you feel fundamentally richer. You feel fundamentally more full because you have this entire community. Now in the research on loneliness, we find that there's actually three different dimensions of loneliness, only one that is fulfilled by a spouse, which is intimate loneliness. It's the desire for someone you can be sort of very close and intimate with, like a confidant that she's couldn't fulfill by spouse, best friend, some people it's their family. But then you have relational loneliness, which is the desire for someone who's as close as

a friend is, right? And then you have collective loneliness, which is a desire for a community working towards a common goal. So what that means is, even if you found the love of your life, you're probably going to still be vulnerable to loneliness. Because according to this research, we actually need an entire community to feel fully whole and to feel fully connected. Well, I think I've got a great follow up question to that. And a lot of people believe

that if they fail to find romantic love, which you just brought up, it means that they're fundamentally flawed. And without romantic love, they feel like there's no love at all. Why is that such a false belief for people to have? Because we need connection in our lives, but it doesn't have to come in one form. I know that getting married gives us a slight bump in our happiness, but actually there's one study that found that single people who have a lot of connection in their life are actually happier than the average married person.

And I really worry about this mindset, right? Because if you think of loneliness, it's the subjective sense that you don't have the social connection that you want. So if society is always telling you that this romantic love, this spouse is the connection that you really want, then inevitably, if you're single,

even if you have so much community, you have so much love in your life, that social understanding is going to seep into how you perceive your reality. And you're going to feel lonely and discount all these other forms of connection that you have that are really beautiful and really rich and really abundant such as your friendships, right? I think another way that this belief, like what I talk about in my own journey was like, I always had these great friends. Why did I feel unlovable? Why did I feel like I had no love in my life, right? That this sort of, I guess, social understanding

that we have that's so narrow in terms of how it defines love made me ignore all the beautiful love that was around me, all the beautiful connection that was around me, right? And it's so harmful because if you see friendship as an inferior form of connection, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I then invest less in my friends. I'm less vulnerable with them. I don't celebrate them as much, right? I don't work through conflict with them because

I ensue friendship is trivial. It's not worth my efforts, right? And then friendship becomes trivial, but we don't look at how we behaved. And if we did, we'd see any relationship where you invest in these inferior ways is going to be a less profound relationship, right? And so that is why I think it's so central for us to understand just that we can be so much more creative about how we see connection in our society and be just as happy and just as fulfilled. Yeah, I love how in the book, you brought up this term underdog.

Because I think so often we become the underdogs of our own lives. And we do it often because we become visionary arsonists to the very things that we want to build. And I loved how you related this to friendship. And you said, friendship is the underdog of relationships. And I was just hoping you could explain that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think with Platonic, I was really concerned with expanding our scripts for friendship because a lot of us have this very limited flattened script of like once a month, happy hours or good vibes only or like, we'll go out to party together, right?

And we don't think of it as that investment and that commitment. And I think why it's so important that we expand these scripts, our relationships could get so much better, right? If we saw friendships as these relationships that can be deep and profound and were worth our efforts, and to me, all this gold entry under our feet, but we see it as cement. We don't replenish it, we don't restore it,

we don't invest in it. And so that was really why I want friendship to be so much less of an underdog in our society. And not only that, I think romantic love is beautiful and it's significant and it's profound. But I just think platonic love is too. The sort of underdog mentality of friendship, it often hurts our spousal relationships too because science finds that when you get into conflict with your spouse, it negatively impacts your release of a hormone cortisol. But that's not true if you have quality connection outside the marriage.

Studies find that if you make a friend, not only do you become less depressed, but your spouse becomes less depressed. What is going on there? There's high rates of what's called concordance between spouses mental health, which means your mental health kind of ping pongs off each other. If one person feels down, the other person is likely to feel down. If another person feels happy and is doing things that make them happy, like one of the biggest things that we know to make as happy as friends,

then that is going to improve your mood and inevitably your spouses mood is going to improve because your mood is improved. Now for people that do rely on this model of one person and friendship doesn't matter, what we see in the research is that when there's normal ebbs and flows in their relationship, there's so much more devastated and so much more impacted. Now, that's bad for your relationship because if you're in a triggered devastated state, it's going to be really hard to center your relationship again and to ground your relationship again. Whereas those people that have quality friendship outside the marriage, specifically

women in this one study, found that they're more resilient to these experiences of stress in the marriage because they have this other resource to bring them back down to their baseline, to ground them and to center them and to take them out of the stress state that we get under when our relationships aren't working out too well. And they can go back into that relationship and come from a centered place to be able to work through problems. So the fact that we see friendship as an underdog, I think it harms us. We are married. If we're not married, I just think it's making all of us more lonely than we need to be. Yes, I can tell you for myself, it's been so beneficial to have friends

who I could be vulnerable with at times when I used to be married because when you're in these long term relationships, there's many, as you said, ebbs and flows. And if you don't really have someone else that you can talk to about them and be vulnerable with how you're feeling, unless you have a counselor that you go to, I don't know how you get this off of your chest and deal with it. I mean, there's times you can talk to your spouse or your partner, but outside of that, you need to get advice and be able to have conversations with others to really analyze

the legitimacy of what you're feeling. Exactly. Or perhaps you're approaching things in absolutely the wrong way what you're feeling. Exactly. Or perhaps you're approaching things in absolutely the wrong way and you're putting blame, where the blame really should be on yourself and sometimes you need a good friend to tell you that as well. Well, we've talked a lot about why we need friends.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the impact on your health and your well-being when you don't have these friendships. And in his famous TED Talk, Robert Waldinger said, good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. Why is this the case and how the relationships make us whole? Yeah. So interestingly, we have these public health priorities that we focus on in the past. Things like weight management, things like smoking habits and cessation and diets, right? But actually social connection, according to the research, impacts how long we live

more greatly than our diet or how much we exercise. Significantly, maybe 20% more greatly than our diet or how much we exercise significantly maybe 20% more greatly than diet or exercise. Why is that true? I talked about how when we're connected we release oxytocin that hormone doubles as a fountain of youth. That's what other scientists have called it. This is like a hormone that fundamentally keeps us young. That also is comes out when we're connected to other people. But the other thing is that when we're lonely, we are in a state of chronic stress, right? It's similar to how you might feel

if you're feeling like you're about to lose your job or other things that are very just move to a new city, right? Like other things that are very stressful, like loneliness is a stress state. And you can think about this historically. If you were lonely, you were separated from your tribe and you were in danger. So you needed to constantly be weary of any dangers that were coming close to you.

Now we replicate this in our bodies when we're lonely, we are hyper vigilant for social threat. What that means is we are looking for cues that tell us that we're being rejected. When we're lonely, we want to connect with people, but we also want to withdraw from people. When we're lonely, we report connect with people, but we also wanna withdraw from people. When we're lonely, we report having less compassion for other human beings, liking people less. When we're lonely and we interact,

we tend to think about ourselves more, refer to ourselves more, not invite other people into the conversation as much. When we're lonely, we tend to act out more aggressively, right? And so what happens when we're lonely? Where our bodies are undergoing inflammation, our sleep is more poor, because we have these like micro-wakes where we're lonely where our bodies are undergoing inflammation? We are sleep is more poor because we have these like micro wakes where we're just like weary like, oh, is anything going to happen to me, right?

And so that's why I say loneliness isn't just a feeling. It's actually a state of mind. When you're lonely, you're going to think things like no one wants to hear from me. I don't want to interact with them. It's not going to be great. They're just going to reject me, right? Like nobody actually loves me. These are the ways that your brain goes into when you're lonely. It's the self-protective state instead of the pro-connection state. And that's why it can be very hard to get out of this

cycle of loneliness because just like other, I don't know, very glitchy human systems that we have, it actually activates a sort of mindset that continues to make us lonely because of brain survival mechanisms at the end of the day. Those are the biggest priority, even more so than the connection mechanism. So if our brain is like connect or survive, right, our brain is going to choose, I'm going to make you do what you have to survive, which is to be very weary and on in a state of high alert. But obviously, having to undergo this chronically over time is just completely debilitating. And that's why we find that loneliness is maybe the one factor

that most greatly predicts how long we live compared to anything else. Yeah, and I'm just going to put the percentages out there. I'm doing this for memory. The audience can cross-check me if I'm wrong. I think it was 23% is dependent on exercise. 24% is dependent on diet, and 43% is dependent on the human connections that we have. And it's interesting because I did two interviews earlier.

One was with Dr. Katie Meltman, Professor at UPEN, and then Dr. Katie Fitzgerald, who's one of the leading experts in the world on reducing biological age. And both of them said that untimely death, 40% of the time is because of our actions or inactions that we take across this broad spectrum, whether it's eating, diet, relationships, et cetera. I think what you're saying is really profound. Another interesting set of interviews I had

was I recently interviewed former monk and Hindu priest, Dada Pani, who talked about how so many of us are not present in the moment. And then I recently interviewed Professor Ethan Cross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. And in his new book, Chatter, he found scientifically that we are only in the present 30% of the time.

The other times we're looking at primarily the past, sometimes the future, but we're not where we need to be showing up. And my question for you was, why do we need to do more than just show up? Why do we really need to be present to make friends? This is such a good question, John. And I love how you put it and how you brought in that outside research.

I think of inauthenticity as a form of loneliness. And when we're inauthentic, we feel unsafe in some way. And that's what makes us less authentic. But authenticity is a state of presence, right? So to build authentic connections, we need to be present because if we're not present, we're not authentic. And that's how we form those really deep and profound connections. So let me go into authenticity a little bit more. Because in the book, I struggle to define it, right? We call it like this true self, but what is a true self? And so I've kind of found, based on the research

that authenticity is like a state of presence that we access when we feel truly safe and not hijacked by defense mechanisms, by distractions, right? So what is a defense mechanism, right? Let's say you tell me, John Marissa, you were the best friend like you told me, you're gonna come to my birthday party, you didn't show up.

The defense mechanism is, I'm gonna blame you. I don't understand, you put all this pressure on me, right? It was just a birthday, why are you making a big deal? Why do you feel so sensitive? That's a defense mechanism against the feeling that is more authentic underneath that, which is feeling maybe shame or disappointment or guilt. I don't acknowledge that feeling because I don't feel safe to or comfortable to. So instead, I leap into this defense mechanism that damages my relationships. If I'm more present, I'm able to to be in touch with that feeling that's underneath that defense mechanism. I'm able to say, hmm, maybe I feel guilty. Maybe this is making me really feel that right.

So in that state of presence, I don't leap into this defense mechanism that really, really damages my relationships with you. Right. that really, really damages my relationships with you, right? And so that is why we really need to be present with each other because it allows us to be more social, more fair. It allows us to not take out some of our issues on other people when we can be present with our own feelings. And it allows fundamentally for deeper connection because presence fosters again, a state of authenticity and authenticity, feeling like you're authentically connecting with someone, makes our level of connection so much more profound. Yeah, I think that is such an important aspect that the listeners need to take from this interview that we're doing because it does have such a profound impact on lives. have such a profound impact on lives. Well, I wanted to further go into Port Tuvier book, which are all the practices to keep and make friends. And one of the things I think a lot of people

feel, especially as we grow up, it's so organically easy to make, because they're on the playground, they're in college, they might be in the work environment. Why is it so much harder for us to develop friends organically when we get older, and why is that something that we have to move away from if we want to develop close bonds with other people? Yeah. So Rebecca G. Adams, the sociologist, she says, for friendship to happen organically, you need repeated unplanned interactions and shared vulnerability. So that's cool. I see you

every day, we go to lunch, we go to recess, we let our guard down, but in the adult world, many of us don't have that, right? At work, maybe I see you every day, even less so now that we're hybrid, but we're not really vulnerable at work. A lot of us feel like we need to be professional, we can't really share things about ourselves, and one study actually found the more time we spend together at work, the less close that we feel.

So this research sort of suggests that when you're an adult, friendship doesn't really happen organically. Like you have to try. Either someone's trying with you or you're trying with them for a connection to happen. We can't rely on the same infrastructure we had when we're kids, when we're in different environments now. And we need to acknowledge that because one study found that people that see friendship

as happening organically or based on luck are lonely or five years later, whereas those people that see it as an active intentional effort are less lonely five years later. So we need to start seeing friendship as something that takes initiative, it takes effort, it takes intentionality, I think just like a lot of us have learned

about romantic relationships, I think that's one way that we can not compartmentalize and expand our script for what is required to develop true and deep connection. Okay, and a follow-on to that, and a little bit different topic. I recently interviewed Professor Dolly Chug, another NYU professor, and she's got a new book that's out called More Just Future. And she's been studying biases for the last 20 years. How do our biases or our hidden biases impact our ability to make friends? And is there something that we can do to overcome that?

This is a great question. In the science, there's two terms, bridging capital versus bonding capital, which is bridging is like your ability to create relationships with people different from you. Bonding is your ability to create relationships with people similar to you. And we find that overwhelmingly, people find bonding capital a lot easier. Racial group people of certain racial groups tend to hang out with people that share their racial background.

This is less true for like Hispanic and Asian groups, for example, but more true generally, right? And that's why I think connection work is anti-racist work, right? Because we come from this history of really ugly, brutalized ways that we've treated others based on race. And that has really shaped our ability to interact and to connect with each other right now, such that people tend to feel more comfortable and safe with members of their group.

I would suggest if you wanna make friends across differences, there's this term that I like called habitual open-mindedness, which means that when you meet someone, don't think you know anything about them because of how they look, whether that's their gender or their race, like they are a complete blank slate,

find out who they are instead of assuming that you know who you are because they remind you of someone who looks like them in the media or someone who looks like them from your past. I think that's really important. The other thing that was emphasized in the research that I read was this concept of adjusted mutuality. And that concept is basically the idea that when we connect with people, mutuality is very healthy, which means I think about your reality and my reality at the same time, and I try to figure out

a way forward that works for both of us. Like, I'm considering both of us. I'm not just thinking of me, I'm not just thinking of you. But the research finds that when we connect across difference, we can't just rely on mutuality because our society is not equal. And so if we're relying on mutuality, like we're going to approach this, like we're the same and our perspectives are similar, right, then what's going to happen is there is interesting study that when Mexican-American summarized the hardship of white people, they didn't feel any better or more connected, But when white people summarize the hardships

they heard from Mexican Americans, they did feel more connected, right? Because like minority groups are basically have to really understand the perspective of a majority groups to survive and to thrive, right? If you're friends with people across difference and you're the person that has more privilege, you're gonna have to be a little more intentional

about hearing more and empathizing more to kind of equalize the inherent inequity that trickles into your relationship because we live in an unequal society. And so yes, if he hoves you, I think if you're a privileged group member to educate yourself, to empathize more, to ask questions, to make less assumptions. Okay, and this was another topic out of the book I thought was fascinating and that is why when we assume we're unlikable and we are consequently withdrawn and cold,

people like us more than we think. That was so interesting to me. Yeah, so this is research on something called the liking gap where these researchers had strangers interact and found that afterward if you asked them how much you thought you think the other person likes you, people underestimated how liked they were. And this study was replicated in a number of different settings

that we all have this tendency to underestimate how liked we are. And the more self-critical people were, the more that they underestimated, the more stronger this liking gap was. And so I think sometimes we think our critical thoughts are weird. I'm awkward. People don't like me. Are the truth. But this research just finds how deeply those thoughts actually distort the truth.

And that's why one of the tips I have for people when it comes to making friends is to assume people like you. And I've talked about how interestly attached people, they assume they're being rejected, then they reject others and they become rejected, right? But when you assume people like you, it's the opposite. When researchers told people, based on

personality profiles, you're going to go into this group and people are going to like you. That's our prediction. People actually went into the group, were friendlier, warmer and more open. And this was a total lie on the researchers part, by the way. This was deception. And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That mindset fundamentally changed how they showed up. And so I think for those of us wanting to connect with people and make friends, one of our biggest barriers is spheres of rejection. So remember, people are less likely to reject you than you think they will, and to assume other people like you. Okay, and then the end of the book, you talk about an interview you did with journalist Billy Baker.

What did you learn from him about making friends? Yeah, he has a great book on making friends, specifically for men, a great memoir. I think his experience was that, probably reflects a lot of men's experience that he became very insular with his wife and realized at some point he kind of had no friends and that his wife and his family were really the only connections that he had. And it's his quest to make friends and his big insight from the process was that he wasn't putting in any effort or as he put it, he had this list of things that you needed to do

to be a good person. And it was like, be a good dad, be a good husband, be a good employee. But what he realized after he took all this effort to creating friendships, reconnecting with people, trying to put himself out there. And he actually succeeded. Was that if he wanted to make friends, he had to be a good friend. He had to add that to the list so that he would prioritize it

so that he would reach out to people so that he would show up so that he would be reliable so that he would treat friendship like a priority in his life. And what came from that is when he put it higher on his list, he made more deeper connections with people. Okay, well thank you for sharing that. And I love to ask authors, if there was one takeaway,

you wanted a reader to get from the book, what would it be? Yeah, you know, I think I would bridge based off of another takeaway I shared on the liking gap that people like you more than you think. That that's true across the board. People are safer than we think because of our brains in built negativity bias where we learn from negative experiences so much more than positive. But the science tells us, for example, not only about the liking gap, but that when we reach

out to friends to reconnect, they value it more than we think they do. That when we are vulnerable, people appreciate it more than we assume. They're judging us less than we think they are. That when we share affection, it comes off as less awkward than we think, and people appreciate it more than we think. So in general, people are probably responding to you a lot more positively than what feels true for you and the world and other people are

safer than you might assume. Okay, and if an audience member would like to know more about you or learn how to connect with you, what is the best way for them to do so? Yeah, so my Instagram at Dr. Marissa G. Franco, DRMA-R-I-S-A, G-F-R-A-N-C-O, or my website, Dr.MarissaG.Franco.com. You can hire me for speaking engagements on belonging and connection within and outside the workplace, or you can take a free quiz that assesses your strengths and weaknesses as a friend and gives you suggestions on how you can continue to work on things. And if you want more, I would suggest that you buy Platonic, how the signs of attachment can help you making keep friends and please leave a review because I'd love to hear from you. Well, Marissa, they're welcome to leave reviews on the shows as well. Yes. And I'll pass those on to you.

I know we both love to hear comments from the audience about these episodes. So all those are great ways. But these reviews for authors mean so much to the popularity. They're booking, getting it out and people looking at it and seeing that it's worth reading. So please do that as well. Thank you. Well, Marissa, thank you so much for being on the show today and sharing this great book with our audience.

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome. And thank you for being a fan of the show. Yes. Thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Marissa Franco. And I wanted to thank Marissa, Alora Will, and Penguin Random House for giving me the honor of interviewing her. Links to all things Marissa will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show.

All proceeds go to supporting this show and making it free for our listeners. Videos are all on YouTube at JohnRMiles Please go check out the over 400 videos we have in exclusive content and subscribe. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm at JohnR miles on both Instagram and Twitter and you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book amazing guests like Marissa, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of a very special passion strike podcast interview I did

with number one, New York Times best-selling author Robin Sharma, who was sold literally tens of millions of books. He is recognized as one of the top five performance coaches in the world, and he is the author of the new bestselling book, the Everyday Hero manifesto. The Everyday Hero manifesto is a manifesto or a manual to help people who might be feeling stuck, let go of victimhood and show leadership,

and be productive, and be creative, and make those micro pieces of progress that over time lead to a tsunami of change. The fee for this show is that you share it with others. When you find something useful or interesting, if you know someone who's dealing with any of the topics that we discussed today, definitely share this episode with them.

The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those you care and love. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, action struck. you