Wholehearted Friendship

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. 

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Anna Goldfarb. Anna is a journalist, author, and speaker. Called the New York Times friendship correspondent, Anna’s work explores the nuances of friendships and relationships. She’s reported for outlets including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, Vice, Vox, the Washington Post. And with Sounds True, Anna Goldfarb is the author of a new book. It’s called Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. Anna, welcome.

 

Anna Goldfarb: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

 

TS: How did you become a friendship correspondent? How did your journalism career take you to the topic of friendship?

 

AG: I’ve always reported on parts of my life I wanted to know more about. And I’m basically a feral cat. I have no idea how the world works and I use my reporting to get a handle on a lot of the emotional best practices. I realized becoming an adult that the strategies I had weren’t working. I didn’t know how to give comfort to a friend as their problems became more complex. And I just was just totally inadequate at it. So I’d use my reporting … Journalists have beats and it’s normal to change beats many times in a career. So I wrote about music first and then I switched to food, to doing food journalism. But when I got married in my late 30s, I realized I was really drawn to friendships because I thought that I had heartbreak-proofed myself getting married. You think, okay, I never have to deal with a broken heart again. But I was having friendship breakups that were so enormously painful and I didn’t understand what was going on. I was like, why are all these friendships peeling apart? Why are they buckling? Is it something I’m doing? Is it something they’re doing? Is it something in the water? What is going on here?

So I started reporting on friendships. My first article for the New York Times was in 2017, and it was about how to maintain friendships. And I didn’t really see many articles on friendship, the art of friendship, how to practice being a friend. I learned that there were such a thing as friendship experts, which I never knew. That was totally foreign to me until I wrote about it. And once I did that article, how to maintain friendships, then I started branching out into other related topics. How to rekindle a friendship. I looked into sibling relationships. How are they similar to friendships? How are they different?

I had such a wonderful editor at the New York Times, he just encouraged me. He let me do it. So I started pitching him more and more nuanced articles of how to handle a friendship quiet season. When you don’t hear from your friend for a while, what does that mean? People pleasing. How to handle saying no to things when you’re not quite comfortable. Just all these … They’re all little things that come up in modern day life so much, but I got to deep dive into them and let me see what’s going on with this thing and let me talk to four experts, let me talk to academics and researchers. And I just developed this fascination with friendship and there’s so much unsaid expectations with our friendships and so much was changing so fast with our friendships and with the pandemic, it only accelerated these issues. They amplified these issues of ambiguity. Like, are we still friends? I haven’t heard from you in six months. Can I even call you a friend? So I just wanted to dive into that and really understand what was going on.

 

TS: In reading Modern Friendship, one of the very first reflections I had was how so many of us have a very intentional perspective when it comes to something like exercise or our diet. But at least I noticed in myself some kind of tacit assumption that my friendship life would just fall into place. I don’t have to really make a plan around it or have a checklist. That would be weird. It’s an outpouring of the human heart. I don’t need to really strategize around that. And you come in and you say something quite different, so I think this would be a good place for us to start.

 

AG: Yeah. I do think friendships absolutely need a plan, and that’s because friendships have never been easier to shed. It’s so easy to shed friends. We move around so much. I think a lot of people, they’re only experience with friend making is when they’re young and they apply those same strategies when they’re older, when they’re not in school and they realize that those strategies aren’t working as well. When you’re younger, your lives are much more simple. The problems are much more simple and you don’t have a ton of variety. It’s like you’re in my sixth grade class. There’s not many other people here. Of all the sixth graders, I think you’re the coolest because we both love horses or whatever. When we’re getting older, our lives are just so much more complicated and it’s very hard to keep your friendships thriving if you’re uncertain of why your friendships are still existing, of how to regard them. Because we collect friends throughout our lifetime.

When you think of our ancestors where they probably lived in the same house for 60, 70 years or the same town, they didn’t have this variety that we have from moving around more, from having advanced education for a lot of us, for working more jobs for shorter periods of time. We’ve collected so many more friends just by living your life in the modern day and it’s historically new. It is historically new to have a hyper fluid society where we move around so much.

And a lot of us go to school. You told me you went to Swarthmore, but then you moved away. So all those friendships that you made in this really compelling, interesting time, you’re all blasted apart from each other and you don’t know when you’ll see one another again, even though you have a lot of affection for each other. So we need a plan because … Social media has brought this issue to the forefront because when you look on social media, you see all your contacts in one stream and it’s very overwhelming. It doesn’t feel as good as you think it would. You think it would feel great. I know all these people, I have all these friends, I have all these acquaintances. But that’s not the reality. Usually it feels … You’re comparing yourself to what you’re seeing.

You don’t feel nourished, you don’t feel nurtured. You don’t feel like the communication you’re having on social media is enough. It just feels hollow. So what I wanted to get in touch with the book is why do we feel this way? This promise of social media. All your friends are here. This is your own party. It’s like walking into a party every day was what they promised us, but it doesn’t feel like that at all. At least for me. It doesn’t feel like a party. It feels painful to see friends I love. They live far away. I don’t know their children. I don’t know when I’ll see them next. It’s just this pain. This pain of meeting these wonderful people and being blasted apart from them. So yes, we do need a plan.

 

TS: If we’re going to bring intentionality, you even used the word strategy, we need a friendship strategy, what are the core elements from the research you’ve done of a successful friendship strategy?

 

AG: That’s a great question. Well, the first thing that’s the most helpful that I learned is that there’s two kinds of friendships. There’s memorial and active ones. Memorial ones are the ones where you have great affection but you’re not in touch very often. And active ones are where they’re based on passions or hobbies and you’re frequently in touch. So when we think of our active friendships, studies show that three to five really close friends is the ideal. That’s what science says will set you up the best. And what’s important is you need a variety. Not one friend can be everything to you, and that’s why you need a variety. It’s not a realistic expectation that one person can take all your emotional needs, all your entertainment needs, all the things that a human needs. It’s not realistic it’ll come from one person. So three to five seems to be the sweet spot. The next outer ring is 10 to 15. And that’s the people you double date with. Those are the people you’d house sit for. Those are your favorite coworkers.

So there are tiers to friendship. And once you understand that there’s tiers, you can understand who you should be focusing on. Because I think a mistake people have is that they get all this information coming in. “Oh, we should get coffee. Oh, I haven’t seen you in forever. We should get together.” And then you can feel very overwhelmed and spread thin. And what having a strategy does is it tells you who you should be focusing on, who you should be caring about and who you should be committing to. In the book, I call it the jacuzzi. Your jacuzzi friends. Because there’s three to five and that’s a legit jacuzzi. Anymore it gets a little unruly.

 

TS: So let’s address that person who says either I only can count one or two and I wonder, do I get to count … You mentioned siblings. Can siblings be friends?

 

AG: Oh, sure.

 

TS: Do I get to count my spouse or no? That’s a special category. That’s not a friend. Often people talk about their spouse like, “They’re my best friend,” and I wonder, and I think, “Really?” It’s a special category. So let’s say I can’t get up to three to five, and then let’s say I have more than that. And if this three to five is the sweet spot, how do you recommend I get there?

 

AG: Well, there’s a more intimate tier which I call the bathtub. And this is based off of Robin Dunbar’s research. He’s a British anthropologist. He’s studied social circles extensively. So I reference his work in my book, but I rebrand it into more water features to highlight how fluid these relationships are. These are very fluid relationships. The innermost tier is your bathtub. And for men, it’s usually just one person, and that’s usually their spouse. For women, interestingly, it’s usually two people. It’s their spouse and a best friend. So right there is your bathtub. And the thing with a spouse is it takes up … Usually when you enter into romantic relationship, you lose a friendship because your availability plummets and you’re spending so much more time with your significant other. So that’s normal. But as we think about our social circle, there’s a lot of times in life when you may not have those three to five close jacuzzi friends. If you’re a new parent and you’re in survival mode, you’re just trying to keep the newborn alive. You don’t have time to go to a happy hour, which is totally fine. Sometimes a pet or a child takes that space of this is all my attention and commitment.

So I can see how that could work for people for a limited time, but once you enter a different season, three to five friends is what is the sweet spot. But it doesn’t mean that that will be available to you at all times in your life. That’s not realistic. If you have illness, if you have divorce, if you have moved somewhere and you don’t have new friends yet. There’s so many instances where that’s not realistic, but it’s something to strive for. It’s something to strive for. And what I liken it to is when you go food shopping and you’re starving and you put anything in your cart that looks good. You go to the hot bar, you get a few wings, get some ice cream. Whatever you’re craving, you just throw in the cart and then you check out and you think, how am I going to make a meal out of this? This is just my desires on full display.

But when you go shopping when you’re full and you have a list, you’re much more likely to get food that’s going to be nourishing for you and what you can make a really healthy meal out of. And that’s the analogy with our friends. Is when you know who to focus on, who belongs on your list, these are the people that you’re going to show up for to the best of your ability no matter what. These are the people you’ll share the commitment, say, “I consider you a jacuzzi friend, and here’s what that means.” Then you’ll know where to focus your energy and your effort. Then your social life won’t be so overwhelming of who’s in, who’s out, where should I be investing my time and my love? That’s the hope.

 

TS: One of the startling statistics that you share in Modern Friendship is that it takes 200 hours for someone to move from the category, if I understand correctly, of a stranger, someone that you wouldn’t call a friend. 200 hours, let alone to become a friend and move into this jacuzzi category. And I was thinking to myself, that’s so much time. If I got together with somebody two hours every other week, I was doing the math, that would be four years of getting to know them before they … And I thought to myself, God, that’s just such an incredible investment and commitment of time.

 

AG: Yes. And that’s actually where I developed my wholehearted friendship paradigm from is from that study of time. So I looked into, well, what do we spend our time on? How does time interact with friendship? And what I learned is that time is the most important factor in your friendships. It’s just like you said, it is an investment in time. So what do people put their time into? And it’s things that they have passions and hobbies about. Things that are interesting to them. So the key is to find someone who’s interested in the same things you are so that you can spend that time together. And I think that’s where people go wrong, is that they think, “Oh, I want more friends. I’m going to ask this woman out for coffee who’s in my building. She seems nice.” But they don’t have a reason. They don’t have a clear and compelling reason to get together. And that’s one of the platitudes of the book.

One of my findings is that every friendship needs an about, and the about needs to be clear and compelling to both people. So that’s the work of finding out who’s in our jacuzzi. Do we have a compelling reason to keep in touch, to get together regularly, ongoing? And that’s where I started to get excited because I’m like, oh, this is the key. This explains why you might gravitate towards one friend over another is because the about between you. Affection isn’t enough. It has to be another reason that you seek a friend out. That’s the key. That’s the key to all of this. There has to be another reason.

 

TS: Tell me more about that when you say every friendship needs to have an about. Give me some examples of abouts.

 

AG: Yeah. Well, gosh, abouts with my best friend are probably in the hundreds. We could spend a month together straight and we would talk about work, family, values, pop culture. We can talk about whatever. We have so many things in common, so many things we love. We love skincare. We could just babble, babble, babble about all sorts of things. But sometimes when you think about your about of a friendship, think about what you talk about. Why do you seek one another out? What do you do together that’s so compelling to you that you would tell your significant other or your spouse, “Babe, you’re on your own for dinner tonight. I’ve got to go meet up with this friend because …” What is the reason? So abouts can be … Well, the thing about abouts is that they can change. They can become outdated and they can be absent.

So let me give you an example. A friend from high school that you’ve loved for 30 years, what is your friendship about? Well, when we get together, we talk about all the people we know in common. We give each other updates about our hometown. How often do you talk about your hometown? It’s like, well, every two years. Is this a compelling about? You can renegotiate your about. You can say to a friend, “I’d love to spend more time with you. What goals do you have? What dreams do you have? How can I help?” And then you’ve just opened up a new portal of what the about of the friendship could be. And if your friend says, “Well, I want to move my body more. I was thinking about taking yoga classes.” “Oh, I’d do that with you. I’d go take a yoga class.” Well, guess what? Now this is your yoga friend. What is the about of your friendship? It’s to get together and go to yoga.

And once you get together with this thing that you both want to do, then your friendship can deepen and ripen and get richer because then you have a chance to bond over values. And that’s when you really start hitting the sweet spot of not only do you have an interest that’s compelling to you both, but you share values and then they’re a good candidate for being a jacuzzi friend. But it has to start with the about. The about has to be so compelling that you will make it happen.

 

TS: You mentioned in the beginning when you decided to focus your curiosity on writing about friendship, that some of it came from the painful friendship breakups that had and how disturbing that was. I’ve had some very painful friendship breakups as well. And I was surprised, first of all. I was surprised. I was not prepared for how painful it was. And my question to you is, knowing what you know, is there a way to avoid that type of painful friendship breakup? I noticed I now have this idea of I want to go very slowly into friendships and not invest as much. So it’s going to take 200 hours, it’s going to take a long time anyway, but not invest so much upfront because I don’t want that painful breakup again. I wonder what you have to say about that from your own experience.

 

AG: Well, my hope by reading the book is that people will identify maybe that they had behaviors that pushed a friend away that they weren’t aware of. Breakups usually happen for three reasons. There are three friendship killers and it’s lying, not showing up when needed or a betrayal of some sort. Those are the three things that people will run from a friendship. They’ll be like this friendship’s done. If there wasn’t that kind of nuclear betrayal breakup, a lot of friendship breakups are just from different values, changing values or someone moves away or someone’s priorities change or they enter a new phase of life and they find other people have more compelling information for them. Like when someone has a baby and you notice, oh, we can’t get together as much because the new parent is looking for other new parents. They want people that can share more interesting, useful information to them.

So there’s all sorts of reasons friendships break up. They can happen at any time. There’s no way to friendship breakup-proof your life because that’s not how people work. People are baffling and people have all sorts of reasons why they pull from one friend to another. I think the best thing you can do is to polish your own skills and to make sure that you’re a great teammate to your friend and that you’re paying attention to the power dynamic between you two. Not saying that you are, but that one friend isn’t dominating the other. Those kinds of things are intolerable in a friendship because it’s a peer-to-peer relationship.

So I think a lot of times people don’t see the friendship breakup coming, but they might be unaware of quirks that they have that are pushing their friends away. Maybe they’re too, you should do this, you should leave your husband, you should leave your job. And maybe they’re being too overbearing and the friend … We’re not socialized to fight for our friendships too. We don’t see that modeled to us very often of this is what it looks like working through conflict with a friend. I just feel like we’re not set up for success here. We don’t have a lot of the language. It sounds really scary to confront a friend and say I’m unhappy with what you’re doing or I’m unhappy with the direction. Because friendships are supposed to be fun and they’re supposed to be like … So when they don’t feel fun, it can be really confusing and scary and alienating and we just don’t know how to handle it.

I’m trying to think how to … One thing you can do is to reassure your friend that you value the friendship and that your door’s always open. And to be, I would say humble of, I understand I might get it wrong. I might say things that really are off-putting to you and we need to have a way to come together when I inevitably annoy you or piss you off. You’re too valuable to me. Our friendship is too valuable to me and I want to work through it. That’s not something I would’ve said when I was younger. I didn’t have that vocabulary. But my hope is by telling friends that they’re in this tier of yours, like, you’re in my jacuzzi, you’re so important to me, that you can work through these conflicts because there is a certainty there of this friendship is important to us.

Now that I understand how friendships operate, I’m a lot better with this. I’m a lot better with my close friends. When something bubbles up, I can have the humility to be like, “Okay. Let’s try again. I feel like I didn’t do it right the first time. Thank you for your patience. Let’s try this again.” So I think I can start negotiating these conflicts more. But a lot of its values … As we saw with the politics in our country, this is tearing families and friends apart. And that is something that I don’t think you can earthquake proof your friendships for. If your friend has wildly different values, adopts wildly different values than you, that might be really hard to work through unless you have a clear and compelling about that’s more important than the issue at hand. If they give you childcare and you’re like, well, I rely on them for childcare, so I’ll put up with these … It’s up to everyone how they want to handle that.

 

TS: In a way, your metaphors with the bathtub, the jacuzzi and the swimming pool, there’s a playful quality to that. And I like the fluidity. But in my experience actually having someone move from say, the jacuzzi to the swimming pool or from the swimming pool out to the nearby lake or something, it’s not actually always that fluid and smooth. It can feel, let’s say perhaps to the person who’s being moved from a more central place to a more distant wide group of people, like rejection. And it feels terrible. And they’re like, “No, forget it. I’m out. You want to put me in the swimming pool? Screw you.” So is there a graceful way to deal with that?

 

AG: It’s not a demotion. It’s really about realistically how many people you can spend quality time with. I don’t think swimming pool’s a demotion. I think this is the reality. Sometimes a friend starts a new job and they’re just not around as much, and then you find yourself getting closer with another friend because their availability matches with yours. It’s not a demotion to realize I’ve gotten closer with someone else because you’ve fallen back. This is how modern life works. This is how people work. I think it’s just putting a name on what we see anyway. And there’s always room for change if there’s desire. If your best friend falls from swimming pool down to the beach bonfire, but then they start a new job at somewhere really interesting to you, you might reconnect with that friend and be like, “I’d love to go out for lunch. I want to hear about your new job. I’d love to work in that industry.” And then you find that you pick up again. I find the fluidity, really hopeful of, yes, you can hang back from friends, but reconnect even stronger later.

When I was writing, I started reporting on friendships. I was estranged from my younger sister. We could barely get through a meal without having some sort of hostility. And I started applying everything I was learning about friendships to our relationship, and I started changing the way I related to her and now we’re best friends. She calls me every morning and I see her every Sunday and I help watch her kids.

 

TS: Tell me more specifically what you did. What did you do to create that shift?

 

AG: Well, I learned reporting my first article on friendship from Shasta Nelson. She’s the first friendship expert I met. First one I heard of. And she said that friendships require three things. Consistency, positivity, and vulnerability. So I’m like, okay, let’s do consistency. So I said, “How about I come every week and come help watch your kids?” She needed help. So I’m like, “How about this? I’ll come help every week.” So that was consistency and then positivity. I started bringing her little presents and I started just like being a happy presence in her life and always thinking of her or sending her funny memes. And then once those were there, then the door was open for vulnerability, and then she was more interested in my life. Of what’s going on with you? What are you working on? And I could be like, “Well, here’s what I’m struggling with.” And then those three ingredients set us on a path and it was immediate.

And what changed for me was instead of looking at my sister saying, why isn’t she happier for me? Why isn’t she more interested in my life? Why isn’t she? Why isn’t she? I turned the volume down on those thoughts and I turned the volume up on thoughts like how can I help her right now? Now she has three kids under eight, so what can I do today to help her? What can I do today to make her day a little bit easier, a little bit better? And that changed everything. And I think that in our culture, we’re so primed for why isn’t my friend reaching out more? Why doesn’t my friend more? Why aren’t I hearing from my friends more? And there isn’t enough of what can I do to make my favorite friends, their lives better, make their dreams happen? How can I help? How can I contribute? And that’s what makes friendships more enduring is when you come with the attitude of, I admire you, I love you, I want to be a part of your life. How can I help you?

But picking a few people whose values align with yours. Who you see that they make your life better. That’s my message. That’s what I’ve learned. That’s what science says makes us feel the happiest. When we have three to five friends that we want to be invested in their success. We want to witness their triumphs. We want to be a part of their lives. That’s where the happiness is, and that’s where belonging is. And belonging is the antidote to loneliness and we have a loneliness epidemic. And I really think it’s because people think too much about … They’re so preoccupied with themselves. What are they doing for me? Why aren’t people calling me? Why haven’t I heard from this friend? And not thinking, well, what’s my friend’s life like? What do they need help with? How do I fit into their reality? That’s what I’m hoping that my book will help reframe the friendship issue as.

 

TS: Well Anna, it’s a really big idea about how I can be there for other people versus looking at the scorecard of how they haven’t been there for me and X, Y, Z so that’s a really big idea. So thank you for that. And it’s interesting to know that that’s actually where the most fulfillment comes is our being a giver to other people in friendship. That that’s actually what feels the best about the whole thing. That’s very interesting.

But okay, I want to go back to your three pillars, if you will, that you say that you learned that you applied in your relationship with your sister, and you started with consistency. And I thought to myself, I can barely keep the plant behind me alive and water it regularly, let alone all of the other requirements. And I think that’s probably true for a lot of people, especially people with children. I have so much I need to do that I need to be consistent about that draw on my life force. Really? And now I have to be consistent out there with other people? I just don’t have it. I don’t have it. I don’t have it. That’s where my mind goes when I hear you say that.

 

AG: Well, I think people are allowed to feel that way, but if they’re feeling lonely and if they feel like I don’t have enough love in my life, I don’t have enough connection, I’m not feeling like my friendships are nurturing, I find that they’re draining, then I think it’s worth doing something differently. And what I advocate for is being choosy about your commitments. And I was really clear on why I wanted a relationship with my sister. This was important to me and I had to say no to other things. But just like the supermarket metaphor, you need to choose. You need to find a way to cut through how overwhelming modern life is. And it involves saying yes to things, but saying no to others. And that is the way. There’s no way around it. Usually what people spend their time on is watching Netflix or doing passive entertainment.

And the choice I made was, I’m going to put away a lot of my passive entertainment. I’m going to say no to other things and make this commitment to my sister. And I have a commitment to another friend. I see her every week and we write together. So that’s the clear and compelling about is we both are writers. We’ve been doing this for seven years, and it’s mellow. Just like to your point of 200 hours. Yes, friendships take a long time, but I chose wisely. I chose people where we have such clear and compelling abouts that it’s a joy to be in their life. It’s a joy to be a part of it. These friendships aren’t draining. They’re what make life fun and make my life feel meaningful.

So I’m advocating for choosing people that give you meaning. That you give them meaning and they give you meaning. And it will change everything. It will change everything. But you have to be choosy. And a lot of us aren’t in a place to be choosy, which I understand. If you’re caregiving, you have illness, you have all sorts of things, I get it. But I don’t want them to stay in that place forever. I want them when they’re ready to have more connection in their life, to be intentional about it and to go in with wide eyes of, am I picking reliable people? Am I picking people whose values I share? Am I picking people whose life I want to be a part of? That’s a worthwhile question.

 

TS: One of the things you write about in Modern Friendship is responding to bids for attention that other people might lob our way. And you quote the work of the Gottman’s and how in personal relationships, it’s been shown to be so important when your intimate partner makes a bid for connection that you don’t just show them the hand, but you actually look up from whatever you’re doing and respond and engage and it’s also true in friendship. And I thought one of the things that I don’t know how to do skillfully and gracefully is when people make bids for connection and I don’t evaluate that they’re going to make it into the jacuzzi and I’m not even really sure about the swimming pool exactly. I don’t know how to respond in a graceful way and I feel like whatever I say is kind of like, I don’t have the bandwidth right now or this or that, so I end up not responding. And I think this is probably think this is probably true for a lot of people. It’s like, oh, there’s this whole bid. I don’t know how to react, so I don’t say anything and then I feel terrible. And then it’s months later. I’m wondering if you can help from what you’ve discovered, give some coaching in this regard.

 

AG: Well, I think my strategy is still, I am prioritizing bids from the jacuzzi tier. There’s no way I could take any bid anyone throws at me. That’s not realistic. Most people, that’s not realistic. But if three of my closest friends, if they say, “I love this podcast. I really want you to check out this episode.”, I will make a note. That is part of my commitment to being in my jacuzzi tier is I will make a reasonable effort to check out what these three people have mentioned to me. And if it’s not my thing, we can negotiate. You can say, “Horror movies aren’t really my thing, but I love documentaries. Are there any that you’ve watched that you love?” You can negotiate anything. But it’s showing that I heard them, that I took it into account, and I’m asking them for some … I want to see what they like in a different realm or different genre. I’m keeping the conversation open. And the point of these bids is to make your friend feel like you’re open to seeing their world. There was something about this show or movie or podcast that resonated with them, and they’re trying to share that with you.

So a great strategy is to give it the attention of, “I see that you’re trying to connect with me by sharing this thing with me, but here’s what I’m thinking of instead. Any ideas?” I do that all the time with my friends who, “Let’s get dinner. Well, I’m not in the mood for Mexican. How about Italian? That’d be great.” I took the bid, but I’m sharing my preferences or what I’m comfortable with or what I would prefer to do. So the bids is really just emotional connection. That’s what a bid is. It’s an attempt at emotional connection. You cannot do that with everyone. You cannot do that. Nobody can do that unless you’re AI. It’s literally your job to take bids. But yeah, be choosy. I think that will liberate people to realize you don’t have to take every invitation that comes across your desk. That’s not a great strategy. If you want a secure, nurturing friendship circle, you really have to be very intentional about whose bids you take.

 

TS: It sounds, Anna, and I didn’t realize this coming into our conversation, that really your focus when it comes to wholehearted friendship, which is what you call it, is this inner circle and the securing and the investment in the inner circle. And that what happens outside of that is less of your focus. Is that fair when it comes to this notion of wholehearted friendship?

 

AG: Yeah. Wholehearted friendship comes from the … The word wholehearted means dedicated, committed, and enthusiastic. And I wanted to think of a word to describe the kind of friend I want to be and the kind of friend I want other people to experience my friendship as. There wasn’t a word for that, of an aspirational here’s the kind of friend I want to be. So a wholehearted friend ticked that box for me of like, that’s how I want my friends to feel. I want my intentions … I want to close the gap between how I want my friends to feel and how they actually feel being my friends. That’s what wholehearted friendship is designed to do. To really make your friends feel valued and treasured. And I felt like I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to make people feel treasured. So that’s where wholehearted friendship came from.

And the whole idea of wholehearted friendship is designed around time. It’s designed around that study that it takes 200 hours. And I go into the paradigm of wholehearted friendship involves desire, diligence and delight. And desire is who you yearn to spend time with, diligence is who you prioritize spending your time with, and delight is who you actually enjoy spending your time with. So all three things need to work together in a wholehearted friendship. And that speaks to the desire is the about of your friendship. Why do you want to get together? What is it about this friendship that will make you leave your house and close your computer and turn up your phone and go be with someone else? Diligence is all about the invitation. Making sure that you’re extending invitations that people can say yes to, that take into account the recipient’s preferences, limitations, and time constraints.

And that’s something I don’t think people pay enough attention towards. I think they just free ball it and they say, “We should get together. I haven’t seen you in a while.” But the underlying question for the recipient is why. Why do you want to get together? Why is this important? So diligence is being mindful of those dynamics. And delight is about making your friend feel like you’re a true teammate, like you were there by their side and you can be reliable and dependable and loving and how to do that so people will feel it.

 

TS: At one point, you write in Modern Friendship about making memories with your friends and the value of saying, we’re going to make a memory, not just have a cup of coffee or whatever. And you write, make your friendship hangouts as special and exciting as a romantic date. That there’s this possibility that you can do that every so often. And I was like, whoa. I don’t know how many special romantic dates I plan with my wife, let alone I’m going to do that with a friend. And then I thought, but that’s actually a really cool idea to take it that seriously and with that much heart.

 

AG: Yeah. I actually did this recently with my writer friends. There was a book reading in DC and I thought, “You know what? We’ve never traveled together. Do you want to go to DC with me?” And it deepened our friendship because I know that novelty is a wonderful tool. It’s a wonderful way to deepen friendships, to keep your friendships exciting and fun. And I do that with my friends all the time. “We should try a new restaurant. Let’s go somewhere new. Let’s travel somewhere for a weekend.”

I wasn’t as attuned to that before I wrote the book, but now I’m much more attuned to it of let’s do some cool things so we can look back and say, “Oh my God, remember we went to DC, we went to that party and it was crazy.” I’m intentionally trying to create those moments, and I think that’s what the pandemic robbed from us was that we didn’t get to make memories with our friends. There’s this black hole for a few years where memories were not being made. So that’s part of the message is like, this is part of what we lost. And don’t get into the habit of memories aren’t important with your friends just because you might’ve stepped away from that for a few years. Like, no, this is important. This is something you should strive for and it’s something you should extend. It makes people feel really good to be included. And so to say to a friend, I love to do something with you let’s go to this new part of town, let’s check out this new restaurant. I think it’s something low lift that all of us can do.

 

TS: Last thing, Anna that I want to touch on. You have a blog site called Friendship Explained, and you had an article that … I think it just made me feel so hopeful. And I want to end on this note for anybody out there who’s listening, who isn’t finding as many people in their jacuzzi as they want. And it was about how according to a NASA theoretical study, 92% of earth-like planets in our universe, they haven’t been born yet. And how you apply that to the possibility of the friendships we are yet to cultivate?

 

AG: Yeah. I’m like a space nerd, by the way. I love anything with space. I found that stat really staggering to think that all the earth-like planets, most of them haven’t been born yet. And it made me think of our friendships and maybe we haven’t had that wonderful friendship yet. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t happen for you ever. And my hope is that by learning how friendships work, by learning new strategies, by extending better invitations, by understanding there’s memorial friendships, there’s active friendships, they each have different expectations attached to them, that people will feel more empowered to go about their friend making. They’ll understand what’s going on and they’ll have clarity. So that’s how I connected it. I’m so happy you saw that. I found it really moving of maybe we haven’t even had our best friendships yet, you guys.

Come here, let’s huddle in. We can do this. We can figure this out. I have turned my friendships around. Learning these strategies, I’ve never been calmer. I’ve never been more confident as a friend. It feels like I took a really heavy backpack off. I was carrying around all this guilt of, should I check in on this friend? I haven’t heard from them. Am I dropping the ball? Are they dropping the ball? And all this self-doubt with my friendships. My hope is that by reading Modern Friendship, interacting with the exercises that people will just feel hopeful of you know what, maybe the better friendships are ahead.

 

TS: I’ve been speaking with Anna Goldfarb. She’s the author of the new book, Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. Thank you so much, Anna, for your good work. Thank you.

 

AG: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

 

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