Thank you for joining us for episode 506 of Live Happy Now.

This is the time of year when we celebrate love, but there's one kind of love that sometimes gets overlooked, even though our lives depend on it.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Dr. Kimberly Horn, a professor and

research psychologist whose new book, Friends Matter for Life, looks at how important and powerful

friendships are throughout our lifespan. Join me as she introduces her framework of dynamic

friendship and explains how its eight tenets of friendship can help support and strengthen your

current and future

relationships. Let's have a listen. Dr. Kimberly, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Thank you so much, Paula, for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. This is a really important topic

for us because it's February, it's a month of love. People are always talking about

the romantic love, but there's another kind of love that's super important, and that is the

friendship. And that is something we're going to oftentimes have longer than our romantic

relationships. And so I'm really glad that you're able to sit down and talk about this. And I was

curious about what made

you go into this area of study? Because your book, you have done your research, woman. There is some

great stuff in there. What drew you to this? Well, I've been an academic scientist for almost 30 years

in the area of public health and health behavior.

And one of the things that I saw consistently in my studies over the years was how important

that social connection is and our social networks are to our health behavior and health

outcomes. And then during the pandemic,

especially in the early part of the pandemic,

I saw some of my findings playing out right in front of me

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