Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We are back here with Dr. Marissa Franco. We talked

so much in the last episode about how important connection and friendship is. And today, we're

going to talk about how the hell to actually get it. And I just want everybody to feel like, well,

this maybe won't work for me or how is this going to happen on a podcast? Just trust me. It is

working for me. Okay, if it's working for me, it can work for you. Dr. Marissa G. Franco is a psychologist,

international speaker and New York Times best-selling author known for digesting and communicating

science in ways that change people's lives, which is so true for me. She works as a professor at

the University of Maryland and author the New York Times best-seller Platonic, how the science of

attachment can help you make and keep friends. I'd like to talk to you, Dr. Franco, about this idea we

have that friendship should just happen organically, that like, oh, if I don't have friends, it must be

because I'm not good enough or people don't like me enough or because friendship is just supposed

to happen. Talk to us about that idea. Yeah, so I think a lot of us developed this assumption based

on our childhoods where it was like we were in the playground, we went to school together, it seems

like we just sort of made friends more naturally. And there's this sociologist Rebecca Adams who

identifies the ingredients of the organic friend as seeing people repeatedly over time in an

unplanned way like school, like none of us were like, let's meet up at this time, it's just we see

each other regularly. And then also letting your guard down, so vulnerability. So when we are part

of groups or, you know, a workplace or a school where those ingredients occur, then friendship might

happen organically, but most of us are not. I might see people at work every day, I'm not often

vulnerable with them. And so it's not happening organically. And so in adulthood, we can't rely on

the same assumption that we had as kids, which was like, it's just going to happen. We need to try

because there's a study that found that people that think that it just happens are lonely or five

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