This is feminist wellness and I'm your host nurse practitioner functional medicine

expert and life coach Victoria Albina. I'll be full heart. Welcome my love let's get started.

Hello hello my love I hope this finds you doing so well Today we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart the

importance of friendships in our lives and I'm thinking about this because last week was Valentine's Day and while I had a delightful

evening with my darling romantic date, I also had so much fun, sending love to and receiving love from my beloved community of friends.

And it felt so wonderful to wake up to a phone full of I love you from all around the globe and to send those darling

caring loving misses right on back to the beautiful humans that are my circle of friends who really and truly are my chosen family.

Now, it wouldn't be feminist wellness if we didn't start with a nerd alert.

There are so many studies like I kind of fell down a Google scholar rabbit hole

but there are so many studies that show that having quality friendships, however you define that for you,

needs to increase life satisfaction, reduce loneliness and potentially longer lifespan through increased social connection.

I would also add to that that the more loving people we have to co-regulate,

or stabilize, ground, and calm our nervous systems with, the healthier and happier

we will be in the short and the long run.

So let's dive in to talk about friendships and why having quality friendship matters, especially

for us coming from our co-dependent perfectionist and people-pleasing thought habits.

One of the things we often do is put all of this pressure on our romantic partners to be our everything, to be our one and only.

So we end up projecting all of our wants and our unmet childhood needs on to our primary partner.

We take a community, a whole village worth of expectations and needs and desires and

put them squarely on our intimate partner and expect that person to be our BFF, our therapist, our chef, our financial planner, our life coach,

our co-parent, our librarian, are everything, which sets us up for disappointment, time and again when we ask one human

being to do the work of so many. It's not kind, it's not loving, and it basically, to put

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