# The Secret to Making New Friends as an Adult  ## About - Author: How to Be a Better Human - Title: The Secret to Making New Friends as an Adult - Tags: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e042e488-fbd9-40bb-9faf-b11003de0bc8 ## Highlights > The Importance of Friendship in Today's Society Transcript: Speaker 1 Now as an expert on friendship, I'm up against a lot because of the hierarchy that a lot of our cultures place on love, right? With familial love at the top, with romantic love at the top. And with platonic love, friendship love really at the bottom. And with so many countries, people feeling so lonely and so disconnected. I believe that if we leave friendship at the bottom of this hierarchy, it's like the other's gold at our feet that we're treating as concrete. And so why are friendships so key? ([Time 0:02:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/001d030d-a302-4539-ba61-2e14f292034d)) --- > The Liking Gap: Why We Underestimate How Much Others Like Us Transcript: Speaker 1 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? ([Time 0:06:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/222fc891-7a4f-4540-aeb8-986771130ba2)) --- > Moving away from fear and towards love with Sarah's message Transcript: Speaker 1 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. I 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. Speaker 2 Thanks for your work, Sarah. ([Time 0:09:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/73e2dbab-c1e3-47e4-90eb-1931daf1835f)) --- > The Impact of Cultural Perceptions on Our Approach to Friendship Transcript: Speaker 2 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? Yeah. Speaker 1 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? ([Time 0:12:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a41f0a88-cb07-4151-a858-3dad6ee2de75)) --- > Our personalities are coping mechanisms from experiences of connection or disconnection in friendship Transcript: Speaker 2 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? Yeah. Speaker 1 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. ([Time 0:12:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/48c1038a-d90d-43b9-a75f-b0d30a39ab53)) --- > How Our Personalities are Shaped by Our Experiences of Connection or Disconnection Transcript: Speaker 1 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. ([Time 0:13:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0bb38f9-395b-4141-a3bb-c304a83b8254)) --- > The Link Between Our Personalities and our Experiences of Connection Transcript: Speaker 1 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? ([Time 0:13:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1f83fdb6-e972-4b3e-822b-9983d9ce9cd2)) --- > The Link Between Our Personalities and our Experiences of Connection Transcript: Speaker 1 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? ([Time 0:13:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a9a41c98-b3dd-4bc0-9df7-80dd8a802bd9)) --- > The Encompassing Nature of Shame in Personalities Transcript: Speaker 1 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 then so much of your personality is spent focusing on making sure nobody finds out this thing, right? And so that's what shame can be so encompassing and enveloping. ([Time 0:17:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aad3f0e6-25bb-45a1-8b97-f26fb8e36bdc)) --- > The Benefits of Accessing Other People for Support in Marriage Transcript: Speaker 1 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 energy affects you a lot more when they're the only person that you're looking to for support. ([Time 0:20:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6dee34ba-f57e-4b7c-b702-9e111acb43f5)) --- > The Importance of Friendship in Relationships Transcript: Speaker 1 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 think of, oh, are my friends a threat to 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 the better spouse for me. ([Time 0:20:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ea142d66-a64c-4de0-80df-8b4066e5b6a8)) --- > How to Make People Feel Safe and Welcome in Social Situations Transcript: Speaker 1 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 want to feel safe, really feel safe connecting with us, right? So, 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. ([Time 0:24:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01964732-5d82-429c-bd08-98368d75fca0)) --- > Finding a Group to Practice Hobbies with Can Lead to the Mere Exposure Effect Transcript: Speaker 1 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 sense in the mere exposure effect describes our tendency to unconsciously, completely unconsciously like people just because they are familiar to us. ([Time 0:25:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/919d3114-e50a-4375-8f9b-73abd91ea2d0)) --- > What are Super Friends? Transcript: Speaker 2 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? Speaker 1 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 sets of self or to help them escape threatening emotions or feelings. So they're able to really humanize other people fully. ([Time 0:29:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7a9d39a7-99e2-45fa-ab64-e6ffd33a107f)) --- > Attachment Styles and Humanizing Others Transcript: Speaker 1 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. Avoidingly attached people, they just think everybody's out to harm them and that everybody sort of untrustworthy. So they almost see other people as threats. So they don't fully humanize them people for their beauty and the sort of 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. ([Time 0:31:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1832a9c7-254a-4065-839b-5e96fc7e4cd4)) --- > Maintaining Long-Distance Friendships: The Importance of Flexibility Transcript: Speaker 2 And then what about friendships that where there's not necessarily a difference in value, 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? Speaker 1 So there's research on long distance friends that finds that we are helped when we perceive our friendships as flexible, not fragile. ([Time 0:32:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/10c2600a-1ec5-48a1-ae33-2d84e842c9d3)) --- > Perceiving Long-Distance Friendships as Flexible, Not Fragile Transcript: Speaker 1 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's asleep, not that it's dead, so that I can reconvene this friendship at any time. So it's being able to recognize that our friendships, ebb and flow. And when we're at an ebb, that doesn't mean, okay, I'm never going to contact this person again because the friendship is officially over. ([Time 0:32:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eadaa07a-bbd3-4d01-9a3b-a9136ac5b077)) ---