Episode 139: Teach Me How to Make Friends As An Adult, with Psychologist and Friendship Expert Dr. Miriam Kirmayer
There’s a new epidemic in town: Loneliness. And while making friends is intimidating at any age, it feels especially daunting as adults. As we hit our 30s, our groups of friends are getting smaller and smaller (fun fact: We replace half our friend group every seven years as adults!). Life gets busy, people move away, and milestones come at different times. Even though this seems to be universal, it can still feel like something is wrong with us.
There’s a new epidemic in town: Loneliness. And while making friends is intimidating at any age, it feels especially daunting as adults. As we hit our 30s, our groups of friends are getting smaller and smaller (fun fact: We replace half our friend group every seven years as adults!). Life gets busy, people move away, and milestones come at different times. Even though this seems to be universal, it can still feel like something is wrong with us.
If we’ve learned anything along our adulting journey, it’s that friendships are crucial to our mental and physical wellbeing. So this week, we’re learning how to prioritize the most underrated of our relationships, how to make new ones, and why it’s so damn hard to maintain friends as an adult.
We’re not the experts, so we called in Dr. Miriam Kirmayer. Having spent over a decade researching the science of friendship and helping people live more connected lives, Dr. Miriam is a clinical psychologist, writer, speaker, and leading expert on friendship and social connection. She’s appeared on some of our favourite media outlets, from Call Her Daddy to Vogue and The New York Times.
She sits on the Mental Health Advisory Committee for Wondermind, a media company co-founded by Selena Gomez, and is a member of The GenWell Project, a human connection movement. She also has a private practice and is one of the first and only licensed clinical psychologists to specialize in friendship therapy!
Join us as we chat about:
Why our friendships dwindle as we age
Dr. Miriam’s best tips for making new friends
Overcoming the fear of rejection
How many hours it actually takes to establish a true friendship
How our attachment styles affect our friendships
Adapting to new life stages and navigating changing relationships
Why one friend can’t check every box
How to prioritize friendships (and why it’s good for your health!)
Advice on letting go of friendships that have run their course
We hope this episode helps you feel less alone and inspires you to get back into the friendship market. Remember, you’ve always got a friend in us!
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Episode 112: Asking For A Friend: How Do I Navigate Friendships When We’re All In Different Life Stages?
As we go through our 20s and 30s, we all start adulting in different ways and at different rates, and maintaining our ride-or-die connections can start to feel complicated. Navigating these different life stages means that our friendships sometimes end up at the bottom of the list, or we start growing in different directions and losing common ground. But every friendship goes through different seasons, and change doesn’t need to be a bad thing!
Picture this: You just turned 30. One friend just bought a home, while another is traveling the world. One is starting their own business, and one is skyrocketing up the corporate ladder. Some are getting married and having babies, and some are single AF. None of us can decide on a date to catch up, and where to go for dinner. So no one told you life was gonna be this way…
As we go through our 20s and 30s, we all start adulting in different ways and at different rates, and maintaining our ride-or-die connections can start to feel complicated. Navigating these different life stages means that our friendships sometimes end up at the bottom of the list, or we start growing in different directions and losing common ground. But every friendship goes through different seasons, and change doesn’t need to be a bad thing!
This week we’re tackling two juicy Qs: How to maintain our friendships when we’re at different life stages, and how to deal with comparison when those big milestones crop up.
Join us as we chat about:
How to stop comparing and start leading with curiosity
Getting rid of timelines and expectations for where you *should* be
Navigating feelings of isolation during a big life change
Why it’s as important to be there in the good times as it is in the bad
Celebrating your friend’s wins like they’re your own
Giving your friends the space to change and grow
Finding new ways to make memories together
How to communicate and self-regulate when your friendship dynamics shift
Bringing your people along for the journey
No matter where you’re at in life, your closest friendships are worth nurturing — they’re the family we get to choose! — and we’re choosing to fight for them.
If you have a topic you’d like us to cover or a guest you want us to interview, comment or DM us on Instagram:
Related Episodes:
Episode 110: How To Be More Compassionate Towards Yourself And Others
We humans are social creatures, we thrive on community and connection. But in these times of social media comparison and cancel culture, it can feel like we’ve lost sight of something vital — compassion. With mean girls dominating the news cycle, we thought this would be the perfect time to get deep and teach ourselves a lesson on the importance of compassion, how to give it to others and most importantly, how to give it to ourselves.
At its core, compassion is about putting aside judgment and making an effort to understand the struggles within ourselves and others. It helps us create meaningful connections, build healthy relationships, and develop emotional intelligence, which coincidentally all make for a well-adjusted adult! We’re all a lot more similar than we are different so let’s get positive (but not in a toxic way we promise).
We humans are social creatures, we thrive on community and connection. But in these times of social media comparison and cancel culture, it can feel like we’ve lost sight of something vital — compassion. With mean girls dominating the news cycle, we thought this would be the perfect time to get deep and teach ourselves a lesson on the importance of compassion, how to give it to others and most importantly, how to give it to ourselves.
At its core, compassion is about putting aside judgment and making an effort to understand the struggles within ourselves and others. It helps us create meaningful connections, build healthy relationships, and develop emotional intelligence, which coincidentally all make for a well-adjusted adult! We’re all a lot more similar than we are different so let’s get positive (but not in a toxic way we promise).
Tune in as we chat about:
What compassion actually means
The difference between pity, sympathy, empathy and compassion
The importance of finding similarities with others
How assuming positive intent can shift your mindset
Why we should validate someone before trying to find solutions
How to hold space for someone's pain
Using the "RAIN" method to cultivate self-compassion
Gill's favourite Loving-Kindness mediation for next-level compassion
We hope this episode helps you have more compassion for the people in your life, but most importantly, for yourself.
If you have a topic you’d like us to cover or a guest you want us to interview, comment or DM us on Instagram:
Related Episodes:
Episode 49: How To Navigate Friendships As An Adult
We can find support for nearly every aspect of our lives these days, from our careers to our mental health. But when it comes to friendships, there's virtually nothing out there to help us maintain and strengthen our relationships with some of the most important people in our lives.
As two besties and business partners, Gillian & Cailyn know all too well the impact that having strong friendships can have on your life. So we called in friendship coach and expert Danielle Bayard Jackson to help us level up our friendships and show up as supportive BFFs.
We can find support for nearly every aspect of our lives these days, from our careers to our mental health. But when it comes to friendships, there's virtually nothing out there to help us maintain and strengthen our relationships with some of the most important people in our lives.
As two besties and business partners, Gillian & Cailyn know all too well the impact that having strong friendships can have on your life. So we called in friendship coach and expert Danielle Bayard Jackson to help us level up our friendships and show up as supportive BFFs.
TBH, after the past year and a half of social distancing, this is the episode you didn't know you needed to help you feel more connected with your #girlgang.
Danielle is a certified friendship coach and national speaker dedicated to teaching women how to create and maintain meaningful friendships through her company, Friend Forward. She’s also the host of the Friend Forward podcast, and she dishes out amazing advice and hilarious videos on IG and TikTok, so be sure to follow her for allll the game-changing friend advice!
Join us as we chat about:
Our biggest friendship lessons and realizations
How to address conflicts in a healthy way
Maintaining your friendships when you’re in different life stages
How to get better at taking and receiving criticism
Clear signs that it might be time to end a friendship and how to do it
Tips for setting boundaries when you can’t spend as much time together
How we can show up as better friends for the people we love
We hope this episode inspires you to build a stronger relationship with your friends or help you take the steps to let go of the ones that are no longer serving you.
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