Marisa Franco | How the Science of Attachment Can Help you Make and Keep Friends

Marissa Franco: Thanks so much for having me.

Srini: My pleasure to have you here. So I found out about you by way of our mutual friend, Smiley, and when he told me you wrote a book called Platonic, which was all about friendship, I thought, yeah, this is a no brainer considering this is fundamental to all of our lives.

So I thought I'd start with a question I think is very fitting, given the nature of your work, and that is what social group were you a part of in high school and how did that end up impacting what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Marissa Franco: Okay. I will go with, I was a fencer for two years and honestly I was pretty good.

Like they rank you in fencing, A one is the top and I was a one for our team because I'm tall, so I had a long reach. I don't think I was particularly skilled, but. It taught me two things that just because I'm good at something doesn't mean I should pursue it, because I didn't actually end up loving the sport, so I dropped out of fencing.

The other thing that I remember from it is just like there's one day where a family friend died and it really affected my game. So I think from then I figured. Maybe for the first time, like this is the impact of your mental health on how you perform and how you show. Fencing

Srini: must draw such an odd group of people.

That's, maybe that's my perception, but one, it's not something that's available to most people in high school. What kind of people are drawn to it and what drew you to fencing of all things? Cuz that's, So you only see it on TV or in movies? I don't think I've ever seen it in I don't know anybody to date until I've talked to you that told me they were in fencing as their extracurricular activity in high school.

Marissa Franco: Yeah, that's a fair point. So for us, it, the fencing crew actually started when I was there, so it was like the new thing, that nobody knew, which felt comforting for me because it's like coming to these sports that people had already been playing and, being new to them, like volleyball just felt more difficult.

But we were a school of nerds. I went to a specialized high school in New York City. And shout out Stan Island Technical High School. You know the, I mean it's funny to, I don't even know if I could say the nerds are attracted to fencing cuz we were all nerds. So it's hard to say who exactly would've gone for fencing, but it definitely wasn't.

The coolest kids in the school that join the fencing team.

Srini: Yeah. That's what I was gonna ask you next. So what are the social structures and social circles like in a school that is full of nerds that based on your description, does it have any of the same sort of typical structures that a typical high school social hierarchy has?

Marissa Franco: Yeah, it certainly did. I guess maybe I should correct myself and say we were all smart. . Yeah, we were all nerds. Cuz some of us were definitely nerdier than others and some of us were more social than others and, but I do think there was a lot of kids who were like not so cool in their middle schools, but then came to that high school and kind of moved to the top.

It's like a, it's. How cool you are. Depends on your pond, and so those of us that maybe were in middle school and were a little more cool all of a sudden became very cool. It just elevated everyone a little bit, I would say.

Srini: That's such an unusual experience for most people.

I think. Making the transition from junior high to high school. But I think also one of the things I saw was that the whole idea of cool seems to matter less and less as you get further and further along in high school. Like cool is very much this important thing in junior high where it's okay, those are the popular kids.

Those are the rich kids. They're the ones who have the nice clothes and shoes. And then suddenly you get to right around 11th grade and you realize nobody really gives a shit about any of this. And I think that you. Part of it is that you feel so insecure. So look, I wonder what was your overall sense of self worth like when you are in an environment like this?

Because I feel if there's. Period of my life that I would happily never have to relive ever again. It's adolescence, , because I think adolescence is literally the time in your life where your parents become the most horrible people in the world. You think you're the smartest person on the planet even though you're full of shit.

And it's such a just bizarre experience, especially as an immigrant kid.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. Yeah, certainly. I don't think I would want to relive it again either. I think for me, my sense of self-worth, it's funny because at the time I wouldn't say I had a low sense of self-worth. But I think having a high self-worth isn't just how you feel about yourself consciously.

It's also about how you ask the world to treat you. And how. Relate to others. So I will say from some of my behaviors, like I feel like I would not talk to certain people cuz I would assume that they're better than me and they wouldn't necessarily like me. , taking myself outta the game before it started.

Or it would be a struggle for me to ask for things for myself or speak up, and so I think all, even though I don't think I was conscious of it at the time, because if you asked me how I would describe myself, I'd probably use positive words. The reality is that you can really tap into maybe someone's less conscious sense of self-worth through how they interact with the world, how comfortably they feel asking for things for people, whether they go into interactions, thinking that they're less than other people, whether they try to reject people before they'll be rejected.

All these things, and I think I definitely had a lot of those behaviors.

Srini: Yeah. It's funny you say that because it reminds me of this friend that I connected with something like 30 some odd years after we finished ninth grade. So I moved away from Texas to California and this kid and I were in pretty much fifth through ninth grade together.

And I always viewed him as one of the popular or cool kids who just really wasn't interested in getting to know me or anything like that. Somehow. We never had a class together, but we overlapped and we were in Costa Rica. 25 plus years later, he saw me wearing a Texas a and m shirt. And he asked me, Where did you get that shirt?

And I said, I grew up in College Station. He was like, No way. That's where we're from. And I then asked him where he went to high school and asked him what year, graduated. And I thought to myself, Holy shit, that means we probably have been in classes together, or we went to school together. And it was really interesting because.

When I started to get to know him, we became, really good friends and he invited me to his house when I went to visit Texas and I thought to myself, this is a kid that I always thought was just somebody who didn't think anything of me, but I remember him telling me that the year that we were at eighth grade, his dad died.

And I, I never knew any of that. I had this sort of just perception based on his social circle of what kind of person he was and a circle that I would never be accepted in, which was wildly and accurate.

Marissa Franco: It. That is so real and that's what I know now that I didn't know then, which is first of all, everybody's insecure and everybody's afraid of rejection, no matter how cool.

Someone seems like you can't know someone's, how someone feels about themselves through things that are external to them. , even their group of friends. And what I also have learned I see like from setting friendship, is that sometimes the people that are rejecting you the most, fear, rejection the most.

Yeah. Like people that are most sensitive to rejection tend to come in with a sort of, Performative, rejecting of others, . Getting cold, getting withdrawn, if there's any signal to them that they might get rejected. Which can be something that's totally benign. And so these people at fear rejection so much, they'll be quiet, just like me, right?

I was sitting next to kids that were popular. I wouldn't talk to them, I was rejecting them, but I just thought, they think they're better than me and maybe they are. If I try to talk to them, it. They're not really gonna like it or they're not gonna accept me. Yeah.

Srini: So you wrote a book on friendship.

I wonder, were you the type of person who got to college and through your adult life and had an easy time making friends? Or how you, one of those people who basically studied the thing that you needed to learn because, they make the joke that we teach what we need to learn.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. I was an average friend maker, I'll say, which means.

Which I think is helpful because it means that I've learned the tools and I've applied them, and because I've learned them and applied them, it, it signifies that we can all grow and evolve and make better friends. I will say the thing that I did need to learn that led me to write the book is really just seeing romantic love is the only love that mattered, the love that defined my worth.

If I wasn't in a romantic relationship, I. Feeling worthless and unlovable. And it wasn't till, upon grieving that in my younger twenties I started this wellness group with my friends where we would meet up and cook, meditate, do yoga together. And I just looked around at them and I was like, Wow, they love me.

Why doesn't this love matter? Why have I been pretending like this love doesn't count or isn't significant or valid? So that's something that I learned I think when I was younger. Just because you're loved by friends. Even if you're not loved by a romantic partner, that doesn't mean you're loveless, and that doesn't mean that you're less than.

And I think that's one of the themes that I try to convey in the book. Yeah.

Srini: We'll get to all that in a lot more detail. So I, one other questions about this early period in your life and in general, I have always made this observation that there are all these skills that.

Basically vital to our wellbeing in adulthood that we do not learn anything about in childhood. . So true. My most popular article to date is this piece title that we should have learned in school that never did. It ended up going viral and medium. The New York Times picked it up and the funny thing is I didn't actually write about friendship, but I did write about the fact that we are not taught anything about how to interact with the opposite sex, despite the fact that it is something that all of us, or.

Interact in romantic relationships, period. Whether we're straight or not, we never learned that. But when it comes to friendship, what do you think they should be teaching in schools? Because I'd imagine if we were to teach this skill earlier in life, people would be much happier and, have much richer social lives.

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Yes, man, so many things. First don't assume friendship happens organically, cuz according to the research that assumption predicts our loneliness in five years. Assume you are gonna have to try and initiate assume people like you because when you do, according to the science, It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It makes you warmer, open, more positive, more engaged. You have to overcome overt and covert avoidance. Overt means you have to show up, but covert means when you show up, you have to engage. You have to introduce yourself to people. Hey, hi, my name is Versa. People are less likely to reject you than you think, according to the science on the liking gap, when strangers were paired and asked, Hey, how much do you like one another?

People generally underestimate how much people actually like them. And friendship doesn't ha don't rely on a spark for friendship. , according to the science of mere exposure. When people are familiar to us, we like them more even if we haven't engaged with them. No. So what that means is it's normal to feel we as people when you first meet them, and for initial interactions to be a little awkward, but that doesn't mean that they'll be like that forever.

Yeah.

Srini: I'm trying to think of how this would all land on me as a 13 year old kid who's insecure and just raging hormones, going through puberty and thinking. Would this lander, would it not? I think it would be hard for me to really internalize what you're saying, but let's talk about this in the context of college, because I, But I was having this conversation with a soon to be freshman in college that was at my parents' house, and I was giving him, advice on how to do well in school.

I'm thinking to myself, I'm giving him advice on how to do well in school when I did terrible in school. Surprisingly, his parents thought all my advice was spot on. And I said, Yeah, I, the beneficiary of a lot of people who are smarter than I am who have gotten to talk to on this show. So I've been writing this article titled Advice for Freshmen, What I Wish I had known when I started college, And one of the things that I wrote about building a Social Life was to be like Van Wilder.

I don't know if you've ever seen that movie. Okay, so the beauty of Van Wilder is that Van is in college for eight years, and the crazy thing about Van Wilder is that he is literally friends with everybody. He doesn't discriminate against any sort of, like cool people, nerds, jocks, whatever. And as a result, He is the most liked person at the school, and it's apparently based loosely on a true story about somebody.

So to me that always stayed with me because I thought to myself, there's no time in your life where people are gonna be more open to meeting other people, and yet it's amazing how quickly people start to fall into sort of a routine and a set social circle. I just know this from my own experience because I graduated from college thinking, How the hell do I not know anybody other than Indian people?

This is.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, in college, I feel like this sorting happens super early on and you end up with people that you're not necessarily you don't necessarily feel comfortable and close to, but then you assume after that. What I see in college students, I teach them too, that you're like, everybody has their friends.

So I can't, I guess I'm just gonna have to accept this group of like lackluster connections that I've created. And yeah, you just feel like, oh, there's this like very small with period or window for making friends. And then outside of that, I just am gonna assume everybody already has their friends, which is such a toxic assumption for friendship.

Especially because like we are lonelier than we've ever been like in human history. And college students are the loneliest, like Gen Z in general are the loneliest of all the generations. And so other people are just as lonely as you and. Probably like more hopeful for friendship, Big connection because of that than than we've ever been to.

Yeah. Yeah. So assume people would wanna meet you too.

Srini: So what is it that actually led you to wanna write a book about this? Because I think that your. About the fact that, you say in the book that platonic love lies at the lowest rung of the hierarchy. Our culture, places on love, but I've learned it's a devastating loss to all of us if we dispose of it there.

And that's so true. We don't actually spend a lot of time really studying friendships. There's so many damn books on romantic relationships, and there's so few on Platonics. Exactly like you and Lydia Denmore. Yeah. The two people, and she's been a guest on their show, .

Marissa Franco: Oh, that's great. Yeah. Lydia's great.

Smiley. I'll just shout out to a couple. Fred Smiley, Que Shasta Nelson top bellows. They all have some great books too, but yeah, you're right. Compared to romantic relationships, we have so fewer books and I think for me it's just I'm just like, we have this cultural problem that is really destroying us.

And there's not enough people questioning it, right? Like it's destroying everybody to feel like you have this form of connection that doesn't matter to you. It's, I think it's destructive for everybody to orient to

,

a form of connection in a way where you're like, This isn't a priority. This should always be positive and light.

This isn't a responsibility. It's not a commitment. Like just our scripts for friendship are so narrow. And so like flimsy, and I say in the book like, here we are investing less in our friendship, spending less time with them, not having formal ceremonies with them, affirming them less. And then we assume that friendship is inferior because something inherent to friendship.

But if we look at our behaviors and how we treat friends compared to other relationships, any relationship that has like that little investment in it is not gonna be. As great or as close or as intimate. And so I think I'm trying to push people to be more critical and think, Oh, all these things I do for my family or for my romantic partner.

I could also experience that with a friend. Like even asexual communities have really been the pioneers in getting us to look at the possibility of friends as life partners, right? , don't have to be having sex with someone to choose them as your life partner. And I just think all of us could like really widen our script on friendship, and that'll even benefit people in traditional relationships because according to science, like if you're in a traditional romantic relationship and you get into a fight with your spouse, your cortisol your stress hormone release becomes, Wacky unless you have support outside the marriage and you're more resilient distress within your marriage.

So I think we're getting more and more insular, like into like couples family unit and it's just harming us more and more.

Srini: Yeah. I wanna come back to that because I know how you wrote about the coexistence of romantic relationships and friendships and I had a lot of questions about that. I think what really struck me is how much you emphasize not only the benefits, but importance of friendship.

At the beginning of the book, you say friendship is a medium through which we find the truest, kindest, and richest selves and friendship affects who we are. Behaviorist traits and identity for some additional evidence of importance, let's zero in on its effects on our biology. Can you talk about that?

Like how does it affect us? Yeah. Both mentally and physically.

Marissa Franco: Yeah, that's a good question. So one of the points that I make in the book is that friendship or connection in general helps us release this hormone called Oxy Ttoc. Which oxytocin is a hormone that also makes us better at making friends because it makes us more trusting of others, more generous towards others.

And not only that, but oxytocin also contributes us living longer. So that's why the quality of your friendships determines the quality of your life. Like Esther Perl, she's a psychologist, she would say, right? There's this hormone we release when we feel connected, that makes us further connect with other people and it makes us live longer.

So the benefits are pass, like basically a lot, like throughout the book, all the different things that I say. The behaviors you could take on generosity, affection towards others. These behaviors that help make other people feel good, make us feel good, like they decrease our level of stress and decrease our blood pressure and things like that.

And so anything we do to make a lot of things that we can do to make friends, I should say, make us better and healthier as people. But another thing that I talk about really in that chapter is just the impact on friends and our sense of identity in ourselves. To figure out who we are. We see aspects of ourselves represented in, in our close connections, and it helps us to begin to embody those traits ourselves when our close connections have those traits.

So it's just to make it less abstract. Maybe I would love golf, but I never know it unless someone in my network exposes me to that idea. And because of something called inclusion that others in the South, which is this theory. When we get closer to people, we include them in our sense of ourselves.

So it almost feels like what they do is what we do. Whatever our friends take on, we're more likely to try on too. So we just become richer, we just become more expansive and I think we become more true to who we really are.

Srini: So one thing I wonder, you talked about familiarity cuz I had his friend from college and I remember early on in our friendship.

I didn't think much of him. I didn't really, see him as somebody that I would want to be friends with. And I remember he asked another friend, he's Does Shie hate me? And he's Nosy just thinks you're an anal fuck. And she's Sh doesn't hate anybody. And he and I traveled through Europe together.

And the funny thing is, despite my first impressions of him, We ended up becoming really good friends. So what is that all about? Like here's this person that I think is obnoxious and there are things about him that still irritate the shit out of me, but I think he and I are so polar opposite.

But somehow in the end we found common ground.

Marissa Franco: Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, California Properties is a brokerage of dedicated real estate experts that are there to support you through every step of the home buying or selling process. From Santa Barbara to San Diego, their team delivers a refined experience with the highest standards of integrity and expertise.

No matter your preferences, lifestyle or interests, stress less when you sell your home with the best of the best agents. Visit podcast dot e HHS California dot coms today to book a free consultation with an agent or receive a complimentary home valuation.

Yeah, great question. So remember how I said don't assume friendships happen organically? Sometimes they do. According to the sociologist Rebecca Adams, when we have continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability, our friendships take off and you could see why, how we have that at school, right?

Like lunch, recess. We just have these periods of time where we see each other repeatedly and we have our guards down. And that's what really creates organic connection. It happens in college. It might happen on a trip with someone. And the problem is though, that doesn't happen in adulthood. For many of us, like at our jobs, we see each other repeatedly, but we're often the vulnerability is missing.

, we're only showing one side of ourselves, which is why I think your template for making friends as a child cannot be your template for making friends as an adult because your setting has changed. And I think we really need to reconcile with that.

Srini: Yeah. Let's come back to that. Let's talk first.

The ideas of how attachment styles affect our friendships. Cuz I know that you basically dedicated all of chapter two to this idea about how our past relationships affect our present relationships. So how is that what is the impact of attachment styles on friendships in our lives? I realize it's a, Yeah, that's a massive

Marissa Franco: question.

Yeah, first I'll just explain the theory. So the theory we have in my book is attachment theory. And the idea is like how we've connected has shaped who we are. Like our personalities are reflections of our previous experiences of connection or lack thereof. Our personalities are almost strategies to deal with.

The connections will the experiences and connections that we assume will experience based on our past, right? So whether we are cynical, trusting, friendly, warm, vulnerable, withdrawn, all of these are behaviors and traits we develop based on our previous experiences of connection. But not only that, once these experiences of connection shape us, then our personalities that develop out.

Shape how we continue to connect, right? It's not random. The people that have connected well developed these traits and characteristics that help them to continue to connect well, whereas the people that have baggage, disconnection, trauma develop these traits and characteristics that are primarily about protecting themselves and the cost is their relationship.

So that's like insecurely attached. People anxiously or avoidantly attached people. Both these groups fear abandonment from others. They hand handle it in different ways. Avoid if people completely devalue connection cuz they assume they'll be rejected, they are not vulnerable, they do not enjoy their friendships as much.

They do not initiate friendships as much. They're more likely to ghost on people. Whereas cuz they think people don't care about them anyway really. But then you have the anxiously attached people. They handle their fears, They have great fears of being abandon. And they handle that by clinging very close.

You see them developing friendships that are very volatile get very intense very quickly. They take things very personally. The research actually finds that they're amygdala, the stress, stress out part of their brain lights up more strongly in reactions to events. And what you also see is that, one of the studies I talked about in the book, When people with insecure attachment are exposed to stories that are ambiguous about how people are treating them, so in, I talk about this study.

Where people were in a cafeteria and your friend comes up behind you and that they spill, spilled milk on you. How do you interpret that situation? Insecurely attached. People think their friend was out to get them, did it on purpose, and then they become vengeful, right? They wanna spill milk back on their friends, whereas the securely attached people, the people that had those healthy connections.

They assume their friend is just clumsy and they don't try to take it out back on their friend. So you see how the insecurely attached people, they project rejection and then they escalate the rejection and it really harms their friendships, whereas they truly attach people, like I said, with the tip. Of assuming people like you, they assume people like them.

They assume people are trustworthy. They assume people want the best for them, and the implications of that means that they act in kind and friendly ways. They don't have to be in this protective stance against rejection that kind of sabotages their relationships. . Yeah. Wow.

Srini: Let's get into this whole idea of making friends as an adult, because you literally open that chapter by saying, Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult?

It doesn't seem to happen organically like it used to. And you even said, the template that you had for making friends as a child is not the one that you can use in adulthood because the context has changed. And I think that this was particularly, Personal to me because I went through this experience because I lived at my parents' house until I was almost 36 or 37.

And I remember moving to San Diego in the first couple months. I thought to myself, Okay, this is great. I'm finally free. I'm not living at home. And I think about six, seven months in, I just found myself in a pretty deep depression thinking, Wait a minute. Half my friends are completely unreliable.

They cancel plans. If I can get them to make plans in the first place, it's a miracle. The other ones are in relationships where they're joined at the hip and it just sucked me into depression. And, part of the reason I left was because I had such a hard time with making friends. And I could not, for the life of me figure out how to build a social circle when half the people in my life were in these different situations.

That made it almost impossible for me to see the ones that I already knew. And I was beyond that stage of I want to go out to bars and I'm 37, 38 at that time, I think I want to be in bed by 10 o'clock at night. , .

Marissa Franco: Yeah, this is a great question. And I think your point is well taken in that to make friends, you have to find people that wanna make friends , right?

That, like people that are similarly as invested as you, which isn't always easy. What the, according to the research, what you can look for is transitioners people. Have just moved to the city, just gotten out of a relationship, just retired. Transitioners. These transitioners, they just tend to be particularly open to friendship.

And you can find the transitioners I think when you join. When you have a hobby or interest you choose to do that hobby and interest in community with others, oftentimes that's because you're not just there to pursue your hobby, but you're there to find community. So you find people who are really open to connection when you decide.

Okay. Instead of doing running alone, I'm gonna join a running group. Or instead of learning my languages alone, I'm gonna take a language class or trying to teach myself photography. I'm gonna take my photography class, like joining that group. That's really repeated over time, so you can capitalize on that mere exposure effect that I talked about.

That when people are familiar to us, we like them more. But not only that, once you do that, You have to generate exclusivity, which means you have to start having experiences with someone that you don't have with other people in the group. That's how you start feeling like you're friends with people rather than you're just, a part of this group.

So it literally takes, and I say to assume people like you, right? Because again, that makes it, it's to us self, it's a self. It's called the acceptance prop and the. And so you say to someone, Oh, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you in this book club. Would you be open to connecting outside this book club?

I'll exchange, Would we exchange your cock information and then following up with them?

Srini: Yeah. Okay. So this is a weird question probably, but I realize there are a lot of guys who, most of us will go to an event or something like that, and if we're being brutally honest with ourselves, we're like, Do I really wanna be friends with this girl or do I just, am like interested in her sexually?

And the answer is almost always the opposite. Is the latter. Yeah. I mean you may have remember that, Chris Rock joke where he was like, men, female friends are women that you once liked and weren't able to sleep with .

Marissa Franco: It's true. And it's so unfortunate. Men that are friends with women experience more emotional intimacy across their relationships.

And while women report that their closest friendships are often with other women, for men, it's mixed. , some men report it's with other men. Some men it's report, it's with one other women. So men uniquely benefit from friendships with other women. But I do agree. Treaty that we're up against this narrative.

I think that a lot of men have around, if I'm gonna be friends with a woman, it has to be because I'm romantically, sexually interested in them.

Srini: It's funny because I have certain female friends where, Somehow right off the bat, it's just a given that there is absolutely no like sexual romantic interest between the two of us, and we are actually able to maintain a really close friendship

But if the idea is in my head at all and ugh, like I really don't wanna be your friend.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. You're too hot. We can't be friends. Yeah. Pretty

Srini: much. Cause it, it takes us back to the whole when Harry met Sally thing right. It was like men and women being friends. Yeah. So I'm curious you, you alluded to the fact that men who have female friends tend to be better in relationships.

So putting aside the sex drive, how do men form female friendships where this is not part of the. Yeah, that's, You just choose ones you're not attracted to physically .

Marissa Franco: You could choose what you're not attracted to or I think you can do, you can you can talk about people you're romantically interested in or hoping to date to clarify.

You can hang out in a group. There's certain like indirect behaviors that we use to convey, Hey, I hope this is a platonic form of connection. .

Srini: So let's talk specifically about one other thing that you talk about, which is this whole idea of how important it is to maintain your friendships when you're in a romantic relationship, because I have can't tell you the number of friends that I have that once they get into a relationship, They don't make time for their friends.

The relationship is their life. And I saw this happen with a female friend. I saw this happen with one of my best friends, and I remember we were all pissed off at him when they finally broke up. We're. Dude, you've pretty much neglected all of us, all for this girl who dumped your ass. Yeah, and of course, I remember my sister was like, Don't be a jackass.

He's your friend. I'm like, Yeah, he's an idiot. But I was, more than anything, I was just upset because he was my roommate and he left. And I, he and I were really close and. But it just struck me and I it, and he wasn't the first. I've just seen this happen so much. So two questions. One, do you notice that this is more common with men or women?

And two, how do you all

Marissa Franco: is Absolutely, yeah. It absolutely more common with men, interestingly, and I think at first I've started to understand why, right? Because men's friendships tend to be less close and less intimate than women's. What they get out of a romantic relationship is. Is so unique they don't get it out of their friendships and often, because men just tend to invest less in their friendships, right?

There just might be things that they experience there as romantic relationship that they really don't get out of their friendships. And that's just, we could talk about the larger problems that we tend to see with men's friendships, but with women there's a lot more overlap. Like they have, women tend to have a lot more intimacy in their friendships, tend to have intimacy with.

Romantic partners or spouse. So it's not Oh, this relationship feels so much better. I'm getting so much more out of it than my friend, so I'm just gonna invest all my time in

,

this relationship. Whereas for women, it's more this is where I get something. I get something here. I get something there.

Just because there, there just tends to be a lot more intimacy and vulnerability and women's friendship. So that's why women just tend to keep a larger network alive when they get into romantic relationships than men. And to me it's really, I think we do this based on so many misconceptions, right?

Some people think that's a way to value your romantic relationship is to just, make them your only priority, right? But we know from the research that this isn't true, That your relation, romantic relationship, according to the science is just more resilient to stress when you have an outside network and.

When you, if your romance partner is like your only source of support when things are going wrong, according to the research, you're gonna be a lot more affected by them than you would be if you had other forms of support in your life. And so I think fundamentally, like for healthy romance, you need friends.

And we know that like we need an entire community to feel whole because there's actually three different types of loneliness and only one can be fulfilled by a traditional spouse. There is intimate loneliness, which is we crave a relationship of deep intimacy, like a best friend, like a spouse.

There's relational loneliness, which we crave a relationship that's like as close as a friend. And there's collectivistic loneliness, which is like we crave a group wor working towards a common goal, and we can experience any of those forms of loneliness. So even if I have the best relationship ever, I could still experience the collective loneliness and the relational loneliness because we.

We just need it. There's also this like jargony term called like the functional specificity model, which basically argues that like each relationship gives us something special and something unique. And I think we tend to again, think on a hierarchy like, Oh, romantic love gives us everything.

Plato love gives us romantic love minus some things, but no, instead I think we could think of, okay, each relationship has value in our lives, so one can't necessarily be replaced by the other. Yeah.

Srini: Yeah. No, I mean it. As you're saying this, I'm thinking about my relationships when I start dating somebody and they're there all the time, and I love the fact that they're all the time.

And then about a month in, I'm like, Fuck, you're here all the time.

Marissa Franco: Yep. Yep. Can't you? A lot of pressure.

Srini: I'm like, Can't you just go leave and do something? And I, I always thought like I was the type of person who wanted somebody to be around all the time. But I think, the fact that I'm 44 and still single, like I realize, I'm like, Wow, I'm a person who needs space.

If you're there all the time, I'm gonna lose my fucking mind. And I'll want you to be there all the time in the beginning. And then once we've established from a relationship, I'm gonna be like, I need you to leave. .

Marissa Franco: Yeah, absolutely. That, and that's very normal. There's this theory called equilibrium theory that basically finds that we need time together and we need time alone.

And when we experience time together, we have a natural desire for time alone. And when we experience time alone, we have a natural desire for time together. Implications of that or if someone needs a little bit of space, give it to them. Cuz that means they're more likely to wanna come back to connect with you.

Yeah.

Srini: The funny thing is that I think part of my challenge with that earlier was that I was, when I read that attachment book, I was like, shit, I'm one of these anxious people. This sucks. And I've become less that way. I think with time. I Amy Chan was the one who told me, she was like, You can actually change your attachment style, which I was really pleasantly surprised to hear.

But yeah, that's one of those things, I think that it just evolves with time.

Marissa Franco: Yeah, exactly. You can certainly change your attachment style, like actually reading about attachment style. Some pe some researchers have found can change your attachment style cuz you don't know the behaviors that you're doing that contribute to your relationships being harmed unless you understand how your attachment style affects your behavior.

That's what I talk about at Platonic, but also I think an important way to change your attachment style is like, Noticing moments of safety that counter your attachment styles. Assumptions, right? So if you think everyone's gonna abandon you, notice when people show up and really take it in and savor those moments.

The more you do, it's, you're gonna release certain hormones that lead to like changes in the structure of your brain if you really focus on and savor them. But like when we have a certain attachment style, we tend to only register. That match our template on the world, and we tend to discount those moments that are counter to that.

So that's one of the reasons attachment styles can be self-reinforcing.

Srini: Let's talk about the two concepts of vulnerability and authenticity and friendships, because I think that the way that you made this distinction between vulnerability and oversharing really struck. You said that vulnerability is the deepest form of authenticity and it involves sharing the true parts of ourselves that we fear may result in our rejection or alienation.

The parts we feel most shame over shame is the sense that our secrets make us unworthy of human connection. And then you go on to say, oversharing is pseudo vulnerability because vulnerability is authentic and oversharing isn't. So talk to me about the distinction between those two. Because I noticed that there were certain friends that I truly could feel vulnerable with.

I realized no matter what I told them, it wouldn't change our friendship. And then there are definitely others who I have to be very selective about what I'm willing to tell 'em about.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. Great point. So I just find authenticity and it was tricky for me cause I was like, all these researchers are saying it's your true self, but what the heck is that?

So from the research that I read, I deduced. Our authentic self is who we are when we feel most safe, and when we're not hijacked by defense mechanisms. What do I mean by defense mechanisms? I mean that sometimes we feel an emotion that we wanna push away and instead of allowing ourselves to feel it.

We employ these defense mechanisms. Hey, I'm jealous of you for getting that job I didn't get, and instead of admitting, I'm jealous with cuz that's vulnerable. I engage in a defense mechanism like, Wow, you're not that great or I'm surprised they gave it to you. I put you down a little bit, for example.

And so oversharing is a form of utilizing defense mechanisms cuz it's compulsive. Vulnerability. And when you're vulnerable, you're discerning that someone's safe and then you're sharing, right? Because again, authenticity requires those feelings of safety not being hijacked by defense mechanisms.

Oversharing is often a compulsion wherein you fear people will abandon you, usually anxiously attach. People use it, so you test them by. Throwing out this, this very deep information about you for yourself early on to test whether they'll stay around and that anything that's testing people is not you sharing your authentic or your vulnerable side.

The authenticity and the vulnerability would be like, Oh, I'm afraid of rejection and I notice that and I recognize it, instead of this defense mechanism of oversharing and testing you so that I don't have to acknowledge my fears. Yeah.

Srini: Let's talk about anger in friendships. I think that is one of those things that, like you point out, it's normal to have sort of tactics and solutions for resolving conflict with family members and romantic relationships.

But in friendships, you almost just assume that it will dissipate at some point. And often that just ends up, leading to resent in my experience.

Marissa Franco: Yep. Yep. I think you know, me too. This was the chapter that I'm like, this was my biggest growth area. Getting into arguments with friends and being like, It's my job to get over it, and that's what it means to be a good friend to get over it and then not getting over it and just withdraw from my friends.

And I think we often don't realize that. If we, It's not like we could just not bring it up and it's not gonna have an impact. We don't bring it up and then we withdraw and we harm the friendship. So our whole goal, I think, in not bringing it up was to keep the friendship safe. And actually we are causing that outcome that we feared when we just withdraw anyway.

And so for me, I, I came across the study that found open empathic conflict contributes to more intimacy in our relationships. So I really started to question. Okay, I'm gonna pretend everything's fine behavior. And then I started to read the psychoanalyst, Virginia Goldner, who talked about flacid safety, which means you just pretend everything's fine so it feels safe versus dynamic safety, which is we rupture and we repair, we rupture and we repair.

And that she says is like, what's behind deeper intimacy? So I was that actually sounds really nice to be able to be that level of honest and to not feel. If anything's wrong in this friendship, I just have to deal with it or dump them, right? Yeah. That there's this third option that we could heal or we could recalibrate our behavior.

Knowing that research, I also realized as someone who was more anxiously attached before, I often really feared that if I brought things up, people would abandon me, and then I would only bring things up when I was so activated that it would come across as very accusational. And so what I realized is that I wasn.

My relationships weren't being hurt by me bringing things up. It was how I brought them up. , like just attacking and blaming people. And those two things are very different dimension. So I would assume, if I, Okay, this is proof, anything, I bring things up, people get, they back away.

That's the self confirmation bias of our attachment style. Yeah. So I learned. Throughout writing this chapter, just how to bring things up in a way that's loving, in a way that can cause healing.

Srini: It's funny you say that because like I was more than willing to tell my older roommate that I was pissed off that he left.

And I told him, I was like, Yeah, what? I'm not mad man. I'm upset because you left and I loved having you here. I missed you. That's why I was mad. And and it was not one of those things that was, like attacking him about it. It was just, Yeah, I'm pissed that you basically ditched us for four months and basically let this girl take over your life.

But there's something else that I want to ask you about, and that is maintaining friendships over time. Because one of the things that happens as we become adults is, people have kids, people get married, people move away, whatever it is. And I wanna bring back a clip from my conversation with Lydia, down with tig.

Listen, it's just much

Marissa Franco: hard. To maintain a relationship when people move further apart, but it's not impossible. So it really depends on motivation again and how much it matters and how, I think what does happen is to be generous. We'll say that people get busy and then they get caught up with the new people in their life or their work, and the longer things go when they haven't seen someone, the less connected they feel the.

Up on the day to day of their life, that person is. And so it's natural that it can fade away sometimes, and it's not actually the end of the world. This is one of the things I think is important. So when you said that it didn't feel reciprocated in the same way, that's the critical. Juncture where you can say to yourself, Maybe this friend isn't, This friendship isn't sustaining me in the same way, and I'm gonna let it go, or I'm gonna shuffle.

I, The analogy I like to use is that if you think of your friends, as you've seen in the book of, concentric circles, the people closest to you, and then a little further out, a little further out, when you have a friend like that, it doesn't mean that you have to not be friends with him anymore.

You shuffle the furniture of your friendship to an outer room, .

Srini: So I think that the reason I wanted to bring that back is because I thought about it in the context of sort of anger and you say there are no absolutes when it comes to salvaging a friendship.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. Yeah. And like what Lydia said.

I, I definitely agree with her in that we just tend to see it at friendship as so binary. We're friends and if there's a problem with the friendship, now we're not friends. Instead of seeing it for the spectrum that it is, we're friends and we have this problem and maybe it means that our, we maintain this friendship but at a different level of intimacy than we had before.

And I also liked how Lydia mentioned that it's normal to lose friends. Actually every seven years we lose half our friends. One study finds, Wow. Yeah, so if you've lost some friends, you're not alone. I think what's unfortunate is that it's not a grief that we validate losing a friend because of how we trivialize friendship.

And so it can trigger what's called disenfranchised grief, which means our grief gets more complicated and prolonged because we think it's illegitimate and we don't validate it within ourselves. So it gets. Hard to grieve friendships, even as we're losing them. But one last point that I wanted to make about maintaining friendships over time, because especially long distance, there's this cool study that talks about how long distance friendships thrive more when we see them as flexible and not fragile.

It's the assuming people like you thing. If I haven't talked to you in six months, me being able to assume this is a flexible relationship. So I assume we're still friends even if we haven't talked for a little while can really help to maintain the friendship versus me assuming we haven't talked for six months.

So it's over and that's gonna impact my behaviors cuz now I'm not gonna reach out anymore. .

Srini: I think that makes a perfect segue into the final part of the book where you talk about generosity. Cause I, I realized that so many people, myself included, we tend to be martys in our friendships.

Like we give and give without really allowing ourselves to receive or, the opposite. You're the kind of friend who's always there when you need somebody.

Marissa Franco: Yeah. Yeah. And that was, I think a surprise throughout my book, this idea that these unmitigated givers who give and give, not only do they experience less poorer mental health, but they actually experience poorer relationships because, actually according to the science, when you give and you feel obligated, people actually feel worse receiving it.

like people can pick up on it in some way. And I argued for a little bit more of a middle ground between just being a taker and being an endless giver. I argue for This idea of mutuality, which means I consider my needs and your needs, and I prioritize what's most urgent, right?

So if I need something from you, but you're like, I don't know, studying for your boards, like you're a medical student or something, I can be a little bit more flexible. But if you're, if you're at a time of your life where you have a lot more freedom, I might expect a little bit more. Like for me, mutuality means my friends that have tiny babies, I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna be a little bit more flexible.

I'm not gonna expect the same, Frequency of hanging out that I usually expect, or I'm gonna be a little bit more flexible about when to see you. Cuz I know your life circumstances and my life circumstances, yours are a lot more constrained. And so that's how I view mutuality. It's not again, absolute like I'm always gonna be showing up for you or I'm never gonna be showing up for you.

It's. I'm gonna try to show up for you based on the circumstances and what I have to give, and hopefully, because you're invested in mutuality too, when I can't show up for you because of what's going on in my life, you can validate and appreciate that because it's my way to refuel so I have more gas for this friendship in the long run.

Yeah.

Srini: Wow. I can see why Smiley referred you as a guest. This has been absolutely fascinating. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody, or something unmistakable? Ooh,

Marissa Franco: this is a really good question.

What makes someone unmistakable? I think it's A deep sense of authenticity, a deep sense of self-expression. The truth or essence of who they are is conveyed in how they interact with the world.

Srini: Beautiful. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and sharing your insights and wisdom with our listeners.

Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything you're up to?

Marissa Franco: Yeah, so the book is called Platonic, How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends, and you can Buy it wherever books are sold. And if you want more friendship tips, I'm on Instagram at Dr. Marisa g Franco, d r m a r i s a g f r a n C o.

I also speak on connection and belonging, and you could reach out to me on my website www.drmarisagfranco.com. And then there you could also take a quiz that assesses your strengths and weaknesses as a friend and gives you some suggestions as to how to improve your friend.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.