Sunday Pick: Do all my friends secretly hate me? | from Corner Piece

0:02Anna Goldfarb: Happy Sunday, y 'all. Elise Hugh here. And today we are bringing you a Sunday pick where we share an episode of another podcast from TED handpicked by us for you. You might remember Corner Piece from a recent Sunday pick. It's TED's newest podcast, a show that starts small on life's biggest questions. Co-hosts Taha, Melissa, and Sabrina, lifelong friends and full-time nerds you might know from their YouTube channel, Answer in Progress, take an everyday worry and launch a full investigation to figure out how much of the problem is modern life and how much is just part of being human. Today, we're sharing another recent episode, this time all about friendship and a question that might feel familiar.

0:43Anna Goldfarb: Why does making friends as an adult feel like mission impossible? Melissa explores what it actually means to be a friend, all while grappling with a friendship breakup of her own. Along the way, she talks with authors and friendship experts, Anna Goldfarb and Dr. Marissa G. Franco. Together, they get into why friendship can get so complicated as we get older and how to build closer bonds. You can find Corner Piece wherever you get your podcasts with new episodes every other Thursday. And you can learn all about TED's podcasts at podcasts.ted.com. That's coming up. after a short break.

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2:31Anna Goldfarb: However works best for you. Simpler operations, smarter spending. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account at business.walmart.com. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall, that cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or the Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more.

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3:38Dr. Marisa G. Franco: When I was a kid, I had all these dreams of what I thought friendship would be like when I was older.

3:46Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Big apartments, large living rooms, pizza nights. The kind of thing that you'd see in the show Friends. I guess that's because my parents had it on TV all the time when I was younger. And what I've always found really beautiful about the show was the genuine connection these people seemed to share with each other. They have this casualness with each other and show up as themselves, unannounced, happy, sad, and everything in between. They laugh together, cry together, and are present in each other's lives. And I know that this is television, but when I look at the picture of friendship in my life today,

4:28Dr. Marisa G. Franco: it's very different than what I had imagined. recently i went through a pretty tough friendship loss or breakup i think i just like thought i told myself that it was fine and i was over it but

4:48Dr. Marisa G. Franco: we were friends for years pretty much all through childhood and into adulthood but long story short we had a small fight that unraveled into this year-long process of slow distancing and now we don't really talk to each other i guess when you're just like friends with someone for so long i guess like you have these expectations and when things change so suddenly without any communication you're just kind of like

5:19Dr. Marisa G. Franco: you're just i don't know like feeling left wondering what is going on for over a year you're just confused and so i just don't understand what the i don't know what the play space is you know she was one of my oldest and closest friends and i miss her a lot and i think i'm making sense of what happened and processing the grief of it all. Like, I'm too scared to even text her. So on this episode of Corner Piece, we're talking about friendship. Am I a bad friend? And what does it even mean to be a good friend? And not just the kinds that you see on screen. I mean, real friends. So I called my friends, Taha and Sabrina, to ask them how they maintain their friendships.

6:13Do you guys ever just call your friends spontaneously?

6:18Anna Goldfarb: So what do you think my answer is, Taha? You schedule in spontaneous phone call with a friend. And then you roll a dice and you have a system.

6:31Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I don't anymore. but when I was a kid I used to when I was in elementary school I used to just call my friends after school elementary school? with a landline? yeah you just grab the landline you were allowed? yeah be like hello is Amanda free for a call? and then they'll be like okay one second and then you'll just talk and then when you're sick of being on the phone you have to like fake be like oh my mom's calling me for dinner I have to go now because you can't just talk forever you have nothing to do what homework do you have when you're in grade 4 like go to your times tables and then you're done but anyways she was really good at her times tables please brag about it but not anymore I don't call my friends anymore she can't do math anymore

7:26Dr. Marisa G. Franco: this feels embarrassing to admit that I'm struggling to hold on to friendships as an adult. Like, it felt easier when I was younger. Less complicated and more fun. I had people that I saw all the time, talked to, and felt really connected to. I don't know, but maybe life was just simpler then. We didn't have the complications of adult schedules and emotions to deal with. And so I couldn't help but wonder if there's something more to friendship that I just seem to be missing.

7:58Anna Goldfarb: So my friends and I realized we didn't hang out for like over a year. And we were like, why? Like your close friends?

8:06Dr. Marisa G. Franco: My close friends and I. Like we have a very active group chat.

8:09Anna Goldfarb: But we didn't hang out in person because there was just so many scheduling nightmares that were occurring. And so we try and make plans to hang out in person once a month. Which means that there are about four to five weekends that we have to negotiate. and something you learn in your 20s is that all of those weekends book almost a month in advance and so it's just like i just learned what they're doing on their weekends it's fun okay how many times do they say well no i listen my friends we're all desperate for an opportunity to hang out it's really like something has to be restraining us or somebody doesn't want to hang out and that's i mean like it's not the right context for the hangout so yeah they'll they'll They'll say yes.

8:52Anna Goldfarb: There's a very little overlap in like times where I want to hang out and they're like, no, you're not allowed to come. I think I have most things scheduled and then I leave the door open for spontaneity. That's true. Do you want to talk about your multi-calendar lifestyle? We can get in the weeds, but the way I construct my calendar system is I have different calendars for different probability events. I have my high probability calendar. I have my low probability calendar. I have my unconfirmed calendar. Okay. Now this makes up the bulk of how I socially organize my life. Now, the reason I have these three different calendars is because I have friends of different levels of reliability.

9:38Anna Goldfarb: This sounds sweeter than I'm scheduling my friendships. You're like building out space for them.

9:47Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Okay. Is there a difference between someone who is an acquaintance and a friendship? Do you distinguish those two things at all? To me, someone who is a friend is someone who I can be myself with. And then there's just people that I know. Yeah. I feel like this collapses the idea of a friendship into a binary, which I would like to wholeheartedly reject. The not friend to friend. I actually agree with you.

10:15Anna Goldfarb: I think that I've just become very strict in my use of the word friends because I think that ambiguity really stressed me out when I was younger. And so I've decided that if there is not that reciprocity in the relationship, they can still be an acquaintance that I care about. but I would not consider them a friend in my book. I think I would, and this is just what I do practically, which is if they call me their friend, I'll just call them my friend as well. Because I'm like, all right. But do you call them your friend in your heart? I never in my heart think of the word friend because I think it means to me.

10:49Anna Goldfarb: Taa doesn't have friends actually. Or a heart. I think I have friends who I definitely talk to about my life and like what's going on in my life, what I'm struggling with, what I'm excited about. those type of friendships. And all of these aren't like neat categories, but there's a quality of friendship that includes that. And then there's another one, which is way more about enjoying each other's personality. That's like way more on the scale about banter and having fun and laughing and enjoying the shared interests that we have. And it's nothing to do with what people's lives are like. I knew that one of them was like an airline pilot for sure.

11:32And like the only thing we would talk about is video games. And I didn't know how old he was. I knew that sometimes you would talk about airplanes and I was like, that's okay, whatever. And I have people in my life that their actual personal lives are complete black boxes. I found out someone that I knew, I think for four or five years has a wife. That was crazy.

11:52Anna Goldfarb: That's great. That is crazy. Classic man friendship. Yeah. I'm like, damn, when'd you get married? Oh, 10 years ago. I don't think I could order my friends in terms of closeness. And so I also feel like when I tell people, oh, this person is my friend. Like, I wonder if one is closer than the other in terms of like, I don't know where on that line anyone goes because there are some parts of my life that I would share with some friends. And there are other parts of my life that I would share with other friends. And neither of those parts of my life are more intimate than each other. I get that.

12:29I think, I think for me,

12:32Anna Goldfarb: I like, I contextualize my friends. And I know that might sound a little bit weird, but it's because like, I get to be a slightly different version of me when I'm hanging out with those people. So I am the type of person who very rarely will mix friend groups. I just, I, I don't like it. It makes me kind of uncomfortable. And all of my friends, the weird part of it is that when I do mix friend groups, my friends become different people, because it's a different environment. And it's like a less enriching hangout, because we aren't getting to be the selves that I really enjoy being when it's like a specific context.

13:09Anna Goldfarb: I'm really comfortable with acknowledging the types of friendships that can exist, the types of activities that type of person enjoys doing, what they enjoy talking about. And I'm happy to exist and build like this magic circle with them that is that friendship.

13:26Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I think I'm similar to you in that sense. But I think of it more as like, sometimes you just don't want to be the full version of yourself with everybody. I think that I, listen, time to get into therapy mode.

13:41Anna Goldfarb: I don't know what the full version of myself is. And that's like a thing that I've been trying to unpack for the past like two years. And that's just going to be an ongoing journey. Like, it's kind of weird that I don't know me because I am me. But like, I like sorting things into boxes, and I'll be who I am in that box. And there's going to be through lines. Like, I'm a pretty consistent person. But what does it mean to be me entirely as a whole without all of these contexts stripped away? I don't know. I wouldn't say I'm the same level of openness with all of my friends. But I don't think about whether or not they are my friend or how close I am with them.

14:18I just behave in the way that makes me feel good.

14:26Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Honestly, it was strange to hear that when Sabrina and Taha are with their friends, there's this ease. At least, they don't seem to overthink and second-guess who they are when they show up around their friends, and I can't really relate to that. Friendship was supposed to be this space that was the safest to be yourself, to be loved and accepted for who you are. So when the friendship that I thought would last forever ended, it really threw me. All that safety that I used to feel in friendships started to disappear, which made me start to overthink how I show up in all my other relationships.

15:07Dr. Marisa G. Franco: And so now I'm worried to be myself. I'm second-guessing everything. And I really don't want this to be my reality.

15:21Dr. Marisa G. Franco: So I started looking for some answers.

15:26Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Okay, wait, this might be interesting. What makes a friendship last?

15:31Anna Goldfarb: Each time that I move to a new neighborhood, it seems to get harder and harder to sustain the friendships I left behind. That same researcher made headlines with the finding that we lose half of our friendships every seven years.

15:44Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Listen to the last sentence again.

15:45Anna Goldfarb: Finding that we lose half of our friendships every seven years.

15:51Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Man, every seven years, that sounds... I don't know, I guess that makes sense.

16:03Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I mean, the friendship that I had lasted 20 years before falling apart. But when I look at other friendships in my life, that seven-year pattern does hold. You know, I think we grow and move through different phases of life, and... And not every friendship survives that change, whether it's moving to a different country or city or just getting a different job. Friendships can be fragile. But I want to know how I can hold this fragility without being so scared of it. I wasn't finding much luck searching for answers online. But I did find two experts who I thought could help me understand where this friendship anxiety I feel is coming from.

16:45Dr. Marisa G. Franco: And it turns out they're actually friends in real life. We'll hear from them after the break.

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17:36Anna Goldfarb: The result? New hires get up to speed faster, and your experts stop answering repeat questions. Plus, those workflows can give your AI agents the context they need to operate on how your company works. Learn more at scribe.com slash TTD and mention TED Talks Daily for your first month of Scribe capture free on select plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash TTD. This episode is brought to you by the Natural Resources Defense Council. For thousands of years, caribou have walked the same route to the same stretch of Arctic coast to give birth. We know from the antlers they leave behind going back to the Bronze Age.

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19:02Anna Goldfarb: Hi, this is Anna Goldfarb. I'm a journalist and author of Modern Friendship, How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. One of the first things I learned about friendship is they can end at any time for any reason. It's a voluntary relationship between equals. It's one of the only ones where we have that equality in them. So they're really special relationships. My name is Dr. Marisa G. Franco, and I'm a professor, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of Platonic, How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. I think when I was younger, I just really focused on romantic partnerships, and I thought that made me worthy.

19:37Anna Goldfarb: But I'd been taught that friendship is trivial or secondary or menial. Romantic partnerships, something to fill the space in the purgatory until you get married. But these friendships actually felt so powerful to me.

19:50Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I feel like an alien trying to understand friendship. And it's like, these are just the most human things that we do. Like, we're social people. We want to connect with people. And why does it sometimes feel so hard and weird to do that?

20:03Anna Goldfarb: It's a very different relationship and it's very hard when we don't have cultural scripts on how to navigate it. It's really because we don't have a lot of models for these conversations. It creates this like deep loneliness of there's no one who understands all parts of me. I know all these people and they all know a little part of me, but not too many people that know all of me. So we have an opportunity here to create new models. We have to figure it out ourselves. So there's this model that I was presenting to my class on like why we're struggling with connection. And it can be for structural reasons, which means we don't have enough friends.

20:41Anna Goldfarb: Functional reasons, we're not reaching out to our friends to get our needs met. Or quality reasons, we don't have enough quality connections. And so when I thought about that in my friendships, I said, it's not a structural issue. I have a great group of friends. It's not a quality issue. This is a restorative people who I feel like my most authentic self around. But I realized I had a functional issue. I don't always reach out to friends to get my needs met. And after realizing that, I tried to be more intentional about tackling this functional issue. So I wanted more like last minute friends where we can do a last minute hang kind of.

21:14Anna Goldfarb: And so I reached out to friends last minute. It was like, hey, do you all want to like come over in a couple of hours and watch the show? And they said yes. And not only that, it freed them to also do the same for me. And so it kind of shifted the norm in the friendship. And I think even if I got rejected in that moment, they were busy at that time, that they would have felt more comfortable now reciprocating in that way because I marked myself as someone who's open to doing a last minute hang. And so, you know, in my head, I call it like the friendship breakaway. My friend Jason says he's really clingy.

21:48Anna Goldfarb: He's FaceTimed me and friends never FaceTime me. Now we have a FaceTime relationship. It took me a while to adjust to being on FaceTime with a friend. But like, you know, if you want to shake up friendships out of their stagnancy, like what's your friendship breakaway? Like, what are you going to do to break up the dynamic and turn it into something that would be even more nourishing for you? One of the best things you can do is what's called social identity support. And that's seeing your friend for all the roles that they play. And the way to do that, Melissa, is, you know, if we met and like, Melissa, I love that you're into podcasts.

22:21Anna Goldfarb: You're a great host. Like, I'm really interested in that. I'd love to see where you grew up. I'd love to see, you know, what foods you ate growing up. I'd love to see your traditions. I want to be a part of it. that's how you deepen a friendship to see to see you for all the roles that you play in your life that sounds scary in some ways i mean you don't know how to do it no one has to do this it's totally optional but if you hit it off as someone i mean that's how we did it in college like you'd go home with a friend for thanksgiving and then you'd see their family dynamic and then you know them a lot deeper you know them a lot better in a certain way so that's one one thing we can give to our friends is to say, I want to be a part of it.

23:01I want to see where you grew up.

23:03Anna Goldfarb: I want to see what you like eating. I want to be a part of your traditions. I think, Melissa, probably a lot of your friends are hoping to get out of that rut too. And so both of you are creating the norm. And I say that so that we could all recognize that we have agency too. I think that is so beautiful in theory, but especially with new friends and people that

23:27Dr. Marisa G. Franco: you're like unsure how they're going to react when you're like, all right, what if I like show you more of myself? And like, what if you don't like that?

23:34Anna Goldfarb: You know, friendships are a risk. You know, this is part of the risk of showing people who you are. This is part of the risk of vulnerability.

23:42Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Why do you think that sometimes those things feel hard to do, to be vulnerable?

23:48Anna Goldfarb: From a psychological perspective, I think we don't trust that people love us. Our felt experience of being loved is very different from the reality of how loved we are. It's called under-sociality, that we kind of underestimate how much people like us. We underestimate how much they care about our acts of affection, how much they care about our acts of kindness, when people on the receiving end are like, this is so meaningful to me. And so I think when you think people don't love you, how are you going to be vulnerable with them? There's this way that pain leads us all to be very self-absorbed in a way that it's hard to acknowledge as self-absorption, because we're always thinking about how we're coming off in our image, our sort of distorted image of ourselves in the other person's head that's often much more negative than the truth, rather than thinking about this other person.

24:35Anna Goldfarb: I think in the culture of social media, we are being trained to filter everything we do through the perception of another and how are we being perceived by another. And I think with the young folks, it's like cringe. Like, what am I doing that's cringe? And so it's like you always have someone judging you and evaluating you in your head. And so I think the root of authenticity of genuineness is safety. And I think our modern culture of always being on display creates a lack of safety and safety is necessary for authenticity. And why we act inauthentically is because we don't feel safe. And so I think in our modern culture, we have lost our connection to self.

25:20Anna Goldfarb: We are not going based off of like what we call intrinsic motivation in psychology. Who do I connect to? Who do I feel close to? We're instead going off of what are they going to think of me? How will this be perceived? How will this be evaluated? How will this be judged? And that becomes a cage for us. It doesn't allow us to authentically express ourselves in relationship. And without authenticity, there is maybe connection by label, but there's not a felt sense of connection.

25:52Dr. Marisa G. Franco: It felt like at one point I had this. And relearning how to do this, that is being open, feels scary.

26:04Anna Goldfarb: One thing that I wanted to say, because I think you brought up some of your fears in friendship, and I wanted to say that they're absolutely normal. And what is vulnerable is universal, right? you know, this fears of vulnerability, fears of reaching out, fears of taking a risk in friendship. And I've realized studying friendship, when you look at people that stay lonely, the reason that they stay lonely is because they think something's wrong with them and they're fundamentally defective. And so how can I try and reach out and connect when everybody's going to smell this defectiveness on me? And so the issue that we have in friendship is not that something is wrong with us, but it's that we think something is wrong with us.

26:46Anna Goldfarb: And because we think something is wrong with us, we do not allow ourselves to take the risks that are inherent to connection. So I just hope that I can tell anyone, it wasn't because nobody chose me. It wasn't because they could smell that I was defective. It was just because I didn't practice the skill. I didn't make the effort, right? And I just want to say the beauty of realizing that about friendship is that you realize that, like, you have been worthy all along. It was never about something being wrong with you. It was all about what actions can you take on behalf of connection.

27:25Dr. Marisa G. Franco: And I'll be honest. I feel like I've lost a lot of my confidence in making new friends and trying to deepen existing ones. They just all stay trapped in this state because I'm just terrified of breaking them. And it frustrates me because I want to feel held by my friends, but taking that step or reaching out that arm? Mm-mm.

27:57Okay, listen.

27:58Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I tried to hype myself up and reach out to my old friend. I just wrote a message on my page right now. I got scared. Just little letters on the screen, you know? Letters on the screen. They don't hold any emotional weight. What? But apparently I wasn't ready to do that just yet. In the following weeks, I tried to practice what I learned from Anna and Marissa. That is, being more open, but with other people in my life. Pause.

28:33Anna Goldfarb: You've been texting me more. You've been initiating conversations with me more as of like the past few days. It was noticeable because I was like, why is she texting me? She never texts me. I'm the initiator in our relationship and that's fine. But it really threw me off. I looked at my phone one day because I got a notification. I was like, text from Melissa. Is she dying? What do you mean? I do. You don't text me out of the blue. Okay.

29:04Dr. Marisa G. Franco: What did I text you? You were texting me pictures of pudding.

29:09Anna Goldfarb: Really ugly pictures of pudding. Help me understand what the heck is happening right now.

29:15Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I kind of had a little friendship therapy session with two friendship experts. In that someone said to you, hey, you can be more than just chill with your friends. Well, it was a little bit deeper than that. Remember like months ago when I was trying to ask you guys like all the things that you do to maintain your friendships and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You probably knew that I was asking because actually I don't know if you knew why I was asking, but I was kind of going through an interesting time in friendship. Is this the friendship breakup I have heard about? Like in the snippets between meetings I'll join and there'll just be like a little Ooh, the friendship breakup And I'll say, anyway Is this about your friendship breakup?

30:00Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Well, not anymore, I don't think Did you get dumped? Oh no, I said it as a joke You said it as a joke Oh no,

30:10Anna Goldfarb: but she's not laughing That's a woman who has never gone through a friendship breakup I've gone through a friendship breakup Really? why I did not make a joke. I was like, I know what this is like.

30:23Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Oh God. What was it like? It was, it was complicated. It was emotionally heavy. For me, it came out of nowhere, to be honest. I had a French, an individual friendship breakup that did not break up the group friendship. but then we were just like we just switched to being cool but no more solo friendship and that was really hard because they continue to be tangentially in my life and so i continue to emotionally feel it over and over again this sounds like an emotional

31:08Anna Goldfarb: entanglement. This sounds fraught. What are you going to do? Just like burn your bridges with everyone else you know? I'm hoping to never experience a friendship breakup in my life. Boom. Perfect.

31:19Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Great plan. That's my plan. You know, you dream of forever and then forever doesn't happen. Sounds like a romantic story, both of you. I actually think it's actually more like when you get into a romantic relationship, the possibility of breaking up is a known own quantity that also has like social scripts around it. But I feel like for friendships, no one expects to have a friendship breakup. It's a weird space to be in. And so I don't know how to talk about this with anybody else. I was just kind of like sitting with it for a really long time, probably thinking that it was fine. And then I worked on this friendship episode and I'm like, oh, wait a second.

32:03Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I'm not fine. I'm really not fine. I think I was trying to figure out ways to like fix it for so long if i thought that if i just like said how i

32:13Anna Goldfarb: felt things would be fixed oh so did you send did you send like a crazy person text no i didn't send

32:22Dr. Marisa G. Franco: i did not send a crazy person text you showed up to their house showed up to their house with cupcakes and said why did you dump me with the with the love actually poster boards oh yes to me you are perfect. No, I did the normal person thing. Okay, I'm just gonna text her.

32:47Something chill. I can do this.

32:58I didn't put my whole heart out there.

33:04Dr. Marisa G. Franco: but all I will say is that it didn't go anywhere. I did get a reply but it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. I guess the sad reality is that some friendships don't get a second chance.

33:37Dr. Marisa G. Franco: It's okay. I think that I was just able to close that chapter of my life and be like, okay, guys, there are other friendships in my life that I can nurture.

33:48Anna Goldfarb: So have you started hanging out with other people?

33:52Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I can't believe it took me like a year and a half to do this.

33:58Anna Goldfarb: We'll be right back.

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35:01Hey, we're Nick and Jack hosts of the best one yet.

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35:55That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish. Cases closed. Requests handled. No extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

36:19Hey.

36:21Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Um. Are you. Pre on Saturday morning.

36:35Dr. Marisa G. Franco: There's this farmer's market. I reached out to an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. We kind of knew each other through mutuals, but we were never ones to hang out one-on-one, so I was a little nervous. But what's that thing about friendship and small acts of risk-taking?

36:57why is she awake well looks like i have saturday plans

37:05Dr. Marisa G. Franco: i think something that i've learned a lot through the past year and a half and also just through making this episode is just i've been second guessing so much of myself i think i was just really self-conscious about the whole friendship breakup i'm like i think that if i just if i just If I just, you know, fade into the background, it'll be fine. But I realize that fading into the background...

37:29Anna Goldfarb: Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry. Melissa, are you saying that your solution for showing up in friendships was to not show up?

37:38Dr. Marisa G. Franco: But I said I'm on the other side of it now. We're reaching out. We're hanging out with people again. You're not fading out into the background. Exactly. That's really wonderful. So later that week, my friend and I went to the farmer's market first thing Saturday morning in the pouring rain. Oh my gosh, you're soaked. Hello. I'm happy we're making this happen. Me too. I didn't want to go inside. I didn't want to spoil anything. Okay, okay.

38:06Anna Goldfarb: I think for me, the thing I love about friendships is that there is this seasonal constancy to it. My friends are people in my life at a time, and those could be really wonderful times. And then other times they might move away or we might drift apart. But like there's always this knowledge that one day, like two ships in the ocean, we might find each other once again. There were four metaphors in there. But like I think the reason why when I imagine my friendships, they're like people who can come in and out of my life. and it's just like a little treat to be with them and the time that I have with them.

38:44I also think that like you're still friends with someone even if you haven't seen them for years and years and years. I have a friend whose parents are from Syria and their parents think of their friends from when they were 14 in Syria before they became refugees as their friends and they reunite 45 years later and be like, oh, that's my friend. And they're still your friend. And there's a constancy to it that like transcends whether or not you even had contact with them. So I just don't think you ever think about friends... Ending. Ending, yeah. And they're just over there and you're over here and the friendship is still between you.

39:23This is going to sound so crazy.

39:26Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready. All right, bud. I don't think that friends are fungible, but I do think... Okay, I don't think that friends are interchangeable. Changeable. But I do think...

39:39Anna Goldfarb: No, no, no. Say fungible, you freak. Listen, I watched Succession once. You're fungible. But what does fungible actually mean? Okay. I don't 100 % know. But I will Google it. That's fungal. Fungible. An easy to exchange or trade. Fungible. For something else of the same type and value. So like replaceable. Replaceable. but fungible is fun to say anyway. But I think that the romantic partner as like a role in your life will have their own very specific, you know, shape. But also that role in your life can be replaced by someone else and the details of how they would behave and your relationship to them will be different.

40:32But I think that friendship, because there are less preconceived notions of what they have to do in that role as a friend versus as a romantic partner, your friend can show up in really different ways and ways that like you've never even expected. And so each friendship can look so vastly different from each other. And I think they are like, especially non interchangeable.

41:00Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Yeah, I agree with you. I feel like people don't console you in the same way. as they would for an actual breakup. And I think it's because collectively, we don't see friendships having the potential of holding the same weight as a romantic relationship. And going through a friendship breakup, let me tell you, it feels the same, if not even more intense, because friendships see you in a way that is so different than any other relationship in your life. But there's also special friendships that you have in your life that have this quality to them that feels even more intimate and more loving than just like regular friendships.

41:42I think that when I lost that connection, it felt like I was losing a huge source of love in my life.

41:51Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I don't think I'm going to have this community of close friends overnight, but I think that I just have to stop hiding so much from the people in my life and just show up because I think that I haven't been showing up in many different ways. And I think I was just really out of practice with friendship, which feels so silly to say, but I don't know.

42:15Anna Goldfarb: How does it feel for the people out there who are scared? Can you name that feeling and how you are getting over it? It's this feeling of, am I the only one

42:25Dr. Marisa G. Franco: who is looking out for me and are all the other people in my life secretly hating me which is a weird place to be because if you are around people and if you believe that they don't love you or like you even how are you ever going to put yourself in a position to like open up and genuinely connect with people because you're just operating from this place of fear you think you're

42:49Anna Goldfarb: surrounded by ops exactly you're actually surrounded by friends i i felt like when i had my friendship breakup that I think that that sort of inner monologue around older people like me is really like it's really confirmed by the friendship breakup and that trust and that safety is now in question and I don't know I definitely felt like I decided to wonder if that was the case with any of my other friendships. And I think it took me a while. It sounds like it took you a while to get back in the game, bro.

43:32Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Exactly. But I've made a new friend. Or at least I think that it's the beginning of a friendship. I think we're friends. I'm not sure.

43:41Anna Goldfarb: Bro, you're overthinking it again. No. This is what a healed woman sounds like.

43:49Dr. Marisa G. Franco: When I write about this in my journal and think about it in my head, I think that I'm coping with this totally fine. And I'm like, yeah, I'm totally healed. It's all good. I think it's still a little bit of a process.

44:01Anna Goldfarb: Yeah, I don't think you need to be totally healed from what sounds like a 20-year-long relationship. You don't need to be out the other side and fully happy and cheery and know the answer to all friendship now.

44:17Dr. Marisa G. Franco: You're right.

44:18Anna Goldfarb: so we're not speaking to a healed woman we're speaking to a woman that's gonna be okay

44:24Dr. Marisa G. Franco: I can deal with that I can get on board with that one

44:30oh my god

44:32Anna Goldfarb: oh my god Melissa that's just it's just the most it's just you know this just describes you to a T Melissa's a girl who's gonna be okay and Taha's a man getting back in the game I need inspirational music to play in the background. I need you to be in a New York City taxi cab with your hair blowing in the wind. And the taxi goes, Where to? And she says, Home. And then Melissa says her reflections in voiceover to end the episode.

45:13Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Friendships can be messy. and while it can feel easier to retreat into yourself and the safety of the known that's not where real friendships are built it's not always about music festivals or international travel sometimes it's as small and silly as sending a random photo of pudding because it reminded you of them i used to think that friendship was an all-in-or-nothing kind of deal but i think the real secret isn't that we know everything about each other or even do everything together. It's that we know enough. Enough to feel safe. And enough to settle into our real selves around each other.

45:56Dr. Marisa G. Franco: Friends walk into our lives in different ways. Some stay, some go. But the friends who stay, the ones that make life feel all the more sweet, begin with someone sending a DM, answering a call, writing that text. Taking a risk. That's friendship. Thank you.

46:45Dr. Marisa G. Franco: This episode was sound design and mixed by Steve Bone, with support from our sound designer, Lucy Little. Fact-checking by Lea Dagan. Music in this episode by Steve Bone and from Epidemic Sound. Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder. TED's executive producer is Daniela Balareso. Special thanks to Roxanne Highlash, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, James Ryerson, Cara Leibowitz, and Tanska Sangmarnevong. Thanks also to Angela Innes. This podcast is made possible through the support of Grant 63685 from the John Templeton Foundation The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation We're so grateful you're listening to Corner Peace We would love to hear from you, so please leave us a rate and review on whatever podcast app you're listening on And follow us if you're a fan Your feedback really helps more people discover the show

47:45Anna Goldfarb: This episode is sponsored by Ashby. Every talk you hear on this show started as an idea, and every idea that actually gets built needs a team. Today's sponsor, Ashby, is the software that supports hiring for those ambitious teams. Ashby is the all-in-one recruiting platform used by the teams at Lovable, Notion, Plaid, and Clay. If you wish that AI could help you move faster through scheduling and scorecards, that you could find that silver medalist candidate from 18 months ago in a few seconds, or that you had better visibility into the state of your candidate pipeline, Ashby is for you. See why over 80 % of Forbes' top AI companies choose Ashby to hire the best talent.

48:25Anna Goldfarb: And visit www.ashbyhq.com.

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49:13It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, No extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.