The Longing Lab Author of Modern Friendship Anna Goldfarb on how to nurture the friendships we most value
Episode 31 Journalist Anna Goldfarb discusses the complexities of modern friendships, emphasizing the impact of social media on longing and the grief in losing friends who played specific roles in our lives. During a time when it appears we have hundreds of connections, she encourages readers/listeners to become wholehearted friends with fewer.
Journalist Anna Goldfarb is known as “the New York Times’ friendship correspondent." Anna’s reporting on friendships has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. Her book, Modern Friendship, explores the nuances of navigating adult friendships. She also publishes Friendship Explained, a Substack newsletter that explains the mechanics of friendship through a pop culture lens. Find her online @AnnaGoldfarb.
In this episode, (in order) we talked about:
*How social media compounds our longing for friends
*The longing we have to know our friends’ children
*Why it’s easier than ever to shed friendships with less social glue
*How her father’s reluctance to connect with a childhood friend just before he died inspired her to write this book
*The parallel between learning music and learning how to do friendship better
*Why we grieve the role our friendships played at a specific time in our lives
*Why we live in unprecedented times where we have more bonds we’re expected to maintain
*How the pandemic disrupting our routines changed how we do friendship
*How to change your invitation to friends be more about them and less about you
*The 14-Day Friendship Cleanse to becoming a whole-hearted (dedicated, committed and enthusiastic) friend
*How you figure out who belongs on your list
Quotes
“I've naturally taken a step back from social media because it's not helpful. It's not reality. Our we're not supposed to know this much about people in our outer rings of our social life.”
"It's just harder to find people, to have more enduring friendships, when your identity is so complicated."
“My dad didn't come to me very often with these kinds of personal problems, and I wanted to be his hero. I wanted to solve it. I wanted to reconnect them...He was so terrified of rejection, silence, if his friend would be mad at him…there was so much uncertainty, and uncertainty creates anxiety, so he never connected."
“When you learn how music works, when you learn the notes, when you learn how to create music, I mean, it's a whole different way to interact with the art form, and that's what I wanted to do with this book. Here is how the music of friendship works. Here are the notes. Here's how it's arranged. Here's why things sound good or don't sound good. This is the human equivalent of sheet music.”
"Studies show we lose half our friends every seven years."
"I think where a lot of people they go wrong with longing for a friendship is they think, ‘What's in it for me?’ I think the miscalculation is, ‘What's in it for them? Why would they want to connect with you?’ And when you think of it that way, it's like ...'I really want to see them succeed. I really want to be a witness to their triumphs and see them overcome challenges.'...That's a different invitation then, ‘Let's meet for drinks, because I'm bored.’”
“Wholehearted friendship is my way to close the gap between the friend you want to be perceived as and the friend that you are in reality. I wanted to close that gap. The cleanse is is my strategy to get closer to those kinds of friendships.”