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In a world that emphasizes romantic relationships, we explore the science of friendships in humans and our primate relatives— how we make them and how they not only influence health and happiness, but our survival.
Episode Summary: Romantic love gets plenty of attention, but what about the friendships that sustain us through life’s ups and downs? In this episode, we explore the science and significance of deep friendships, how they contribute to our mental and emotional health, and why they deserve just as much care as romantic relationships. We also discuss practical ways to strengthen friendships and rethink how we define meaningful connections.
How To Do This Practice:
- Assume that people like you. People tend to underestimate how much others like them. If you expect acceptance, you’ll be warmer and more open, leading to stronger connections.
- Be An Ignitor. Friendships don’t happen by accident. Instead of waiting for others to reach out, be the one to start conversations, invite people to events, and follow up.
- Keep Showing Up. Friendships form more naturally in structured settings with repeated interactions. Join a class, club, or hobby group where you’ll see the same people regularly.
- Overcome Covert and Overt Avoidance. Showing up isn’t enough— avoid “covert avoidance” (like staying on your phone or sticking to one person). Engage with new people, introduce yourself, and ask questions.
- Repot Your Friendships. Move them into new contexts. Invite a coworker to a weekend hike or a book club friend to coffee. This deepens bonds by adding variety to your shared experiences.
- Show People How Much You Like Them. People are drawn to those who make them feel valued. Compliment them, show appreciation, and express excitement when you see them— friendships thrive on mutual affection.
This is part of our series The Science of Love, supported by The John Templeton Foundation.
Sign up for The Science of Happiness podcast's 7-Day Love Challenge to receive these science-backed practices delivered directly to your inbox: tinyurl.com/7daylovechallenge
Today’s Guests:
DR. MARISA G FRANCO is a psychologist and professor at The University of Maryland and author of the book “Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends.”
Learn more about Dr. Marisa G Franco here: https://drmarisagfranco.com/
Follow Marisa on Instagram: @drmarisagfranco
DR. LAUREN BRENT is an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Exeter. She studies the ecological and evolutionary basis of social relationships and networks.
Learn more about Lauren Brent here: http://www.laurenbrent.com/
Related The Science of Happiness episodes:
36 Questions to Spark Love and Connection: https://tinyurl.com/ktcpz78u
How 7 Days Can Transform Your Relationship: https://tinyurl.com/bdh2ezhr
Why We Need Friends With Shared Interests: https://tinyurl.com/bp8msacj
Related Happiness Breaks:
A Meditation on Love and Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/ye6baxv3
A Guided Meditation on Embodied Love: https://tinyurl.com/3dmpfam6
Visualizing Your Best Self in Relationships: https://tinyurl.com/4797z2vf
Tell us about your experience building lasting friendships. Email us at [email protected] or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: This episode was supported by a grant from The John Templeton Foundation on Spreading Love Through The media.
MARISA G. FRANCO: So, in my young 20s, I was not focused on friendship, I was focused on romantic love! And it was not going well. I remember going through a breakup, and I felt so bad. So I asked my friend Heather, "Heather, how about we create this wellness group? We'll meet up and practice wellness. We will meditate, cook, do yoga."
And it was really to heal from that romantic breakup. Heather said yes, and me and a group of friends would meet every week to practice wellness. And I looked around and I asked myself, like, why doesn't this form of love matter to me? Why I've been so focused on romantic love, feeling like I have no love in my life unless it's romantic, like I'm not worthy unless I have a romantic partner. Like, why doesn't this love count?
I felt the ways that I was seeing friendship as trivial and less than, reflected a larger culture that devalued this form of connection. And, because I felt so loved by my friends through that group, it felt like something's wrong about this. We're really missing something.
DACHER KELTNER: Friendships shape our lives in ways we don't always realize. They play a huge role both in our happiness and physical health. So why do we sometimes take them for granted? And what can we do to make them stronger?
I'm Dacher Keltner, and this is The Science of Happiness. We're going to hear about what it really takes to build and maintain deep lasting friendships, and why they matter more than we might think, with psychologist Marisa G. Franco.
Later in the show, we hear from ethologist Lauren Brent about the unexpected ways friendship shapes not just our lives, but the lives of animals, too.
LAUREN BRENT: Looking outside of ourselves has taught us. We get something out of these relationships that we fundamentally need in order to be alive, to be successful, to be healthy, to produce babies.
DACHER KELTNER: That’s coming up, right after this.
I'm Dacher Keltner. And this is The Science of Happiness.
We're going to hear about what it takes to build and maintain deep, lasting friendships—and why they matter more than we might think—with psychologist Marisa G. Franco.
She's the author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends.
Our executive producer, Shuka Kalantari, talked with her about the science of friendship, how our culture’s focus on romance shapes our social lives, and the ways we can invest in the friendships that bring us joy.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Dr. Franco, thank you so much for joining us.
MARISA G. FRANCO: I'm so happy to be here.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Just like you in your 20s, in Western culture, romantic relationships tend to be prioritized over platonic ones. How does this cultural emphasis on romantic love affect the way that we view and treat our friendships?
MARISA G. FRANCO: We just treat friendship as something that's trivial, something that we take for granted, something that we don't have to put effort into, you know, people are less likely to work through conflict with friends than romantic partners. And we have this all wrong, because first of all, our romantic relationships thrive the most when we consider our romantic partners our friends. It's friendship that is at the center of the success of romantic partnerships.
Second of all, romantic relationships are less healthy when we don't have friends outside of the relationship. Research finds that having friends not only makes you less depressed, but spills over and it contributes to your spouse being less depressed. And third of all, fundamentally, you know, one person can't fulfill us as much as that's the myth we've been told that one person can complete us.
And so even when we have a romantic partner we really love, likely a lot of us still struggle with feelings of loneliness because of the different ways that we experience loneliness, our fundamental human needs are not met through one person.
The impact of a large social network is similar to the impact of a healthy diet and exercise combined. Part of the reason is when we connect, we release more oxytocin, which is also known as the hormone that's like the fountain of youth. And so everything that we do to connect is also what makes us healthier.
Loneliness is as toxic for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which is wild, right? Because none of us are smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but a lot of us are lonely, unfortunately. And so everything that we do to connect is also what makes us healthier. loneliness is a chronic stress disorder state on our bodies.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Loneliness is pervasive and it's not just the U.S., especially when you think of, you know, post COVID, so many of us are now working remotely, siloed in our homes, on our computers. There seems to be less common spaces, to come together and share and connect. And, within all of that, we're told, but yes, making friends is good for us. Tell us about how to make and keep friends.
MARISA G. FRANCO: Well, first I wanted to kind of speak to your point because I think it's really important to emphasize that it's not one individual's fault that they're lonely. It's a larger societal, cultural trend that we are all getting swept up in, you know, in 1990 compared to now, four times as many people have no friends. There's a lot of reasons for that. What I find most compelling, even though academics kind of dance around this reason, is the smartphone, because loneliness surged in 2012 around the presence of the smartphone. We see this really in younger generations that, even if they're not using technology in ways that disconnects them, everyone else around them is. So people used to reach out to you, your friends used to reach out to you more, but now they're not because they're, you know, at home scrolling. When people overcome loneliness, they do so because they don't internalize it as their fault, right? Loneliness is a systemic issue, but it's also something that we can get out of. We kind of have to swim upstream against the tides. I wish it was easy and automatic and default that we find connection like maybe it was 50 years ago, but the reality is that it's really not.
One study that tracked people's beliefs about connection and their loneliness over time found that when people thought friendship was something that happened without effort, they were lonelier five years later. Whereas the people that thought friendship takes effort were less lonely five years later, because they made that effort. They showed up at volunteering, places of worship, to meet and connect with people. Now, I would say that in addition to that, you know, to connect with people, you need to show up in places where you could connect, but you also have to overcome covert avoidance. Covert avoidance is, I show up physically, I check out mentally. I'm on my phone. I'm in the corner. I'm talking to the one person I already know. So I have to say, hey, you know, my name's Marissa. How long have you been part of the soccer league? Or what was your favorite part of this book? We have to engage with people.
SHUKA KALANTARI: I love that. So these are two of the tips that you've distilled in your how to make friends formula. One is don't assume friendships will happen organically, and that makes sense. When you're in school-aged, you're doing sports, you know, you have activities, you're in class together. Friendships do happen organically, but then the older we get, we're so siloed in our lives, you know, in our families and whatnot, that it is harder. So, to make that effort. And then the other thing I heard was start assuming that people like you. And I think that's a big one for people because like, why would they want to talk to me? Why do they need extra in their life? How do we shift our perception to help us combat that anxiety that comes with, kind of assuming that the other person doesn't really want to engage?
MARISA G. FRANCO: When I was looking into the research on connection, there was a study where people were told that they would go into a group and be liked based off of personality questionnaires they filled out. And, this was a lie. The researchers were using deception. But, when they thought they would be liked, they suddenly became friendlier and warmer and more open. Whereas when people think they're going to be rejected, right? When your arms are folded, you're cold towards other people, you're putting out all these signs that you're going to reject people, and so they reject you back. And so that's why trying to assume people like you is really important. But it's not easy. When you assume people like you, it's not that you don't have to have that voice in your head that's scared or that's critical. It's just that you have to shift your attention to the possibility, the hope, the what if this could go well, you know? What if we do connect? What if we end up being friends?
And so freely expressing that you like people, that you value people, or any act that conveys that. Like, "I'm going to share my baked goods with you," or "I know you're sick so I wanted to drop off some cough drops for you." Anything that conveys that you like people brings you closer to them.
SHUKA KALANTARI: As you know, we're doing a series on the science of love and talking about romantic relationships and a lot of the core things that you're talking about are kind of the same for romance and non-romance. It's like,
MARISA G. FRANCO: Yeah.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Put yourself out there and be your best when you do it and assume that they want you around.
MARISA G. FRANCO: Yeah, yeah. There's this scholar, Dean Spade. And Dean says, what if we took the best self across romance and family and friends, and brought that best self across all relationships? And I'm just like, yes, that is so beautiful and the skills are transferable and we don't always realize this, but you know, what you've learned about being a good friend is going to make you a better partner romantically. What you've learned about being a better partner is going to make you a better friend.
We are sort of biologically wired to really fear rejection, but what the research tells us is that generally, our fears of rejection are much more overblown. When strangers interact, they underestimate how liked they are by one another. When people talk to strangers, they think about 40 percent of the time people will talk to them. It's about 90 percent of the time. And so there's just probably a lot of people out there waiting for you to connect with them, waiting for you to reach out, and you just have to initiate.
SHUKA KALANTARI: These are all tips on how to engage with a person to be able to form a friendship, but how do you find those people to begin with?
MARISA G. FRANCO: First thing I suggest is to reconnect with people. Are there people in your life that you’ve fallen out of touch with, that you already know you kind of get along with? That, maybe you could scroll through your phone this time last year, who were you texting? And just say, I was just thinking about this memory we shared and wondering how you're doing. Then take it from there, if they seem open, you can say, "Oh yeah, I would like love to reconnect.” And you already have trust built in, so it's just a lot easier. The next option is, so, Ryan Hubbard, he has this great term called repotting the friendship. And that is simply changing the setting in which you interact, which, research finds, deepens the connection. And so, are there friendships that you can repot in your life? Do you have a work friend that you can invite to hang out outside of work? And so saying, “Oh, do you want to get dinner sometime? Or, you know, go for smoothies sometime?” that can really deepen your feelings of connection. And it also makes our connections sustainable beyond the environment in which we met, right? Because often when we finish the job, we lose the work friends, unless we've repotted the relationship before then.
The next option is if you think about things you like and enjoy, just doing them in community, right? You like dance, go to a dance class. You know, you like to learn languages, go to a language class. And the reason that I say a class, right, rather than like a single event, is because of something called the mere exposure effect. Now, this is Psych 101. Which is this finding that the more that we are exposed to something, the more that we like it. And this applies to people.
I tell people like stay for two to three months, unless you're absolutely dreading it, because your experience in two to three months is gonna be very different than your experience right now and I think it's one of the ways that we miss out on connection is we'll go to that book club once and it'll be like, “Oh, it was awkward and weird” and, we'll leave not knowing that that awkwardness, that discomfort is a part of the process of connecting. It's not a sign to eject from the connection.
The other tip that I have, which I think will really change the world if people really take this on.
So I teach this class on why we're so lonely at University of Maryland and I try to create community amongst the students. And I see that one of my sections, everyone's super connected, they're sending me, like, pictures of them going to have lunch together. In the other class, they're not. And so I'm wondering what is happening here? And I see that I have one student, Savannah, who says to everyone, “anybody want to get lunch?” And because of Savannah, ten other students are more connected. And Savannah is what I call an igniter. An igniter is a person that creates social groups. They create opportunities for people to connect as a group. I ignited when I created that wellness group and because of igniters, so many other people have connection, even though they didn't have to put themselves out there and try. And so I really think that if we had more igniters, it would not only help the igniter with their own experience of loneliness, but it would help so many other people. So my question for you is, is there something in your life that you can ignite that you want to do in community?
SHUKA KALANTARI: Close friendships play a big role in living a long, healthy life, more so than diet and exercise. And we’re not the only ones that depend on social connection.
LAUREN BRENT: Friendships exist outside the human species. They’re not some quirk of humanity. Other animals do it too. And to that, it serves a purpose, these things evolve. They have an adaptive function, which means you get something out of them. You're biologically more successful because of them.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Up next, we take a look at what non-human animals can teach us about our own friendships.
Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I’m Shuka Kalantari. We’ve talked about how to make friends and why it matters, now we're gonna see what other animals can teach us about friendship.
Take for instance, the rhesus macaques. They're a species of monkey that live in Puerto Rico on a small, protected, island called Cayo Santiago.
LAUREN BRENT: So to get there we take a boat. This little rickety fishing boat, it's up to safety code, but it’s rickety. That we take every morning. It's about a five minute boat ride, depending on the condition of the sea.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's evolutionary biologist Lauren Brent, at the University of Exeter.
LAUREN BRENT: And then we dock the boat. Often the monkeys are fed, so some of them are sort of waiting near where we docked the boat, because they're anticipating that they're soon going to be fed by the caretaker staff.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Rhesus macaques aren't native to Puerto Rico and wouldn't survive without human help.
LAUREN BRENT: They were brought from India by an American anthropologist who wanted to have monkeys closer to home to study their biology.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That was in 1938.
LAUREN BRENT: Monkeys have been on this island ever since. So I'm studying their, I think, 14th or so generation now.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Brent has been studying rhesus macaques for the past 19 years to see what they can teach us about friendship.
The rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago are medium-sized, averaging 15 pounds, with fur that's blondish-brown, sometimes white. But their faces have no fur at all.
LAUREN BRENT: So they have bare skin faces, which makes facial recognition easier, in some ways.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Over the years, Brent has memorized countless faces and the personalities behind them.
LAUREN BRENT: They're quite a despotic, aggressive society, so they are pretty terrible to each other, and they try and also do that to us, but we're not involved, so we have to signal neutrality.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's fascinating.You're saying it's an aggressive society, and yet you're studying friendships in them.
LAUREN BRENT: Yeah. Friendships are found, and the strongest friendships are found in the most competitive societies. Because I think, in part, friendship solves the problem of competition. So me and you against the world, right? Me and you against others.
SHUKA KALANTARI: There are about 1,800 monkeys on the island, split into 12 social groups.
LAUREN BRENT: You have your loners, your socially isolated individuals, and then your like, very popular kids in class who have some relationship of some description with almost everybody. So there's variation in connectedness.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Imagine an elementary school classroom. One where you never go home at the end of the day.
LAUREN BRENT: And I think that's a good analogy, because they are all together all the time, but the level of togetherness and the quality of their interactions and the quantity of their interactions changes.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Brent closely studies some of them, observing how often they groom each other, how many babies they have, how long their friendships last, and other signs of social connection.
LAUREN BRENT: So you have your BFFs, your BF’S for now, your friend colleagues, you have your acquaintances, your friends of friends. Not all relationships are exactly the same, but I think they don’t all serve the same function. What you get from your acquaintances is probably very different from those very close alliances where I'm really putting my neck on the line and you're gonna do vice versa.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Sound familiar? Rhesus macaques and humans have a lot in common—they just live on a much shorter timeline, with lifespans about a quarter of ours. As these macaques age, their friendship circles tend to shrink and become more deliberate.
LAUREN BRENT: So as they get older, they’re pruning out particularly those weaker connections and they’re concentrating their network on previous close partners. Their closest relatives, individuals that were their partner the previous year.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Brent doesn't just observe the monkeys, she also examines biological factors to understand physical differences between the social and less social ones.
LAUREN BRENT: The reason the Cayo Santiago field system is amazing is because we can capture and release animals once a year. So we can get blood samples, we can get weight measurements from them, we can measure all sorts of body mass index type things. And with some of those samples, we can measure the rate of aging.
SHUKA KALANTARI: She found that rhesus macaques with close friends tend to live longer. Brent also measured stress hormones, by analyzing over 1,300 fecal samples from 20 female macaques. The macaques with less social connection had higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that can cause various health problems if it's elevated for too long.
LAUREN BRENT: It was a sign to us that being well connected is adaptive. It gets you something when you don't have it. Then your body is signaling to you, problem. Solve it.
How the individuals are experiencing those relationships, what they're thinking about them, I don't know. We can't know. We can't know that about each other either. Much less what a monkey is doing in their heads, so there's that.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Lauren Brent's research leads to a pretty clear conclusion: friendships aren’t just some quirk of humanity.
LAUREN BRENT: It's not just some cultural thing that we do for no reason. Other animals do it too. And to that, it serves a purpose, right? These things evolved. They have an adaptive function, which means you're biologically more successful because of them. That's what looking outside of ourselves has taught us. That this is a biological imperative of our species and others. We get something out of these relationships that we fundamentally need in order to be alive, whether you're a monkey or a bird or a giraffe or a person.
DACHER KELTNER: On our next episode of The Science of Happiness.
How lullabies and calming melodies can support parents and caregivers who sing them. On our next episode of The Science of Happiness.
Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Shuka Kalantari is our executive producer. I'm your host, Dacher Keltner. Have a great day.
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