E99: The Environmental Domain of Friendships

Katie: Okay, so I think I've shared this story before on this podcast, but if you listened before, you'd know that I was a 17-year-old high school dropout and a single mother, kind of raised in and living in poverty at that point in my life. And I was the last of my three best friends, talking about friendship, to become a young mother. So that was sort of the space I lived in. And if you'd asked anyone, including me, what my future looked like, I would expect that that would be where I would stay, more of the same.

So my environment, that environment that I grew up in, had shaped my friendships, and those friendships reinforced a particular path. But then having that baby, something shifted. I got some encouragement to go to college, and access to Pell Grants and other financial aid allowed me to afford college.

College didn't just give me an education. It gave me access to entirely different environments, and that allowed me to change the course of my life. I had places to live, different kinds of work, different communities, and different friendships, and those created new possibilities and futures for me.

So today on our 7 Domains of Friendship, we're talking about the environmental domain. I don't just mean whether you live near a park or breathe clean air, but I think we're going to talk about those and they matter a lot. I think that the physical and social infrastructure that makes friendship possible, that just sets you up for who you're going to bump into, is really important to think about.

So those spaces where we encounter each other and the institutions that bring us together, that is the environment that friendship takes place in. The freedom, or the lack of it, to move towards communities or connections that we need are really important.

I'm Katie Ward. I'm a professor of nursing at the University of Utah and an anthropologist. And with me today is my friend and my co-host, Dr. Kirtly Jones, who's with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a reproductive endocrinologist.

Kirtly: And Katie, yours is a powerful story, an amazing change of environments and friends, and friends who allowed you to blossom and have your wonderful son.

I came from a very different environment. Moving every couple of years made making friends that were other than temporary a little difficult. And I was in the environment of first child. We could talk a lot about order theory, but the first child of four. So according to child order theory, my friends were not as important to me as adults in my life, particularly the approval of friends.

And that's what child order theory says, that first children are looking more to adults for approval. I had zero importance of my friends in terms of what I thought of them and they thought of me. Not that they weren't my friends, but what they thought and how they drove my behavior was zero.

My neighborhoods were middle class. My junior/high school environments were highly educated families. And my friends and I all were expected to go to college, but it wasn't really wealthy. They were all pretty much white. And going to college on an academic scholarship and knowing there was no other money coming from my family made my college life very study-oriented in it.

It wasn't until I was a senior that I made friends/roommates for the next many years, and still friends, who introduced me to my honey, my friend for the next 53 years.

So for me, the environment of first child, moving around nationally and internationally profoundly affected the friends who would be with me the rest of my life. And that was a small group, but an important group for me.

Katie: I was a first child too, so I'll have to think about that.

Kirtly: Well, order theory doesn't predict everything, of course.

Katie: Yeah, but I think I grew up in a hurry.

I keep coming back to this idea of The Big Sort. So this is getting a little more meta than where each of us comes from, but this is a concept from the journalist Bill Bishop. It's been something people have been thinking about a lot, about how Americans are increasingly clustered into like-minded communities, sorting ourselves geographically by values, politics, education, and economics.

So we're not just choosing where to live anymore, but we're choosing who to be around, and it has profound implications for our friendships.

I'm thinking about it right now because politically in this particular moment when we're recording this, we're thinking about gerrymandering. And so this is some mathematical stuff that's happening on top of people already sort of sorting themselves and clustering around people who are like them.

So I think there's this big picture going on where we're losing some of our environmental infrastructure that used to create friendships. There were a lot of things that brought us together as a community not by choice, but just by virtue of living in community. And I feel like we're losing a number of those things. So we're losing local newspapers where everybody in town was reading the same stories and following . . .

Kirtly: You found out everything that everybody else was doing. Who didn't bring their garbage in on the Monday after the trucks came by and whose kids were in trouble?

Katie: I remember moving into a small town as a child and there was a list of who came to the house and what food they brought, and that was news. But yeah, just where everybody's reading that same information and everybody's following local sports teams and seeing the same letters to the editor and having a shared reality. Now, it's curated and you're not getting the same news as your next-door neighbors.

And then there are spaces like union halls and places that built community, churches, and so many other things, book groups, bridge clubs, bowling leagues, but places where you'd gather together with people that shared something. You could come together on your shared interests in a way that I feel like we're sort of losing in our highly connected via social media, but separated and sorted.

Kirtly: The rise of the TV where you could stream anything from a million different platforms. So you can pick your platform. I mean, people used to watch TV, but it was everybody was watching one of three things. It was Cronkite or it was whoever. But people didn't used to spend that much time in front of the tube.

So there was more time for dad to go to the bowling league or for mom to go whatever. My parents sang in the Adelines in the barbershop. People weren't stuck in front of a TV, so you went out and hung out with people. And maybe they were like-minded people. I don't know.

People who sing barbershop could come from a bunch of different religious and political persuasions, but once you have to be in four-part harmony, you have to be in four-part harmony.

Katie: I mean, I don't want to just bemoan the loss of the past because I do want to stay encouraged about the potential for the future, but I have been thinking about this sorting business a lot.

I've also been thinking about . . . and I guess because I'm in a college and I'm paying a lot of attention to how we're thinking about higher education, but that was why I started here with the impact that college had for me. That was not the path I was on. Whether or not I went to college was not important to my parents.

That was a decision I made as the consequence of an early pregnancy. It was like, "Oh my goodness, I have got to get a better job than what's available," and college was going to be my path to doing that.

So what I didn't understand was I wasn't just getting an education. I was getting an access to an environment where I'd encounter people unlike me. And I think that the value of college campuses where you start to bump into people from different backgrounds class-wise, financial backgrounds, different religions, different life experiences, and you throw them all together and live together and eat together and learn and make friends.

I'm really concerned about how we're defunding higher education and kind of almost pre-sorting people to say, "You're on this path of just your job is going to be to go make widgets or stay on the farm." And I'm worried that we're on the verge of losing one of those environments that . . . I mean, I'm just looking back at my life experience and thinking how formative that was for me.

Kirtly: Well, I think that you went to college at the time that your brain was ready and interesting. Now, of course, it was rewired. We talked about this in the 7 Domains of the Fourth Trimester, but your brain had been rewired for being social and you were still in late adolescence. And lo and behold, you were exposed to a whole lot of new stuff, and you were willing to take it in. Had we thrown you in a college as a 50-year-old, you might not have been quite as willing.

And I think from my experience, my friends weren't really cross-cultural. They had similar backgrounds. My parents always made friends in the neighborhoods where we lived, but they were neighborhoods that kind of looked like us. All over the world, we could find little pockets.

We'll get to that topic later, because people, when they move, look for neighborhoods that are like them. So our way is to not sort all that much.

Anyway, there were neighborhood barbecues and neighborhood splash pools. And my dad was the neighborhood adventurer and would help kids fly kites and learn how to do stuff and chase people with snakes. The defining number of children made it so easy for parents to click in with other parents.

Now, the declining number of children . . . and I think there's increased mobility of neighborhoods, and certainly my family was mobile, but we moved into neighborhoods that had some steady families . . . makes the environment of community friends a little more fragile.

I think of the wall-to-wall houses of the boroughs of New York City where people sat on stoops and kids played in the streets. Maybe they don't do that anymore.

People pack up and move for jobs and for financial reasons, both good and bad. Declining financial fortunes make people have to pack up because they can't afford their rent or they have to sell their house and they have to move someplace else.

But when we do move, we always are looking for something that we hope will be somewhat familiar. And I think about the poor kids when they move to a new school. Being the new kid in town is not a comfortable relationship, I think, for just about anybody.

So I think we've been movers for a long time, but I think if we have a choice, we have a tendency not to sort. We try to look for something that looks a little bit like us. I don't know what you think about that.

Katie: I mean, as an anthropologist, it's one of the things I study, is the idea that humans migrate. It's kind of what defines us as a species. So that's a thing that I study, is how people move around the globe. I'm fascinated by it.

My own family story . . . my baby book says that I was 133rd in line to the Habsburg Empire.

Kirtly: That's a little bit of a ways, Katie.

Katie: Somewhere the person around 125 decided that was too long to wait for the throne and packed up and left Austria for the United States. And I actually don't know the full story about why you'd leave, because I think they did actually have some connection to the court, but it was weak at best. But the promise of whatever was happening in America compelled them to cross an ocean and start over and bet on a whole new future. And they could do that. They had that freedom.

I feel like that's another big thing that seems to be happening at the moment. Everybody seems to want to close their borders. I'd kind of like to move to New Zealand, but they won't let me in.

Kirtly: Oh, why? You have talent. You've got a little bit of money. Not enough, huh?

Katie: I'm too old. I'll just be a drain on their lovely social structure. But corporations can move. So corporations can go wherever they want in favor of lower taxes and cheaper labor, and capital seems to flow across borders. But humans, it does feel like we're increasingly kind of stuck in place, whether that's big moves or little moves.

Kirtly: I kind of disagree. I think people with money . . . during COVID, people would, with money, move to places that were often rural or beautiful because they could work from home.

Katie:Because they could, yeah.

Kirtly:And poor people move because they have to move, because they can't afford where they are. I think people do move around for good and bad reasons.

I've been reading about the internal migration in Canada. This is after I read all about the internal migration of African-Americans during the early part of the 20th century, and a little bit before. Eleven, 12 million African-Americans moved north to the northern parts of the United States.

But anyway, the Canadians from the Canadian Maritimes have moved in large numbers recently as they lost the fishing industry, and they moved to central Canada. These are Arcadians, so they didn't have French and different food and different music.

They moved to central Canada, the oil patch, where there are jobs. And the word gets out that there are jobs in that town, and people move to that town. So they can move with their friends from the Canadian Maritimes to neighborhoods where there are other people from their homeland. And they bring their culture and their music with them.

They don't commonly move to a new country. They can move internally in Canada, and they bring stuff with them. And they make a little new stirring of friendships and food and music in the community they move into, but they choose to try to move to where they know somebody, have a friend.

We are increasingly seeing international migration of people, families and friends picking up from one country to migrate legally and illegally to a new country for better personal safety, better economic opportunities, or a place that they're no longer able to live and they just have to pack up.

So I think we've been on the move as long as we've been humans, and I think we're still on the move. It may be harder for people in the middle. For people on the bottom, they have nothing to lose if they've got the energy to move. People at the top, they can go anywhere they want in their great big boats or their corporate jets or whatever. But people in the middle might be less able to move for one reason.

Katie: And you want to be around people you know, right? But I think the point about this whole episode is that the environment does shape that. I think a lot of people are moving because the coasts are rising and they have to move inland. So there are all kinds of ways that the environment shapes our friendships and our opportunities.

I am a little worried that we're creating boundaries where people have less and less say in where they can go. So I think moving to where community is stronger or where we might find our people or where our skills are valued or where we can go to college, these are all really important. And I'm worried about this idea that we're sorting people and making them stuck. It's a thing I'm worried about. Maybe this isn't the place to worry about it.

Kirtly: Well, I'm still thinking about people who are seeking internal and external migrations by the millions across the world and arriving in places with new culture and new languages. And often these people try to settle in little enclaves of friends and families from their home culture.

We've done this for 250 years in this country. I think of cities with Little Italy or Germantown or Chinatown. And we try to create environments in our new place that look and smell like home. It's easier to make friends if you have a common language. You're now immigrants, so we've got a common issue.

And Katie, your comment about The Big Sort is interesting in the face of immigration where people move, but choose not to sort if they have a chance. They move to neighborhoods or areas with other people from their own culture or their own race or their own whatever, and they have more in common. And they're closer to someone who can make a decent tortilla or an almond cookie or noodle soup. But what I love is when that happens, there's invariably opportunities for cross-cultural friendship.

When I first moved to Salt Lake, it was a very homogeneous town. You couldn't get a bagel here to save your life, and coffee was hard to find. Mexican food was two restaurants. Forget Ethiopian food or something else. And now I have places to go and people to talk to and new friends to make who came to the city and settled down and made new little environments that I want to go visit. This is Salt Lake, for goodness's sake.

So I'm encouraged by the fact that people are picking up and moving, and they bring some friends, they bring family. Sometimes people come all by themselves. But they often bring someone with them. So I'm kind of encouraged, but I'm very encourageable.

Katie: That's what I love about you.

Kirtly: In every good tortilla I can see the sunshine.

Katie: And I think there's an interesting thing where it's easy . . . Well, I don't know if it feels easier, but I feel like people are staying in their house more.

Kirtly: Oh, that's true.

Katie: There's somebody I follow on social media, and he does this skit about when your doorbell rang in the '50s and you'd be like, "Someone's at the door." And now your doorbell rings, and the thing in his skit is the dog holds still and puts a lampshade on his head and he's hiding under some cushions on the couch. You just don't answer the door and you look at your Ring doorbell.

Kirtly: I love it when people ring my doorbell. It's wonderful.

Katie: When my kids were growing up, we had a house with a pool and we would just hold the pool open every Sunday afternoon. It was open plunge. And our neighbors and our friends knew that they were just welcome to come over. But it did really create community in a way that I miss a lot. I keep thinking I need to get another pool, but probably I just need to open my porch and say, "Come over. There's something here."

I don't want to sound like I'm just romanticizing the past or ignoring new forms of community, because there are some things/spaces I don't fully understand because I'm not on them. Even for people that don't want to go outside, there are Twitch streams and Discord servers where people are connected.

Kirtly: I don't know what those are, Katie. I have no clue what you just said. What did you even talk about? What did you say?

Katie: So Twitch is a thing where you sort of sit on your computer and you're watching somebody else play video games, but you have headphones and you can comment on what they're doing.

Kirtly: I can’t even think that's even vaguely interesting to me.

Katie: I actually know people that that's sort of their world. It's a very different world than the one I move in, but it's creating connections. And people who are spending a lot of time on Discord where they're communicating with people. Again, they're sort of sorted. They're into their little channel of people, but they are making friends and connections.

Kirtly: But I can't touch them and I can't smell them. I must be a dog. I think there's a dog in me. I want to be touched and I want to smell. That's how I get my endorphin fix from my friends. I want to be close to them, not electronically.

Katie: But we're a different generation, and maybe this is a new form of migration. It's a way to find your friends without having to pack up your house when you can't do that.

Burning Man is another community I haven't quite gotten into, but it's like this intentionally temporary community and people build connections around that.

So thinking there may be a lot of new things that I don't know about that are new environments where friendships form, and they create bridges in ways that some of the things that I've been bemoaning the loss of may be these new opportunities.

I'm in this funny space where the past things feel gone and I'm not participating in the new things. So I think the point is to figure out ways to find your people, whether it's game nights or joining a gym. There are still bars and the age-old pub. I admire a good pub. Some spaces aren't my spaces, but I think it's worth thinking about.

Kirtly: Yeah. I'm working personally on getting to my neighborhood again, because the neighborhood has turned over a couple of times since I've lived here and I need to. I'm going to say yes to everything. Everybody who says, "Come on over," or everybody who knocks on my door, I say, "Yes, come in." I would say yes to the neighborhood potluck, and you might make a friend. You might find someone who can dig you out when the snow gets too deep for your little blower. And that kind of kindness by you or your neighbor means bringing cookies as a thank you. So you do this back-and-forth thing with friends.

I mean, you don't have to go electronically. You don't have to travel around the world. If you've got a halfway safe neighborhood, get to know your neighbors. There's somebody in there who'd be a lovely person to get to know. And besides, even if it's not a tier one perfect friend, it can be someone that you can help or they can help you.

Katie: Yeah, for sure. I think you kind of keep trying until you find the space that works for you. Not every environment is going to feel right, and that's okay. But somewhere there's a space where you can show up regularly and encounter people over time and form new friendships.

Collectively, I think this is important that we fight for infrastructure that creates friendships, and supporting policies that create walkable neighborhoods and fund public libraries and make education accessible and protecting public spaces and protecting the environment that supports those spaces where it's safe to be outside and have shared commons.

Kirtly: Dog parks. We talked about this in the emotional domain, that if you've got a dog, going to the dog park gives your dogs a chance to make new friends and then you can be that person's dog mom or whatever. It's a place to go where you've got a common theme, which is your dog, who hopefully behaves appropriately in groups. Yeah, make dog parks.

Katie: Yeah, make movement possible. Because friendship doesn't just happen. It does require an environment that makes it possible. And I think we have to be cautious to forces that are creating environments that make it harder, because there are those forces out there. So I think that was the thing I wanted to advocate for, was paying attention to the environment because it does impact our friendships.

So I want to say thank you for listening to the 7 Domains of Friendships. We've had some really wonderful conversations throughout this series. And so if this is your first one you're picking up, please go back and listen to the rest of the series. Join us for all of our conversations as we explore what it takes to build and maintain meaningful connections in our modern life.

You can find the "7 Domains of Women's Health" wherever you get your podcasts, any of the podcast platforms, or online at womens7.com.

Until next time, pay attention to those spaces around you and ask yourself, "Does this make friendship possible?" And if not, what can you do to change that?

Kirtly: Absolutely.