Hi, welcome back to Eat Your Crest podcast. I'm Jisoo. I'm

Crystal. And I'm Helen.

All right, so we have a familiar voice on today. You might recognize Helen from episode 185, Girl Talk, Ix and Sticky Situations, where we put Helen in various hypothetical situations and pretty much made her decide whether to stay with someone or not. Deal breakers, red flags, and whatnot. So that was a really funny episode. But today we have a little bit of a different topic for you, Helen. And we wanted to talk about friendship, specifically the various values that we each kind of carry and hold when we think about friendship. Let's kick this off by starting with a very simple but maybe kind of hard to answer question. What does being a good friend mean to you? A

good friend, I think that is a very difficult question because everybody has different standards for what a good friend is. For me personally, I think it's somebody who really, really, truly cares for you and someone who can be loyal. And most importantly, I think someone who is intentional. Intention in the sense that like they want to spend time with you they want to care for you they want to put in the effort and just go that extra mile to be there for you but also these are the standards that I put on myself to be a good friend to my friend I think that's my definition of a good friend yeah I like that

and I feel like that makes a lot of sense. Intentionality, I feel like is something that comes up a little bit more when I think about friendships now, especially in our adulthood, where all of us are so busy, and we have crazy work schedules, you might have a lot of obligations, even outside of work that you're keeping up with. So I think being able to like carve out time for people is a skill, it truly is a big effort. But something that I kind of think about for this question is, I guess this is a little bit hard to conceptualize, but in my mind, a good friend is someone who feels like home. So someone who is not blood related to you or can be, I guess, but just feel so much like family and you feel so at peace around them. You feel safe around them and comfortable around them. And I feel like this is something that you can definitely work towards, but it's not something you can force. So to me, there's something a little bit under the surface where it's kind of like innate. There's almost like a base level that you have to meet before you can be

really good friends with someone. So that's one of the qualities that I think about for a good friend. I think what you both said makes a lot of sense. Jisoo's idea is kind of like good vibes, like their vibes match with yours. And then I think, Helen, you have the other part where it's like you also put in the work. And as you mentioned, the intentionality, it definitely matters a lot to see people return the favor kind of or like return the same effort that you do so that you can feel like you're not in some sort of one-sided or like unrequited friendship. Because I think I've seen in the past, sometimes with my own situations, sometimes with other friends of mine situations where one person is very willing to say, I don't know, drive up to SF to hang out. The other party is like not willing to drive down, you know, the other parts of the bay to hang out. And I think that just kind of shows how like priorities differ. And then it's like, oh, well, why does like only one side of this friendship have to put in the effort all the time to like go up and like travel to hang out when you know the other side isn't paying it forward as well and

I