The Secret to Making New Friends as an Adult: Marisa G. Franco (Transcript)

And so that’s one of the reasons why friendship is really important. But I think there’s two reasons why we tend to really devalue it. One reason is because we just don’t know how to make friends. So luckily, I am going to help you with that a little bit today.

But the other reason has to do with something I like to call the “paradox of people.” That on the one hand we need people, they make us feel healthy, they make us feel connected, they make us feel like our very selves, right? But on the other hand, people are really scary. They can dismiss us, they can reject us, they can actively harm us. And so this sort of dilemma that we face, the sort of entity that we need the most is also the entity that can harm us the most.

And how we walk across this tightrope handling this paradox of people says a lot about our ability to make and keep friends. Because if we find ourselves stuck in the place where we see people as — we mistrust people, or we see people as potentially rejecting us and harming us, it’s really hard to foster connection. And this really materialized for me one day when I had bought an apartment, and I was really excited to make friends with my neighbors because I’m like, “I’m going to be here for a while.”

And I see a couple of my neighbors in the hallway, when I’m walking home into my apartment with my ex at the time who was living with me. And I walk right past them, right? Because paradox of people, I’m scared of them, they might reject me. They might see me as weird if I try to introduce myself.

So I scurry into my apartment and my ex, he pushes me back into the hallway to talk to my neighbors and says to me, you know, “You’re writing this book on friends. What would you tell other people who are in your situation?” And so as I’m sort of stumbling back into the hallway, I’m thinking about a few things that I have learned through studying friendship so intensely. And so two observations that I have on friendship and two takeaways for what we can do to make and keep friends.

First observation, friendship does not happen organically in adulthood, right? And in fact, one study found that people that think that it happens based on luck are actually lonelier five years later, whereas people that see it as happening based on effort are less lonely five years later.

So what does that tell me? That if I was just there hoping that my neighbors would someday try to be my friends, it probably wouldn’t happen, right? And so I would need to make that effort in order to be able to make friends.

But second observation that I have, based on reading all the research on friendship, is something called the “liking gap,” which is a phenomenon wherein when strangers interact and predict how likely the other person is to like them, they underestimate how much the other person likes them.

So this research really suggests that we’re less likely to be rejected than we think. Which leads me to my first takeaway for making friends. If you want to make friends, you have to assume that people like you, right? The reason is, when researchers told people, “Hey, you’re going to go into this group, and based on your personality profile, we predict that you will be liked.” This was completely bogus, a total lie.

But they found that when people went into this group of people, they became warmer, open, more friendly, because they made this assumption. And so indeed, it became this self-fulfilling prophecy called the “acceptance prophecy”. And when we assume we’ll be liked, we make it more likely that we actually will be liked. Whereas other research finds that people that tend to assume that they’re rejected, even when the circumstance is ambiguous, like, my friend, maybe they’re just, like, hungry or something, rather than that they hate me, right?

Those people that go straight to “maybe they don’t like me,” they actually become cold, they actually become withdrawn and they reject people. And then they get rejected in return. So I’m thinking of these things in the hallway, you know, right by my neighbors. I’m thinking that, you know, I can’t wait for this to happen organically. OK, I’m afraid they’re going to reject me, but that’s less likely to happen than I actually think.

I should assume that they’re going to like me. And then one last thing I have to remind myself of was to overcome something called “covert avoidance,” which is our tendency to show up around other people physically, but check out mentally, right? Like, you’re hanging out with people and you’re on your phone, or that would look like me just standing in the hallway hoping that my neighbors talk to me.

And so to make friends, you have to overcome covert avoidance by not just showing up, I showed up in that hallway, right, but you also have to engage with people when you get there. So I ended up approaching my neighbors and saying, “Hi, I’m Marisa, I just moved into 103, It’s really great to meet you.” And we start chatting. And at some point, you know, I asked them, like, “Is there a group where we can keep in touch? I’d love to, you know, chat further.”

And they tell me about their cat group that they have for cat parents in the Drew. And I don’t have a cat, but like, I’ll take connection when I can find it. So the cat group became half cat group, half social group. And I think sometimes we think that you know, a tiny act, something small like saying hello can have colossal consequences for our life.

But when we can lean into the sort of positive side of the paradox of people, when we can initiate and assume people like us, right, it can have colossal consequences. Because since I said that “hello,” me and my neighbors, we met up and we hung out every Friday, socially distanced of the pandemic in the garden behind our apartment, right?

And so I think that this experience really taught me the importance that while we all face this paradox of people, while we all face this dilemma, that, if we want to make friends, if we want to connect with people, we have to be able to move away from the part of ourselves that is fearful, that is mistrustful, that assumes people will harm or reject us and turn towards the part of ourselves, that simply wants to love and connect with people and can ready ourselves to engage in these new connections with optimism and with hope.

You know, my niece read my book “Platonic,” and one thing that she took away from it was that for friendship to happen, someone has to be brave. So be brave. Thank you.

Question and Answer session

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: Thank you, Marisa. I loved all of that. And I could see in the chat that a lot of the members also really love some of the things you shared there. So thank you so much for that wonderful talk and for those tips which we will dive into in this conversation.

And, you know, I think just to sort of start, your line of work is just so interesting. Friendship is, it seems such a unique area to research. And I actually want to read something back to you from your book to help us understand a little bit more about just the importance of this type of relationship.

You say, “Friendship, in releasing the relationship pressure valve, infuses us with joy like no other relationship. Without needing to plan for retirement, fulfill each other’s sexual needs and work out who should be scrubbing the shower grime, we are free to make friendship territories of pleasure.” So can you talk a little bit more about this and just why friendship holds such an important role in all of our lives?

MARISA FRANCO: Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, I’ll take a step back and say, like, clearly, connection is so central to all of us. You know, the research finds that, for example, loneliness is more toxic for your body than having a poor diet or not exercising. And these are things that we talk about in the public health conscious, but we don’t talk about social connection enough. Maybe for our UK folks, you all have a prime minister of loneliness. So it’s a little bit different, right?

But when we talk about the impact of loneliness, there’s actually three different dimensions of loneliness. There is intimate loneliness, which is the desire for someone to be very intimate with. There’s also relational loneliness, which is the desire for someone that feels as close to us as a friend might. And then there’s collective loneliness, which means I desire to be part of a group working towards a common goal.

And this research on loneliness really suggests that, just like I said, we really do need an entire community to feel whole. Because if we just focus on being very nuclear, you know, just having a spouse and that being the center of all of our connections, right, that’s maybe touching on our intimate loneliness, but not our relational, not our collective, right? And so I think a lot of us found this in the pandemic that, we may have been home with the spouse or partner that we really loved a lot, but we still ended up feeling lonely. And that’s because as social species, as social creatures, like, we just need an entire community to fulfill us.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: You touched on this a little bit in the talk, and in the book, you separate, sort of, the way you think about friendship into two categories. You talk about, you know, sort of a backward look at how we’ve traditionally experienced friendship, and then you look forward at how we could build better relationships, better platonic relationships. And so if we could just talk a little bit about sort of that first section, just diving into how we as a culture tend to think about friendship and how does this really impact the way that we actually approach it?

MARISA FRANCO: Yeah, so I’m reading all the research on friendship, and what sort of materializes before my eyes is that our personalities are fundamentally a reflection of our experiences of connection or disconnection, right? Like, in some ways our personalities are coping mechanisms from the experiences of connection or disconnection we’ve received. So whether you are friendly, open, warm, vulnerable, trusting, cynical, aggressive, even violent, all of this is predicted by what your history of connection or lack thereof looks like.

So how we’ve connected really affects who we are. But not only that, who we are really affects how we connect, right? Those people that have that history of healthy relationships, they have an internal set of beliefs within them that allows them to continue to facilitate healthy relationships. This is, if people are familiar with “attachment theory,” securely attached people, who think others can be trusted, who think they can be vulnerable, who think they can turn to people for support, right?

And they go into new relationships with this set of beliefs that allows them to continue to create these new relationships. Whereas people who have had difficult previous relationships, those can be internalized as a belief system that then can impede their ability to foster further connections, right? Because they may think “people are going to reject me,” that “I can’t be vulnerable,” that “I can never feel safe around anybody,” even when someone is safe, they’re still holding that assumption and that judgment, right?

And so what I want “Platonic” to do, because I know some people hear this and they’re like, “Good for those people with healthy childhoods, you know, whatever. For me, I guess I’m doomed.” Absolutely not.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: Your work is focused specifically on adult friendships, which, for a lot of the reasons you’ve already outlined, seem like are just really challenging for us to develop. But I guess, can you talk about sort of, why this breakdown happens and really when we start to see that it becomes more difficult for people to make friends in the same way as you did when you were kids?

MARISA FRANCO: Yeah. So when I say friendship doesn’t happen organically in adulthood, I don’t mean that friendship doesn’t happen organically in childhood, because for children it often does. And they have certain ingredients in their environment that really foster friendship. So Rebecca G. Adams, she’s a sociologist, and she says, you know, for friendship to be fostered organically, you need to have this repeated unplanned interaction and the shared vulnerability, right?

And so in school we have that. We have that through our lunch period. We have that through our gym, we have that through our recess, right, we’re seeing people every day, we’re letting our guard down, we end up sort of just developing these friendships. But when you think about adults going into the working world, you may have repeated unplanned interaction with your colleagues, less so now that we’re doing more hybrid and remote workplace, right?

But we’re often not as vulnerable in the workplace. And that’s why one study, and again, this is a caveat, in the US context, one study found that the more time people spend together at work, the less close that they feel. And so we need to recognize that as adults, we don’t have the same infrastructure we had as kids.

So we can’t rely on the same set of assumptions that, oh, this is just going to happen, I don’t have to try, I don’t have to initiate. Because as I shared from that previous research study, if we think that way, for a lot of us, it won’t happen.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: And I think also just in thinking about what friendship brings to the table for you, how it benefits you, you have this phrase in your book where you say, “Connecting to others makes us ourselves.” And it’s about much more than just the pleasure of connection there. Can you explain a little bit about that?

MARISA FRANCO: Yeah. So Harry Stack Sullivan, he’s a psychiatrist, and he has this theory called the “theory of chums,” which is basically that our chums or our friends earlier in life, they provide us with the sort of relationship template that we take on into our future. So it allows us to continue to connect throughout life, right? And there is some research that finds that if we connect in childhood, we have good friends in childhood, we have higher self-esteem in adulthood, we’re more empathic in adulthood, right?

And so he kind of argues that the therapy experience is similar to the chumship experience, in that with your friends, you share things that you feel like you should be ashamed of, right? And when you are ashamed of something, you’re not integrating it into your entire personality. You’re trying to push it away and suppress it and not make it who you are. And the shame can really take over your whole personality because you’re pushing away this part of who you are that you think is shameful.

But what Stack Sullivan argues, is that when kids share this shame with their friends and their friends are like, you know, we still love you. You know, this isn’t a big deal for us, right? And we still think you’re amazing and we accept that about you, right? We begin to be able to accept it in ourselves and to bring whatever we felt shame about, to see it as just part of our personalities rather than antithetical to the personality that we want to have. And we are able to sort of relinquish all of the energies that we spend trying to push this thing away.

And so in that way, the experience of experiencing that platonic love from our friends, especially at that time in childhood, teenagers, where we’re very high in shame, we’re like highest in shame than throughout our whole lifespan, right? That our friends are there at that time when we’re so high in shame, to help us integrate that and to help us connect to all sides of ourselves so that we sort of begin to become who we fully are.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: It’s just so interesting how much vulnerability and shame play into this. And in a way, it seems like on the one hand, as you get more confident, you start to lose some of the ability to make new friends, but also using that confidence, leaning into it to actually make the friends is what you need. So it’s fascinating. Well, I want to dive into some of the member questions we’re receiving because they’re also really interesting. So TED member Arnoldo, they ask, “Married people often complain about lack of time to cultivate friendships outside of the marital circle. What insights have you gained in your research about the effects of outside friendships in a couple’s relationship?”

MARISA FRANCO: Oh, I love this question. I think that having outside friendships is necessary for having a healthy marriage. I do. And this is where I’m coming from with that. The research basically finds that if I make a friend, I’m not only less depressed, but my spouse is too. It also finds that when you get into conflict with your spouse, it negatively impacts your release of a stress hormone cortisol, right? But if you have quality connection outside of that marriage, that doesn’t happen. Your cortisol release is normal, right?

Other research finds that, particularly for women who tend to have more close intimate relationships, when they go through difficulties within that partnership, they are more resilient to it when they have this outside support, right? And so it’s just like, if I can access this other person to center me during times of stress in my marriage, I can return to that marriage in a centered and grounded way. And that’s a resource for me, and it’s a resource for my spouse. Where we see that people that only have that close connection with their spouse, they have high rates of what’s called concordance, which means that, however your spouse feels is kind of how you feel.

Their, sort of, energy affects you a lot more when they’re the only person that you’re looking to for support. And so what happens is like, the natural ebbs and flows that can happen in a marriage, they’re so much more impacted, and there’s so much more devastated during those times of ebbs because they don’t have that support outside of the relationship. So I think sometimes we see, we think of like, “Oh, are my friends a threat to my spouse? My spouse is spending time with their friends, they’re not spending time with me.” But if we understand more broadly the importance of friendship and how it makes every other relationship in our life better, we will see that there’s actually synergy between these relationships.

That my spouse having friends outside of this relationship is what makes them a better spouse for me. How to make friends.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: So, so much of it has to do with the way we just think about the role friendships play in our lives. We have lots of questions that are coming in about, sort of, the steps to actually making friends. And I think before we get into some of those specific questions, I know you, in the talk, sort of shared — you started with two tips, this idea of first, assuming that people like you and then overcoming what you call covert avoidance or that urge to sort of mentally check out when you’re meeting someone new. What are some of the other ways that you recommend people try to use tools that people use to build new friendships?

MARISA FRANCO: So I can walk through my own experience of making a bunch of friends and share this in a story. I went to Mexico City alone and was there for 10 days and was like, OK, if I spend ten days here and don’t make any friends, I’m going to be very lonely. So how did I make friends when I was there? First I went to a coffee shop. I heard another American there and I knew, you know, he’s less likely to reject me than I think. I also knew the research on transitioners, right? People that are in times of transition are most open to friendship.

So people that are traveling, people that have just moved to the city, people that have just started school, people that have just retired, right? Those are the people to try to connect with versus, you know, someone who’s been here for a while and already has an established network. So I knew this guy’s a transitioner and he’s less likely to reject me than I think. So I’m going to engage with him. And I asked, you know, where are you from? Like, I’m from the US too. We start chatting and I end up inviting him to a meetup that night, and it’s like a language exchange meetup. And at that language exchange meetup, I meet someone else who’s cool, and I say, you know, “Do you want to come to this Lucha Libre wrestling match with me?”

Then he said, yes, and I think… You know what I realized, too, from the research on friendship, I used to think that making friends was about being interesting, being smart, being insightful, being charismatic, being entertaining. But in fact, people report that this entertainment factor is the least important quality they look for in a friend. And the most important quality that they look for is someone who makes them feel like they matter. So for me, if I want to connect with someone, it’s not about me trying to impress them. It’s about me trying to make them feel valued and, you know, say hello to them and engage with them and tell them what I like about them and tell them what I appreciate about them, right?

There’s this study that looked at friendship, budding friendship groups, for like 12 weeks, which of these pairs ended up becoming friends. And it was the ones that shared the most affirmation and affection towards each other, right? And so, just to go even deeper into the research rabbit hole, there’s a theory called “risk regulation theory,” which indicates that we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on our view of how likely we are to get rejected. So when we show people “I like you,” we’re telling them, “Hey, you’re not going to get rejected if you try to be friends with me.” And that makes people really feel safe connecting with us, right?

So I was both engaging with these people and I was trying to make them feel loved and tell them how great I thought they were and how happy I am to meet them as I reached out to them. And then I went to my Spanish class, which, if you don’t have any friends, what I recommend is that you join something that’s repeated over time. And remember, I said repeated unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability is that infrastructure that kids have for friends that we lack as adults. So as adults, we really need to recreate that infrastructure.

And so if you join like, a social group that’s repeated over time, turn your hobby into a community, right, that’s a really important way to make friends. So for me, it’s I want to take the Spanish class because I love learning languages. For you, it might be football team, improv team, hiking team, meditation group, but it’s just finding something, finding a group that meets around this hobby. Because when you find something that’s repeated over time, what happens is something called the “mere exposure effect” sets in. The mere exposure effect describes our tendency to unconsciously, completely unconsciously, like people just because they are familiar to us.

So, for example, this researcher found that when he planted women into a large psychology lecture, at the end of the semester, none of the students remembered the woman, but they reported liking the woman who showed up to the most classes, 20 percent more than the woman that didn’t show up for any, right?

Nobody remembered her, but they liked her a lot because they had seen her face, like this is our brain, right? And what I think the other implication of mere exposure effect is in the beginning, mere exposure hadn’t set in. So it’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be weary. You’re going to feel uncomfortable, right? Maybe a little distrusting. That’s not a sign that you need to stop showing up. That’s a sign you need to keep showing up because when you continue to show up, they’re going to like you more, you’re going to like them more, right?

So I joined that Spanish class, that was repeated over time. Every day in Spanish class, I would ask people to go out to lunch with me. We’d go out to lunch together, then we went to Lucha Libre together. You know, of course, I was only there for 10 days, so I can only go so deep with folks. But in general, when you join this event that’s repeated over time, you want to start generating exclusivity with someone in that group.

Exclusivity means you develop memories and you develop experiences with one person in the group that you don’t have with other people. So pick whoever in the group that you really liked and ask them, “Oh, would you be open to like, getting coffee, getting tea like, before or after our next group?” Like, “I love to hang out” and those are like, the budding stems of friendship.

And luckily, if you’re in this group, right, you don’t have to put in as much effort, you had your tea, and now you’re going to just continue to see them over time, and you have the wheel start moving for friendship and connection.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: So TED member Celia actually is curious about virtual friendships and sort of how all of this plays into it, especially to some of the points you were making earlier about the pandemic. You know, for people who have met on social media only as opposed to in real life, they ask, “Is it possible to have a strong virtual friendship? How important is in-person connection or getting together in real life?”

MARISA FRANCO: Yeah, so this is such a nuanced question in some ways, right? Because it’s such a “both/and.” We know from the research that in-person connections tend to be stronger than virtual connections, right? But I think that that research, it doesn’t account for certain communities like people with disabilities, people with severe social anxiety, even older people that aren’t as mobile, who tend to find connections online.

And even though, you know, the online connections tend to not be as deep as in person, they can get deep if you’re practicing the same skills that you can practice in offline connection to establish deeper relationships. So, for example, like, the research finds that if you’re just passively scrolling on social media, doomscrolling, it makes you more lonely and negatively impacts your mental health and well-being.

But if you are engaging actively on social media, I’m posting, I’m commenting on something that you shared, I’m saying congratulations to you, that’s actually linked to less loneliness and is something that actually makes us feel more satisfied in our relationships. So if we want to have deep virtual connections, it’s certainly possible. But we have to bring those same principles that we use in offline connections to create more intimacy, things like being vulnerable with someone, being generous with them or showing affection towards them. That also works online.

They feel like they like one another more. But when you’re vulnerable with someone who’s avoidantly attached, that doesn’t necessarily happen. The avoidantly attached person doesn’t like you more because you’re vulnerable, because they have their own wounds around vulnerability, right? They’ve learned that it’s not good to be vulnerable, “I shouldn’t be vulnerable.” Like, that’s the implicit message that they have that really inhibits their ability to connect.

So the implications of this, I think, is that if you’re vulnerable and it doesn’t go well and it wasn’t from a place of fear, remember that it’s not always your fault. That other people have their own issues that they’re dealing with which may lead them to respond to your vulnerability negatively. And that doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. I mean, I think if you continue to try to be vulnerable with this person who’s shown you that they can’t handle it, then I think you should try to pivot, right? But just because someone responded dismissively to your vulnerability, it might mean that they have their own issues to work out.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: I think, in sort of thinking about how to make friendships work well, or to be really good at this process of doing this, you know, there’s a popular excerpt from your book that you shared in “The Atlantic” where you talked about the concept of super friends. So what makes someone a super friend, and how can we all strive to be super friends?

MARISA FRANCO: Yeah, secure friends, aka super friends. These people are secure with themselves, which means that they don’t have to try to use other people as a tool to fulfill their sense of self or to help them escape threatening emotions or feelings. So they’re able to really humanize other people fully. And the research on securely attached people find, and again, these are the people that have a history of healthy relationships, but there’s also earned-secure, which means you may not have had a history of healthy relationships, but you’ve done the work on yourself to develop a sense of security, right?

Remember, this isn’t — nobody’s doomed by their attachment style. But what qualities do we see in them? They’re more likely to initiate friendships. They’re more likely to maintain friendships. They’re less likely to dissolve friendships. They’re more generous towards other people because, again, they fully humanize other people. Insecurely attached people, they sometimes perceive other people through the lens of their own wounds, right? So anxiously attached people, it’s like, you need to prove to me that you value me and you love me because I’m so afraid that you’re going to abandon me, and then I can try to control you and make you do things to show me that you really, really love me, right?

And so they’re not fully humanizing another person because they’re almost seeing that person as a tool to fulfill their sense of self. Avoidantly attached people, they just think everybody’s out to harm them and that everybody’s untrustworthy. So they almost see other people as threats, so they don’t fully humanize people for their beauty and the resources that connecting with another person can bring you.

But these securely attached people, they tend to assume other people like them. I talked about something called pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. It’s the idea that, you know, the universe is commiserating for your success and for your well-being and that you can trust people. They’re comfortable with vulnerability, they’re more empathic, they’re comfortable sharing their needs, but also fulfilling the needs of other people. They’re more responsive to the needs of other people. When they engage in conflict, it’s all about perspective-taking. They’re not like, “You do this, otherwise I’m going to be pissed off.”

They’re like, “These are my needs. What are your needs? Let’s figure out a way to collaborate and figure out something that will work for both of us. So they tend to be quite healing friends. They tend to be — I talked about avoidant being low effort, low reward. Anxious is high effort, low reward. Secure is high effort, high reward when it comes to friendship.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: And then what about friendships where there’s not necessarily a difference in values, but maybe a distance, whether that’s a physical distance has been created or some sort of emotional distance because your life has changed in some way? How do you suggest people go about maintaining and nurturing those types of relationships?

MARISA FRANCO: So there’s research on long-distance friends that finds that we are helped when we perceive our friendships as flexible, not fragile. So when we perceive that, “Oh, I haven’t talked to this person in a few months, I’m going to assume that friendship is asleep, not that it’s dead, so that I can reconvene this friendship at any time.” Right? So it’s being able to recognize that our friendships ebb and flow. And when we’re at an ebb, that doesn’t mean, “OK, I’m never going to contact this person again, because the friendship is officially over.”

We assume that this ebb is part of the normal process to flow again. So that facilitates us being able to re-engage in the friendship at any time. So basically, this all goes back to, I really think, this tip, right? It’s such an all encompassing tip, right? Because what I’m basically telling you is to assume people like you, right? Like, if you don’t talk to your friend awhile, assume that they’re still interested in being friends with you.

Again, this isn’t about, you know, being delusional. If someone’s clearly indicating that they’re not interested in a friendship with you, then move on. But if it’s ambiguous and you’re like, “I’m not really sure, we haven’t talked for a while, but they haven’t necessarily rejected me or they still are responsive when I reach out to them,” you want to make that your running assumption in response to ambiguity, because again, having that assumption really facilitates continued connection.

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