E96: The Social Domain of Friendships

Kirtly: Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. And this is forever singing round in my brain from when I was a Brownie, a junior Girl Scout at Scout camp when I was little. It's a beautiful thought, and it's beautiful round when sung by 30 Brownies and Girl Scouts.

I'm Dr. Kirtly Jones from obstetrics and gynecology, and we're continuing our 7 Domains of Friendships. Friendships being critically important for the mental health of children and young women and older women, and all people. Today, we are working on the social domain of friendship. When do you make friends? How do you make friends? Where do you make friends? We've talked about the why in the physical domain and the emotional domain. So if you haven't listened to them, you should check them out.

With me is my co-host, Dr. Katie Ward. Katie's a long-term friend, and we'll talk about how and where and when we became friends. Katie's a professor in the school of nursing and has an advanced degree in anthropology. And so she thinks a lot about friendships as an anthropologist. She has a busy practice in women's health. And we've been thinking a lot about friendships.

Katie: Right? There's nothing like doing a podcast to make you think hard about it.

Kirtly: Well, there's nothing about living through tough times that makes you think about your friends. We are hypersocial beings. We share that trait with a number of our other mammals. Herd animals aren't necessarily social. They're herd animals. They just stick together, but they don't raise their children together. They don't share food so much. And as best we know, they don't have advanced communication skills.

When do we have the capacity to be a friend? We need to develop empathy first. And this happens right after birth as we look at our caregivers and they smile back. Talking to babies, singing to babies, smiling, and offering emotions to babies to help them develop emotional intelligence.

By age 2, children can show empathy. One of my favorite photos of my granddaughter is at her first day of preschool, when she was not quite 2. She was anxious and tearful, and an 18-month-old little girl came over to her and held her hand all day long. By 3, they were best friends.

But by 3, children have a playgroup, may have some preferences for one child to play with or another. And by 4, they can articulate who their friends are and who they're not.

Katie: Yeah, as toddlers, kids do more sort of side-by-side play. That is, they're playing next to each other but not really with each other. So, yeah, something special about that 4 to 5 age where that shifts and they're interacting and taking turns and caring and caring about who gets hurt or whose feelings get hurt.

I think what they're learning at that point is . . . well, there are a couple of things. One is reciprocity. The other is the theory of mind, where they know that what's going on in their head is different than what's going on in somebody else's head. So there's a lot of development that goes into being able to be a friend, right?

Kirtly: Oh, absolutely. And that theory of mind continues well on to adolescence, when we have to do it all over again as we rewire our brain, unfortunately.

Katie: Yeah. Young chimpanzees will play . . . they play together, and that playing with each is really important for their physical development. And they do that. They kind of pick who they want to spend time grooming and who their best companions are. But we just take this to a whole new level with being able to understand what's going on in somebody else's head and thinking about that.

Kirtly: Well, some children develop imaginary friends, usually about 3 years old. And these imaginary friends can offer comfort. And toddlers are building their language skills and can express that their imaginary friends are feeling happy or sad or want something, or their imaginary friend spilled their milk. They've got someone to blame it on.

It's a safe way for toddlers and young children to express their fears and emotions, and they can express their empathy. And about 65% of young children develop imaginary friends.

Katie: My daughter had imaginary friends. I remember them vividly. They were named Ooey and Ginny, and they lived slightly up the street. We would sometimes walk up to visit where they live, and then we invited them for tea parties. And I was trying to figure out, "Is Ooey and Ginny two people or one person?" So I'm like, "Well, how many teacups do we need if Ooey and Ginny come over?" But yeah, they were such a feature of my daughter's life that I haven't forgotten their names, and I love them dearly.

Kirtly: Yeah. Does she remember them?

Katie: Oh, yeah.

Kirtly: Oh, good. Well, as children grow, they make friends through proximity, like a neighborhood or a school. And in rural communities, their friends were on neighboring farms or in the schoolroom. And when children move frequently or live in neighborhoods that have few children, and that's increasingly common these days, the neighborhood friendships are less available.

Now, I grew up with kids we played with after school, and in the summer, there were no playdates. You just walked outside, and there were all these kids. We just walked outside, and we were kind of wandering from house to house, and we always had friends. We had some friends we liked a little bit better. But we went to the same public school, so the kids in our neighborhood went to our school, and our parents hung out together.

This was a 1950s small town in suburban America, so clearly, this wasn't true in some big cities. But when I was raising my son, we lived in a tiny little lane, but there were kids on that lane. He just had to walk out and wander up the street, and there were some kids to play with.

Katie, I don't know when you were raising kids if there were kids in their neighborhood, or did they make their friend at school?

Katie: I mean, I would pick a neighborhood based on the saturation of children and the availability of playmates, but also who those . . . I put a lot of thought into that when buying a house, about where that neighborhood was and who were going to be my kids' friends, because that's the one piece as a parent I have a little bit of control over. Your kids go out and play, and those are going to be the important people in their life.

And I think, looking back on my childhood, my parents didn't think about that so much. And so I ended up with some influential friends that didn't have such a good influence on me. So I was thinking about that a bit.

Kirtly: Well, in the rewiring of the brain in adolescence, it lights a fire under social connections. We become wired for intense friendships and sexual relationships and good friends, as you just tried to do for your family, your kids, Katie. Good friends can provide a positive protection against anxiety and depression.

And friends' habits can be contagious. A scholastic friend can raise the grades of someone who might not be that studied as much. An adventurous friend may increase the adventurous undertaking and increase risk taking, which is part of adolescence. So an increasingly worryingly adventuresome friend can get your kid in trouble. So this is all part of the rewiring of adolescent behavior.

There's a five-minute TED-Ed talk by a neuroscientist and educator, Shannon Odell, called How Friendship Affects Your Brain. And it's worth a short listen if you have adolescents in your life or are just curious. It helps understand the deep connections and intensity of adolescent friendships and how this theory of mind . . . how actually they can kind of read their friends' minds.

When they walk down the street, they walk in sync together, and how important the wiring and the rewiring for the social brain is how learning to get along. So we need friends and the difficulties in making up with friends, we need to learn how to do this.

And the intensity of friendships continues into our early 20s as we're still wiring our adolescent brains. And we may never have as intense emotional connections with friends as we did in adolescence, but it does help out to get our brain ready for pair bonding.

Pair bonding is . . . not everybody does it. We don't always do it with the same sex or a different sex. But strong bonds with friends can be protective and healing in the face of the highly emotional romantic breakup.

Unless, of course, that friend is the cause of the breakup, and that's a classic theme in many books and movies. Who do you stick with, your romantic one or your friendship? Anyway, that makes movies go.

These friendships can be intensely disruptive when friends break up or someone feels rejected from a peer group. And I think we're going to talk about that more in the intellectual domain, as when is it time to leave a friend? Anyway, having a number of friends can be protective in the face of other peer losses or pressures.

So in midlife we make friends through common interests, hobbies, activities like book clubs or hiking groups or maybe a choir or AA or sharing our parenting. These are important friendships, even not as intense as the friendships in adolescence, thank goodness. I mean, there's only such so much drama that someone who's in midlife with a couple kids can deal with.

Katie: Yeah, I think so many of my friends are the parents of my kids' friends.

Kirtly: Yeah, exactly.

Katie: I'd send my kids into the world, and they would make friends with whoever they encountered. But then those parents became my friends and have stayed . . . Even though my kids maybe aren't so close with the people their age, I've kept the parents.

Kirtly: Yeah, because you have these long-term commonalities, which is when our kids were younger.

Well, we make work friends in medicine, of course. Our training is very intense. And during residency we can feel like the bonding that comes with men and some women experience during boot camp or at war.

And I think about our friendships, Katie, when I am in a teaching or a supervisory or mentorship relationship. The reciprocity of friends doesn't feel possible.

When I have people who I'm mentoring or growing as children, professional children, I need to be the parent or the mentor and not the friend. And the power relationship is unbalanced, and I wouldn't be able to share my vulnerabilities. I'm not going to cry in front of my resident when I'm feeling anxious. No, no, no.

So when Katie and I met 35 years ago, this was where we were. Katie was curious and energetic and courageous and thoughtful, all the things I wanted in a friend. But it took time for her to advance to her professional heights, for us to see each other as equals. This is how I see it, Katie. You can pitch in.

It's a great joy for me, and I think some mentorship relationships never grow to that because one or the other never sees the other as equals. And I think that's a fault. Eventually, if you've done right, your kid becomes your equal. I don't know, Katie.

Katie: Yeah, I agree. I think work friendships can be tricky, right? I mean, you and I are a good example of how that evolves.

Yeah, when I first met you, you were my boss, in a way. It's, I guess, a complicated boss-ness, but you had more education than I did. In my role where we were working, I had to report mistakes to you. So they could be my mistakes or everybody else on the team that I was a little bit responsible for. And so, yeah, there was a lot of vulnerability on both sides. But I always admired and respected you and wanted to be like you. So now even I still sort of think, "I can't believe you like me."

Kirtly: Come on.

Katie: But I think it was a place . . . I think for the real friendship to develop, we needed to not be working in that exact situation anymore. It took being in different roles where there's not a supervisor-subordinate dynamic.

And I feel that, too, as a teacher. I have students come through who I really enjoy, and I think, "Oh, I'd like to have this person as a friend." But there is a boundary when I'm responsible for their grades and their professional development, where I feel like I can't also socialize with them. And then they go out and graduate, and I may not bump into them again, but . . .

Kirtly: Yeah, same thing happens with patients. Patients may share with me their vulnerabilities, and these are powerful women, extraordinary women, but there is a boundary. And we try to teach residents boundary issues. That's not the chance for me to share my emotional trauma. In fact, some people do, and I think that's oversharing on the part of the clinician.

Well, we keep friends through continuous contacts through time, but that takes work on the part of friends. And maybe one friend is the one that reaches out or travels to maintain a friendship. It's common for good friends to drift apart, and moving away, or getting married and having a family, or developing political preferences or religious pathways can divide friends unless they're non-judgmental good listeners.

I personally feel that the vast majority of my friends who don't necessarily share my cosmological view of the universe or my politics, they were friends of mine before, and I love them for who they are. We just don't fight about politics.

We make friends through intense experiences, men at war, people in intense physical conquests. And Katie, you're my physical adventurer in this duo here.

Katie: I think there's an idea that those intense experiences automatically create lasting friendships. But I would say that that is not always true, and maybe less true than you'd think.

I've made friends on various adventures. I have a 40-year friendship that's actually the second generation of some friends I met skiing. So I made some friends, and then they sent their friends, and it's that second generation that I've stayed in touch with now for 40 years. So sometimes it's worked out really well that we've gelled.

I've had other adventure experiences . . . I was thinking about a Grand Canyon River trip I took a long time ago where we really had a difficult kind of trying experience. We lost our food, we were starving, and one person made herself the guardian of the food, and it was . . .

Kirtly: Oh, dear.

Katie: Yeah, "Lord of the Flies." But again, I think it comes down a little bit to reciprocity again. Either you're actively choosing to support and comfort each other, or you're just enduring the same hardship without any real mutual care. I think that's what sort of happened on our river trip. But I found that I tend to stay closer to people that I already knew going into the adventure.

Kirtly: Oh, yeah. Someone you chose to go on that trip with.

Katie: So those relationships got stronger through those shared challenges. I got another river trip story along those lines. But there was already that foundation of trust.

And with strangers, I felt like we bonded in that immediate adrenaline rush and there was a lot of closeness, and we promised we'd never lose touch with each other, but we did. So we were bonding early over the situation, not really creating a friendship there.

So I don't know that the intense experience automatically creates a bond. I mean, they can, but I don't know that it's the same as a genuine friendship, necessarily.

Kirtly: Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about social media and friends. I've talked about this before in the emotional domain. Are friends that we only know on social media really friends? And I'm old enough to feel like I need to have them in my physical proximity at least some of the time. And I don't know, Katie. You have some ideas about this.

Katie: I mean, I have really mixed feelings about social media and friendship. I've had some amazing experiences through social media that I would not have had if it didn't exist.

So I was going to share a story about a relative that I found through social media. He was somebody who I didn't . . . I sort of knew he was out there. I recognized his name, but I had never met him. And he's older. He's 80.

I had something in my possession that had belonged to him when he was a little boy that had landed in a bunch of my family's things that had gotten passed down. And so I looked him up on Facebook, and I sent him a message saying, "Hey, I think we're related, and I'd love to connect with you sometime."

And so for a number of years, we just had been Facebook friends. I'd like his posts, he'd like mine, and we'd occasionally share a message. But I had put a pin in that and thought if I ever got to Memphis, where he lives, I was going to make the effort to meet him in person.

And meeting him in person was delightful. We could fill in the gaps in each other's family histories. I knew things about the family that he didn't, and he knew things about the family that I did not. But we had similar stories about various characters in our family or pets that the family had owned. And so we were able to have a great laugh about stories we both grew up on, even though we'd never met before. So the in-person was definitely the richness of it.

But I wouldn't have found him, I don't think . . . I mean, maybe if I was really motivated to go to a genealogy library and the White Pages. But social media made it very easy for me to make that connection.

Kirtly: Well, I've had friends who come back to social media, people I knew in high school that I wasn't really friends with, but then they found me, and then I wanted to reach out to them a little bit more. I mean, I wanted to have some kind of a dialogue with them. And they kind of did some of the work, and I did some of the work. So it takes a little work.

Katie: Yeah, I see that happen all the time, that somebody looks up just a name from their yearbook or somebody they remembered from kindergarten, and a romance blossoms.

But most of what I see on social media isn't from my actual friends. It's from ads and influencers who are trying to sell me something. And I see that over and over again because it's right there in the palm of my hand, and I'm seeing it repeatedly. I think it does tickle those same parts of your brains that feel familiar, like friends do. And so that is the scary algorithm part of this, is that they're hacking into our brain's friend wiring, the network that does that.

Kirtly: They do. They say, "Kirtly . . ." You don't know me, but when someone says, "Kirtly, I would love you to think about this," it tickles my . . . Someone's paying attention to me, and it's all electronic. It's like, "You don't know me. You don't get to call me Kirtly."

Katie: Yeah. That technology is so good at sort of understanding how we're wired, but they're doing it for profit. You have this kind of false intimacy that's not real mutual investment.

Like I said, I've had some really good experiences with social media. I've taken some cool trips with some influencer that I followed who offers vacation experiences or travel experiences, and that's been amazing. And then I've met friends on those travel experiences.

I've done something interesting here locally. It's actually all over the world. It's a dinner group. And so you sign up and you answer a few questions, and then they match you with four or five other people that look like they're going to be reasonably compatible. So it's kind of age-matched. And they're questions that sort of are designed to get at putting people together who are likely to have a few things in common. And you show up at this dinner with five strangers.

I've done this twice and had really nice experiences. And usually out of a group of five of us, there's one person . . . At least in my two experiences, there's been one person that I've connected with and gotten together with outside of the dinner and added a couple more as Facebook friends.

Kirtly: So it's the dating app is taken to the friend app.

Katie: Sort of. Yeah, it's a group. It's not dating. I've met more women than men.

Kirtly: So they're not confined to that. I mean, they can actually expand this group. They ask you to answer some questions about your interests, and then the pool from which they can pull from is bigger.

Katie: So I think there are companies that are trying to get people off the app and meeting in person. And I've had a good experience with that. In fact, if I had a little more free time, I'd probably do it a little bit more often. The app sort of sets you up, and then it's humans taking over from there on the in-person basis. So the app doesn't do a lot. Dating apps try to set that all up in a lot more detail.

So yeah, I think there's good and bad. I think the thing that I'm most worried about in this moment, though, are these AI friends or boyfriends or girlfriends or . . . I think those are genuinely dangerous because it's a computer running statistics predicting the next most likely word. And they're really good at it. They're better than I am at picking a word, but it doesn't love you back.

And so I think these AI tools, where you think you're talking to an avatar or a person that you invent . . . The business model of AI is to keep you engaged. There's no genuine care coming from the computer. It's running a business model to ask you another question or to say another thing.

They're really solicitous and encouraging and positive because that's what keeps people coming back. But it's very artificially validating. It can feel really good. My ego likes hearing encouraging responses. But I think that that's actually the problem, is it doesn't actually give you honest feedback, and it's doing that just to keep you engaged. The more engaged you are with the platform, the more money they make, either from you or from other investors, by saying, "Look how good we are at keeping people connected."

And so this idea that you get an AI boyfriend or girlfriend really has me concerned.

Kirtly: It makes me think a little bit . . . And this would be fun for you and me to talk about as friends over coffee, is the parallels or non-parallels with imaginary friends. So kids from the age of 3 to 6 who create imaginary friends . . . and for some, a need. Their friends can be safe or not safe, and they get a chance to act out a little bit. It's really one way. Maybe their friends are talking back to them, I don't know. But they give it up, and it's an important skill.

I guess if I were analytic and I wanted an AI friend to talk to about problems, it would be interesting for me to analyze what my AI friend is giving back to me. Almost like a therapist. It's like, "What is this AI friend telling me? What's the algorithm telling me about me that I need to work on?"

Katie: That's always an interesting question to ask AI. "What do you know about me that I don't know about myself?" But I think what they do that is a really good therapeutic technique is they . . . It's like the five whys. They keep asking you questions.

So if you're sitting there with your AI and you're trying . . . And I've done this. You're trying to work through a problem. You're trying to understand something. It keeps asking you questions. And so sometimes that can be helpful if you're trying to think through something and dig a little deeper into it.

I always understand that that's what it's doing, and at some point, I can cut it off. But I think with the kind of AI companion that's just there to soothe you or something, then it's dangerous because you're not digging deeper. You're asking it for flattery or more, I guess, in the case of the boyfriends and girlfriends. And that, I think, is scary.

Kirtly: But that technique of "tell me more" is actually useful when you finally decide that you maybe don't have as many friends as you want and you want to go out and be more social. How do you begin having a conversation with people you just are beginning to get to know?

There are some people who will start by telling all about themselves. But the better tool for being social is to ask someone about themselves. And when they say something and you haven't got anything to say, you can always say, "Tell me more." That's a way. So the AI gives you some ideas about what are successful tools.

If you decide that you've gotten older and we have fewer friends as we age, and this is when we might need friends the most. Reconnecting with friends at high school reunions and reaching out to friends we haven't kept in touch with can help us keep friendships alive and supportive as we live through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, like aging.

And if you feel like your social circle is small, you don't have friends, and you feel lonely, it can be hard to take the first steps. You have to decide that being more social and making friends is important to you, and it is indeed important, but you have to make that decision.

And then you have to put in some work. You might reach out to neighbors or church acquaintances or friends by inviting them for breakfast or spend a little more time. Be a good listener, that very thing that AI has been programmed to do. Ask about them. Just don't go on all about yourself. I mean, if they ask you, that's okay, but be a good listener.

And when things seem like you don't know what to say next, you can always say, "Can you tell me more about that? That's really interesting." And then you can see if it blossoms or not. It isn't going to work in every case, but it can really be worth the effort, I think.

Katie: I mean, I think I've been thinking about that a lot in anticipation of this series on friendship. It is easy when you're young. You're in a big pool of people, school, college, churches. But society is kind of structured to put you in a space where you bump into a lot of other people. But as we age, that doesn't happen as easily, and it has to be intentional that you make the effort to go out.

The great thing about being a grown-up, though, is that you have lots of choices. So you really can start to say, "What are the things that I like to do and where do I want to spend my time?" But then making the effort to kind of do that, where you put yourself in a situation where you might bump into some other people who also like hiking or book groups or lectures, or whatever, pottery.

Kirtly: Or volunteering, volunteering at the food bank or wherever it might be. There are volunteer opportunities, and you find people who are like-minded. And even if you don't make a friend, at least you're conversing. You're feeling like you're doing something that you enjoy because you chose to do it. And it's one of the first steps to being more social and getting out there.

Well, I want to thank our listeners. I want to thank you who are listening. So anybody who's out there, if you're listening, you can listen to the other domains of friendship wherever you get your podcasts, or at women7.com.

I guess Katie and I might consider our listeners as our listening friends, and that we put the "7 Domains of Women's Health" together to reach out and touch our listeners with ideas and thoughts that might warm their hearts or give them something to think about. Thinking about folks who might take the time to listen warms my heart, so it's kind of like a friendship.

I will add the second verse to my Brownie Scout song. I will save you from listening to my singing voice. But you can find the song sung as a round on YouTube if you search for "Make New Friends Brownie song," and you'll get some Brownies singing it. And I particularly like the Fairfield County Children's Choir version, because their round is gorgeous. Friends singing together.

So here it goes. Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other is gold. A circle round, it has no end, and that's how long I want to be your friend.

Katie: Aw.

Kirtly: Thanks for listening. Aw. Sorry. It's me.