Speaking of Psychology - Why is it so hard for adults to make friends? With Maris Franco, PhD

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

As an adult, making new friends – and maintaining old friendships – can be tough. Life is busy and friends end up taking a backseat to other relationships and responsibilities. Dr. Marisa Franco, psychologist and friendship expert, talks about how to make new friends and strengthen and rekindle old friendship ties, why Americans’ friendship networks are shrinking, the differences between men’s and women’s friendships, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you were a kid, making friends might have seemed easy and natural. You were surrounded by potential playmates at school and on the playground, and friendships just seemed to happen. And college may have been another situation where friendships easily blossomed. But for many adults, making new friends and maintaining old friendships is more difficult. We're all busy with work or partners, child care, and other grown-up responsibilities, and friendships often end up taking a backseat to the other priorities in our lives. Why is that? Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult?

And why don't we prioritize friendship more? If you want to make new friends, what's the best way to do it? What about strengthening and rekindling old friendship ties? What are the essential ingredients of being a good friend? And how do you know which friendships are worth the effort to maintain? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Marissa Franco, a psychologist and friendship expert who is working on a book about friendship called Plotonic due out later this year. Dr. Franco is a counseling psychologist and an assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland. She was previously an assistant professor of psychology at Georgia State University. She writes a blog on friendship for psychology today and has also written for or given interviews about friendship to many news outlets, including Scientific American and the New York Times to name just a couple. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Franco. Happy to be here.

Thank you so much for having me. Let's start with a question I posed in the introduction. Why does it seem like it's so much harder to make friends as we get older? Is it that we're busy with adult responsibilities or is there more to it? I think that it's the context that we're in. So sociologists have argued that there's a few ingredients that need to be at play for friendship to happen organically. And that's continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.

And we have that when we're younger. You know, like at school, we're on the playground. We have recess. We have all these clubs. But as we move on into adulthood, we're not in a lot of environments that allow for continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. I mean, like, work gives us continuous unplanned interaction, but often there's professionalism norms where people aren't actually sharing a lot about themselves. And so that really impedes connection. And so I think it's just

that we no longer find ourselves in the environments that have the right conditions for friendship, unless we intentionally seek them out as adults. Is there an age when this becomes particularly a parent or some stage of life when people realize that it's gotten harder to make friends? Yeah, I mean, I would argue that it tends to start after college where you no longer have those, that environment. But what we see in the research is that people actually have the most friends in their young to mid-20s and then it tends to taper out over time. Some of this is actually arguably good. There's a theory called the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis, which which basically argues and finds that as we get older, we focus more on quality rather than quantity because

we're thinking, you know, I have X amount of time left and when I spend it with people that really matter. Whereas when we're younger, we're focused on expanding our sense of identity. So we're just like, I'm going to be open all different types of people who are going to show me new and different things. So just what tends to happen is that we shrink our circles over time, but I'm not exactly sure if that's because it's getting harder or because we're also doing so intentionally. So in a recent article, you referenced a study that found that people on average have fewer friends than they used to. Friendship networks seem to have shrunk over the past several decades. Why do you think that's happening and is that a problem? Absolutely. I mean, the recent research has found,

and this was conducted in the pandemic. So that's a caveat that compared to like decades ago, people are four to five times more likely to have no friends. And it's worse among men compared to, I think it was like a few decades ago, like early 90s. The amount of men that have no friends has, has risen fivefold and fourfold for women. And so other meta analyses and meta analyses just combined research amongst a bunch of different studies have been finding that our friendship networks have been decreasing over time. And I think that this is a crisis. It's a public health crisis because, you know, loneliness is as toxic for our bodies as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, the science finds. For our longevity, actually, our social connection matters more than even our

diet and our exercise according to various meta-analyses. And so having friends, having connection for us as social creatures, it's just central to our health and also just central to our sense of identity, for us to feel like ourselves, for us to be able to explore who we are. Often we find pieces of ourselves and other people and we begin to incorporate that and that's how we feel enriched and that's how we feel full. And so I think as our friendship starts to decline, we're going to see more health issues alongside feelings of just like social unease or sort of like identity issues. So in your writing, you offer advice for people about how to make new friends and how to maintain friendship. So let's start with the first. What do you advise people who really want to

make new friends, say someone who's just moved to a new city and is feeling lonely, doesn't know anybody? Yeah. So for people to make new friends, I recommend initially. We tend to rely on this myth that friendship happens organically so we don't put ourselves out there. But actually the science finds that people that see friendship as something that doesn't take effort are more lonely over time, whereas those that see friendship as taking effort are less lonely. And that's because they make the effort. I think the biggest problem is that we tend to be so self-defeating. We tend to fear rejection. We tend to think that, you know, if I reach out, they won't want to talk to me.

but in fact, that's a bias that we all have. It's not necessarily true according to the research. There's a study on a phenomenon called the liking gap wherein the researchers had people interact. And afterwards, each person was asked, hey, how much do you like the person that you interacted with? And the study actually found that people underestimated how like they were by the other person. And the more self-critical people were, the more pronounced this bias was to underestimate how much people like them. And so my advice to people who are thinking about initiating a little bit more is to get into the right mindset, which was going to require you to begin to assume that people like you. And then going out there and initiating with new people is going to look a lot easier. And just to make this super practical, what does this look like?

Simply saying a line like, hey, I really enjoyed talking to you. I'd love to stay connected, exchanging contact information, following up from there. So we just have to put ourselves out there, really take the risk and repeat. the benefits. Yeah, take the risk, reap the benefits, and believe that there will be benefits. Maintain your optimism, because if you're self-defeated, it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So what about someone whose concern is more about maintaining and deepening friendships rather than making new ones? Maybe we're talking about a new parent who's working full-time and finding that old friendships are falling by the wayside. What are some tips for them?

Yeah, so you want to create your own continuous unplanned interaction. So I would say, schedule a monthly meeting on your calendar for you and your friend to catch up and put it there so that it's there and you don't have to figure out when can we find the time. It's there automatically so that you can find that time to connect. Other things that I would suggest is taking that assuming people like you and applying it to old friendships you want to rekindle too, right? Because often we don't reach out to these old friends because we're sort of like, oh, maybe they're not interested.

They've moved on. they have all these other things going on in their life, they're too busy. But instead, hey, they're probably like wanting to hear from me and they're probably wondering about me too. And that being the mindset that can allow you to actually reach out to some people that you want to connect to. The other thing that I would say is as we become more busy, one way to keep friends is to incorporate friends in a goal that you would like to set for yourself. So maybe that's like, I want to walk more and finding time to go on walk with friends or I want to eat healthy. finding time to cook with friends because that gives you something to anchor your friendship around. That gives you the excuse. That gives you the regularity of the interaction. That's really important

for maintaining the connection. So to follow up on that, how do you know that a friendship is worth investing that kind of effort in? I mean, this is really the $64,000 question. What makes for a good friendship? Yeah. I mean, early signs of reciprocity are very promising. Like you reach out and they're also reaching out to you. What's really important for friends is people that are rooting for your success. When you share good news, are they happy for you? Are they excited for you? Research studies actually find that this predicts how satisfied we are in the relationship, even more so than whether someone shows up for us when we're sad. So that's really important. We want someone who is looking out for us, wants the best for us. The other thing is, I really love this concept. It's called identity

affirmation. And that means we look for friends who support us in becoming the person that we want to be rather than imposing who they think we should be on us. Right. So someone who's high in identity affirmation, if I tell them, oh, I want to quit my job and take an intensive Spanish class in Mexico, right? They might think, oh my gosh, I would never do something like that. That's so risky. But they would understand that these are my values, right? That this is what I enjoy adventure. And so they would be able to say, I'm so happy for you. I want to support you because I understand that that aligns with your goals. And that's actually been found to predict whether best friendships maintain over time, do we provide that identity affirmation? The other thing that's just really important

is perspective taking. Unhealthy relationships, toxic relationship. Often there's a breakdown in perspective taking. I'm thinking about my needs. I'm not thinking about your needs. So just for an example, an interview that I did in my book, this woman got sick during the pen, She wasn't sure what it was. She was supposed to go to a dance contest with her friend. She says, I can't. I have some serious illness. It's a pandemic. Her friend says, I can't believe you abandoned me. You're a horrible friend. That friend clearly is only thinking about her needs. I want my friend to show up to this dance competition, but not thinking about her friend's needs at all. And so healthy relationships, we want to find people who balance their own needs and

our needs and try to collaborate and figure out how to navigate things in a way that is a win-win and suits both of us. You know, there's a lot of talk these days about ghosting people who just sort of drop out. You thought things were going well and all of a sudden they're not returning your calls and texts. How do you know when you've been ghosted and it's time to just give it up that this person is somehow giving you a signal but not a straightforward, I don't want to see you anymore? So it's really hard because honestly, friendship more than any other relationship tends to be a relationship of so much ambiguity. And that's because, you know, in our, in our marriage, we have this formal contract where we're connected and our family, it's blood. But friendship,

it's just you don't quite know what the expectations are and you're always just trying to figure it out. And so when it comes to ghosting, I like to maintain an air of optimism. If I haven't heard back from someone, I like to assume they're busy and, you know, give them that grace and not take it as personally. And I think that's a good starting assumption. I think when you take a step back and look at the larger landscape of the friendship, does this ghosting reflect a larger lack of investment or interest in the friendship, right? How are they showing up when we interact one-on-one? Are they willing to interact one-on-one? Are they willing to interact face-to-face? And do they seem interested, engaged? Do they affirm me when we're interacting one-on-one?

All of that is information and the sort of not responding to your text message should be a data point within the larger realm of information, right? The fact that someone didn't respond to your text message alone does not indicate that they're trying to go send you or end the relationship. So I just think it takes us taking a step back and evaluating the landscape of the friendship more broadly to try to figure out what's going on. And I say, like, people are so afraid of conflict and friendship to the extent that they'd rather just end the friendship, right? but actually the science finds that when we have open empathic discussion of issues in our relationships, we tend to experience more intimacy. And so if you're just avoiding conflict, you might actually be harming your friendships,

actually, because I think a lot of people avoid it because they think, oh, it's better this way. You know, I'm not going to bring this up. I'm not going to cause all this tension. But the tension is already there. The question is whether you can work through it and have that opportunity or not. And so that's another thing. if someone's ghosting on you and you're not sure, I would just invite a conversation.

Like, hey, I haven't heard back from you. Not sure if that's because something might be going on. But if so, I just wanted to welcome you to bring up any concerns that you have because I'm here to listen. So again, I mean, it's really about putting yourself out there and taking a little bit of a risk and hoping that you get a good answer. Absolutely. I mean, connection is this sort of schism of being the most risky thing we feel like we can

engage in, but also the most nurturing and important. thing we can engage in. It's both petrifying and gorgeous at the same time. So I want to go back to something that you were talking about a little while ago, the differences between men and women and friendships, and especially what you were saying about men, which struck me as being very, very sad. I've seen articles in mainstream media that talk about how women are better at making friends and maintaining those friendships. Is there research that backs that up? Yeah. Well, there is science that finds that men just tend to be less vulnerable in their friendships. And vulnerability we find in the science, the more people disclose vulnerably about themselves, the more liked they are.

And people feel more connected to people that disclose vulnerably. And so while we may fear vulnerability for its potential liabilities, like, oh, someone can use this against me and exploit me, in fact, the more likely outcome, according to the science, is that it's going to cement the connection and bring us closer. And so I think a lot of the times men's friendship issues are actually vulnerability issues in disguise. There was this really interesting Atlantic article that talked about how men often need a third object in their friendships.

They're watching the game together. You know, they're playing a sport together. And that is a way to avoid vulnerability by having a third object to focus on. But again, to the great detriment of the friendship. But I also have to point out there's this phenomenon called homo hysteria. which is men's fear of being perceived as gay. And so what that does to men is they feel like they can't do all of the behaviors necessary for connection because that might come off as gay.

And so I've even heard men say, I can't even initiate with another guy. I can't say, hey, I'd love to hang out because he might think I'm interested in him, like sexually. And so because of this way that we conflate absolutely any sign of interest or affection with some sort of sexual interest, that leaves men in a real bind where they feel like, oh, I can't engage in this relationship at all because then it's going to be perceived as sexual, but then they're left really lonely. What about platonic friendships between men and women? Are those any easier for men to initiate, navigate? Plotonic friendships between men and women.

Well, I mean, there is the difficulty of obviously sexual interests, depending on if both parties are heterosexual. There's some interesting science on this that actually women tend to feel closer to their woman friends than men friend, their male friends. But men actually either feel closer to their woman friends than their male friends or feel equally as close. So men actually aren't reporting feeling as close to their male friends compared to the women friends that they have because often men access more vulnerability through their friendships with women. And so I think that's a real, you know, we talk about men being put into the friend zone when I'm like, you know, according to the science, that should be an honor because men's friendships with women are some of the best friendships that

they have because what tends to look different when men become friends with men versus woman is that they are able to access that vulnerability. That being said, when men are friends with friends with men, they access more ease and more of a sense of relaxation than they might access around women. Let's switch gears and talk a little bit about the past two years. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about how to maintain friendships during social distancing. And we all got used to things like Zoom happy hours and online game nights. Looking back, do you think the pandemic will affect people's friendship ties in a long-term way? Do we even know yet? You know, the research here has actually been mixed in finding that, you know, the pandemic has promoted loneliness,

but then we sort of haven't been lonely, have been less lonely. And I think part of that is we kind of had to reconcile with the fact that we need to initiate with friendships. We can't just passively engage in our friendships and rely on, you know, I'm just going to rely on us meeting up every month at the potluck that someone runs. We've learned, I think, a little more in this pandemic, that we actually have to initiate to keep our friendship. And that is such an important skill that I really hope that we can take into the future. And if we can really internalize that, then it can really make our friendships better in the long run. The thing that I am worried about is for those of us that have been chronically lonely, you know, we know from the

science that loneliness is not just a feeling, it's a way of seeing the world. Lonely people actually tend to dislike people. They interact with. They report liking their roommate less. They report liking humanity less. They report liking people they interact with less. They report assuming people are going to reject them when they aren't actually. And that's because, you know, when we were lonely historically, we were separated from our tribe. So we were in danger. And so our sort of danger signals are just going off when we're lonely in ways that make it hard to come out of loneliness because, you know, if you're thinking nobody wants to hear for me and I don't really want to hear from them, I'm devaluing the value of connection even while I wanted at the same time.

I'm pulled in two different directions when I'm lonely. People report wanting to withdraw from people and wanting to connect at the same time. So it just makes it very hard to get out of loneliness when it's really, really entrenched. But I always believe that it's possible and I think we need to maintain our optimism. And I tell people that so that they can remind themselves when you're lonely. Oh, it's not that I actually don't like this friend. It's not that they're actually rejecting me. It might just be because I'm lonely and that's shaping how I'm interpreting events right now. So for a lot of us, work provides an opportunity for making friends as an adult. But now with remote and hybrid work, that's changed the dynamic for a lot of people. And it's

got to be especially tough for young adults, say, in their first or second job, as well as more seasoned employees who might be starting a new position remotely, let's say. So you recently wrote about ways to make work friends even while working remotely. What did you recommend? So I recommend setting up continuous unplanned interaction virtually. So when I stop seeing my work friends, I just set up a monthly meeting on our calendars for us to interact. It's some of the same strategies that we use in person that can apply in the workplace to, like simply affirming each other. We don't realize that according to the theory of inferred attraction, people tend to like people who like them. And So if we can show people that we like them, they're going to want to connect with us.

And so just saying, you know, I value you, I appreciate you, I miss you, these are all things that cement and maintain the connection. Similarly, we need to initiate even virtually to make those connections. What does that look like? You know, hey, I'm the new person at work. I've been wanting to meet new people, was wondering if you'd be open to connecting. Or, hey, you know, we haven't chat in a while. Do you mind if we put something on the schedule?

I'd love to hear about you and check in about how you've been. the science of connecting at work is really interesting because studies actually find that the more we interact with people, the closer we tend to feel, but at work it's the opposite. And I think that that's actually because we don't often share vulnerably at work. And so there's this way that we only interact with a single dimension of each other all the time. So I just also encourage a little bit more vulnerability. Like, how are you doing, cracking jokes, things that you sometimes feel iffy about doing

in a work environment. There's just, I know people are scared, things can be used against me, and that fear is real, but there's just so many things that you can disclose about yourself that are safe, like your wins or your accomplishments, or your hobbies, or your weekend plans, just feeling free to share a little bit more about yourself to create that connection. And the last thing that I wanted to say is there's this idea that I call the employee myth, which is the idea that when we go to work, we simply become employees and we no longer have fundamental human needs, like the need to belong, and it's simply untrue. Having connection network is related to your engagement,

your productivity, your creativity, how much teams can succeed, how likely you are to stay in the job. In fact, not belonging is the third reason that people have reported quitting their job within the last year. And so your ability to create connections is going to have a powerful effect on whether you feel happy and satisfied and fulfilled in your work. So it really is worth it. You've also written about cross-racial friendship and cited research that found that the more contact people have with others outside of their racial group, the less prejudice they were. Can you talk about that and maybe offer some advice about building friendships across racial lines? So contact with people across groups is actually found to be one of the most powerful ways that we

found to combat prejudice. But with the caveat that this has to be quality interaction. And there's a study that actually found that when people tend to attend work events, they tend to feel closer to people at work. But this isn't true when people are interacting with people across races. And that's because when people interacted across races, they weren't having as much quality conversation. They were engaged in the conversation more so to get ahead work-wise rather than to actually connect with each other. And so we need to have those more quality interactions where there's shared vulnerability and we're talking about things of substance. But what I really suggest when you're connecting across race is to maintain something called habitual open-mindedness,

which basically means put all your stereotypes and preconceptions aside, right? I think sometimes we try to over-identify with people across races to make them feel like, oh, we know them, but then they actually end up feeling really stereotyped. And so don't do that. You know, don't try to approach someone and say, yeah, I also celebrate this holiday that I assume that you might celebrate based on your identity. You know, just leave that aside and let them show themselves to you and reveal themselves to you as a person. Let them show you who they really are. One more current topic that I wanted to talk about. There's been a discussion in the past few years about how political polarization is straining family and friendship ties.

People might feel pressure to maintain a relationship with a family member they disagree with politically. Do you think it's possible to maintain close relationships with friends? we disagree with very, very vehemently. I do think it's possible. What I suggest to people when they're figuring out whether to maintain these relationships is to step back and consider the larger pros and cons of the relationship, right? And so what that means is there's going to be a different calculus when you're deciding whether to be friends with a new friend who maybe has very different values than you

that are expressed in their political beliefs versus a friend you've had forever, who's providing you with a lot of different benefits just because, you can reminisce and you have these shared experiences together, right? And so you just have to take a step back and think about this person may have different values than me in this way, but what are the things that I also get out of this friendship? And how do I weigh those two things together? Because all of our friendships should be more good than that. That being said, there are people who might be like, you know what, having different values, having different politics is too much of a con for me. That's something that I weigh heavily as a con. And I don't

think there's an amount of pros that could counteract that. And I say, you know, we all need to develop our own system. We all need to go through our own self-reflective process to understand what our needs are and what our values are and what we are and what we are willing to compromise on and what we're not. That being said, you know, I know from theories of racial identity that people of color who tend to go through experiences of discrimination then tend to go through a hibernation period where they only want to interact with people from their group. And so what that research sort of suggests is there can be times when we feel like we need to hibernate for our own safety, but that also doesn't necessarily last forever. And so we need to also

expect that sometimes when we have these differences and things that feel so valuable to us and that feel like they're part of our identities like politics tend to be, that sometimes there'll be periods where we might need some space, but we might be able to re-engage in their relationship over time. So I think, too, when we're making friends across difference, we should expect that there's going to be a little bit more ebb and flow. So as you're working on the book and you're reading all the research into friendship, are you finding areas where either the research is surprising, that the results are surprising or that there are areas where you think, boy, we really need to know more about this. Yeah. I mean, the surprising thing I've learned since studying

friendship is that a relationship is a relationship, right? And what that means is what makes our romantic relationship succeed makes our friendship succeed. Affirmation of another person, working through conflict empathically, vulnerability, right? But the problem is I think we tend to compartmentalize a lot of these skills to our romantic relationships. People are so used to working through issues in their romantic relationships because if they weren't, their relationship would end. And yet they don't transfer those skills to their friendships, right?

And so that's what I want to share. Think about transferable skills. What are skills you've developed from your marriage that you can bring into your friendship to make it better in that same way? And the other thing that I would say is that, you know how I talked about are the liking gap and our bias to assume people like us less than we do? That's true across the board with all different types of intimacy. There's this phenomenon called the Beautiful Mess Effect, which finds that when we are vulnerable, we think people are judging us more than they actually are. There's studies

on affection in friendship that finds that when we share affection, we assume that people will think it's more awkward and be less grateful than they actually are. And so when it comes to, to connecting, I should say, we really need to tune in to our self-defeating thoughts and recognize that we may have some biases involved and to maintain optimism, to assume that people like us, that they want to connect with us, that they're going to enjoy the interaction, that they're going to value the things that we do and value the things that we've invested into the friendship. Dr. Franco, I think you have given us some really good advice about how to be friends, get friends, maintain friends. Thank you so much. And I hope our listeners really get something out of this,

particularly during the pandemic where it's been such a strain. So keep those connections, gang. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. And if you want to stay connected with me, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram at Dr. Marissa G. Franco.com. I also have a assessment for your friendship, strengths and weaknesses on my website, www.com.com. And I speak on friendship and belonging within and outside the workplace. Thank you so much for your time. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.combeatingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening to us on Apple and you like what you hear, please leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us

at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.