Platonic Book Review: Adult Friendship in the Age of Romance Obsession

There’s a notion sown in social media and even in real life that romantic relationship is all you need. (Romantic) love is everything you need. If you’re single in your twenties, you are either miserable, unloved, not cool, and so left behind in life. Therefore, people see friendship as disposable, they would move and forget their friends, thinking they can always make a new one. People spends much time swiping left and right, looking for romantic partners rather than building good friendship.

Albeit romantic relationship is being prioritized, an awareness of how difficult it is to make friends as an adult also seems to rise, and also the fact that now we are experiencing epidemic loneliness because romantic and sexual relationship is being prioritized in life. To build good friendship, we need to unlearn this idea.

When I see this book in the Kindle Daily Deals last year, I was so intrigued by the notion it brings to the table: now that we are experiencing epidemic loneliness because romantic and sexual relationship is being prioritized in life.Marissa G. Franco, in this book, reminds us that platonic relationship (friendship) still matters. Just reading this blurb, I clicked the purchase button. And yes, the first chapter makes me even unable to put this book down because of her explanations why friendship still matters even more as you grow older.

Also in this book, she also explains various concepts that contributes in making healthy friendship, which includes: the attachment styles and how it contributes in friendship, taking initiative, dealing with anger, expressing vulnerability and other concept that I don’t cover in this blog but are worth learning: being authentic with friends and offering generosity.

Love Is Not All You Need

Whenever I sit together with my friends, romantic relationship always often revolves around romantic relationship. You can meet up with your friends that you haven’t met for years and the second you sit together, you start talking about your (or your friends’s) romantic partner.

As a person who spends 24 years being single and has no girlfriends in life (read: so inexperienced in love), I begin to see that romantic relationship being over-glorified in both social media and real life. People beg or cry in misery because they’re single, thinking that if they have romantic partner right now, they will be happy.

Dr Franco in this book explains that friendship and romantic relationship is not exclusive with each other. Platonic relationship with friends alters and even betters romantic relationship. It improves self-esteem and allows us to practice empathy.

Also we can give unlimited amount of love with every person in your life whereas in romantic relationship, if you believe in monogamous relationship like I do, we can only give romantic love to one person.

If you’re in a relationship, make sure you’re making time for friends … Encourage your partner to spend time with friends too. If you’re single and looking for a healthy romantic relationship, lay the foundations by developing strong friendships. Remember: friends will only make your romance better.

Why Friendship Still Matters

When we’ve asked how to make friends, people have likely told us to join a meetup group or find a hobby. But somehow, the advice slips away from us. Because when we’re told this, the part about facing our social anxiety, enduring fears of rejection, tolerating intimacy, and risking the further shredding of our self- worth is silent.

To make friends, we need deeper work— to fundamentally reconcile with who we are and how we love. That’s the journey we’re on in Platonic. Friendship is worth it.

• Friendship cures shame
• We think we feel shame because of the agony of our experiences. But it turns out that we feel the agony of our experiences isolates us from being humans. For example: It is not unusual when we feel ashamed of our background or our physical appearances and how do we handle the shame: by distancing ourselves by other people.
• Feeling shameful or ourselves prompts us to isolate ourselves from other people, hence it makes us feel even more miserable then leads to loneliness. But the key of shame is to put a light on it. To do exactly what shame tells us to avoid: to share and tell other people about our shame. That’s when friendship can help us to cure shame and love ourselves even more.
• We learn empathy with friendship
• Building relationship with other people generally is a form of practice of building empathy. Since we are kids, we are practice to read people’s emotions with friends, we don’t learn it from school or with parents (because with teacher kids tend to be “to obey” and to parents they tend to be “to take.” Only with friends we can learn how to be empathetic with others.
• There’s also a saying that friendship relationship teaches us about empathy and how to connect with other people before we do romantic relationship. So having good relationship with friends also prepares us to have good and healthy relationship with our romantic partner.
• It helps us understand ourselves better
• By connecting with friends, we know which people with whom we don’t feel comfortable with ourselves, hence we know more about ourselves.
• We observe other people’s behavior and absorb their behavior into ourselves. With friends, we can discover the side of our personality that we didn’t know exist until they exist. Our friends advertise the kaleidoscope of ways we can live. They expose us to new ways of being in the world, showing us another life is possible.

“Anything unspeakable to you is affecting you.” That’s why we don’t heal shame by hiding it. When we share it, and our friends love and accept us, we are released from the labor of guarding our shame.

…self-expansion theory. The theory emphasizes that our identity needs to constantly expand for us to be fulfilled, and relationships are our primary means for expansion. That’s because when we get close to someone, we include them in our sense of ourselves, a phenomenon aptly termed “inclusion of others in the self.”

Attachment Theory in Friendship

I think everyone in this modern age has already been familiar with this concept. Generally speaking, this theory explains how we interpret relationship with other people, how we view others and our behaviors have predicable impacts on whether we make and keep friends.

It seems to be popular in romantic relationship context but in fact it is applicable in more general relationship, including friendship.

There’s three attachment styles:

• Secure attachment: when people assume they are worthy of love and trust the other person to give it to them
• Anxious attachment: when people assume the other people will leave them and hence it makes them anxious and clingy
• Their anxious might be seen as aggressiveness
• They might suppress their need for love but the anxiety won’t disappear and oftentimes they leak their feelings into passive-aggressive
• Avoidant attachment: similar with anxious, they also fear that others will leave them but instead of being clingy, they keep distance with other people.
• They need people, but afraid of depending on others. So they hold into principle “I can do this alone, I don’t need anyone”
• Their friends often describe them as “mystery” since they avoid sharing about themselves
• Because breakups can involve difficult emotion, they tend to eject the relationship with shortcuts like ghosting

Attachment theory still illustrates that how we view our relationships is not objective; it’s influenced by our past and by how our parents, and then others in our lives, responded to us. But most of us don’t recognize this.

The initial attachment is formed with caregivers when we were still infant or kids. But one thing that people often missed is that this attachment is not permanent. Each and every relationship we build (not only romantic relationship).

If you’ve ever wondered, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong—why can’t I make or keep friends?” identifying how your attachment shapes how you relate to others can bring fresh hope and lay the bricks of the path forward.

Taking Initiative

I used to think that friendship will work automatically, that people will come to me and talk to me first. Whenever I attend events alone, I used to sit passively and wondering if someone will talk to me first. But oftentimes, they never do. And this is exactly what Dr. Franco explains in a particular chapter in the book.

Friendship require initiative, because adult friendship doesn’t happen organically. However, many people think the way I think: waiting people to come to them first. It’s easy to be in the world when people like us than we liking people. But why is that the case? Because taking initiative means we need to confront our greatest fear of being disliked.

Here’s a simple, sometimes surprising truth: making friends as an adult requires initiative. We have to put ourselves out there and try. It’s a process of reaching out over and over again.

The good news is we can choose how to make initiative. We don’t have to constantly attend social events if that’s not our style. With technology becomes more enhanced, there are many ways that we can do this: following each other on social media, commenting our friend’s Instagram stories. Or we can reach out to old friends and reconnect.

We can develop an internal locus of control by shifting our mindset to see friendship as something that happens when we make it happen.

Tips on making friends as an adult:

• Assume people like you
• The more we feel good about ourselves, the more people feel positive aura in ourselves and hence they like us
• We often underestimate how people generally like us, because if you don’t love yourself, you won’t notice when they do.
• When we assume “I don’t think they are interested in me” because we think we are uninteresting. This is the mindset that we can change
• Our attachment style plays a role in this case. Because we don't have telepathy to read people's thoughts, our insecure attachment tends to take over.
• Say Hello first
• Taking initiative is not only showing up physically but we also must engage with other people
• There are two psychological terms to explain this:
• Overt avoidance: when people don’t show up to events because they are too uncomfortable.
• Covert avoidance: like showing up physically but checking out mentally. It is getting to the event but failing to engage with others
• Initiative needs us to overcome overt and covert avoidance
• To overcome this: expose ourselves regularly with social events and really take initiative, this is the key to overcome anxiety

Through experiences, you accumulate proof that the seedy voice in your head that says you are hideously unlikable isn’t speaking the truth. You also prove your resilience, your ability to survive even the most egregiously uncomfortable of circumstances. So go for it!

• Keep showing up
• Propinquity is built especially when we are physically closer with our friends (like living in the same neighborhood, going to the same school, or doing the same job etc)
• It is because it reduces cost for us and our friends to meet and see each other
• As the relationship becomes more mature, this cost is less related to whether a friendship sustain or not, but in the beginning phase of friendship, this cost plays a big role
• In the psychology world, this is called the “mere exposure effect,” since through merely being exposed to someone continuously, we come to like them.
• We can harness exposure by attending the continuous social events, like joining a book club, or attending language class than just one-time language workshop

Mere exposure means that to make friends, you have to show up again and again. But mere exposure alone doesn’t build relationships; initiation does. I suggest building up “spontaneous communication” with other regulars over time and seeing if these scatters of interactions build the foundation for friendship. Spontaneous communication is unplanned conversation that occurs because two people are in the same place at the same time.

Mere exposure also leads us to expect that (1) making friends will be uncomfortable at first—all those unfamiliar faces that we’re programmed to be wary of; and (2) it’ll gradually begin to feel easier the more we show up.

This is how it has gone for me when I have wanted to make friends: I show up at some sort of gathering or meetup. I usually feel clumsy and uncomfortable as a new person showing up to a meetup of people who’ve already built connections, get discouraged, and never return. But mere exposure is my reminder to keep showing up if I’m at a new social club, soccer league, or co-working space and I’m tempted to leave when things feel awkward. It is why you should live out our networking scenario and keep showing up for those monthly events. Mere exposure means not just that people will warm up to you at the social group over time, but also that you’ll come to like them more too. Initiate, unapologetically, and then do it again and again.

Dealing with Anger

We are often told that anger is bad, we must avoid it at all cost. I used to believe in this, even until right now. However, based on psychology, every emotions signals something to us and it’s better for us to pay attention to what the emotion we’re feeling is telling us. In case of anger it signals that our personal boundaries is crossed. It tells us that something’s not fair to us.

In adult relationship, including friendship, conflict is a normal thing. But if we don’t manage anger correctly, we tend to distance ourselves from our friends leading to broken relationship that can’t be mended.

There are two types of unhealthy way of dealing with anger: leasing out (anger out) and suppressing anger (anger in). Most of us choose the second way: we bottle up our anger and its siblings: annoyance, frustration and rage. Both ways leads to jeopardizing relationship, these ways lead to resentment and hostility

Anger held in too long can gush out. Researchers theorize that each strategy likely increases resentment, making us brew in our anger, which might explain why they are each correlated with hostility, depression, and anxiety. They also each harm our relationships, scholars argue, because these anger strategies keep us from productively addressing the underlying issues that drive anger and impede intimacy.

Dr Franco explains that anger can strengthen friendship instead. She introduces another type of anger: anger of hope. This type of anger energize us because this anger indicates that something’s off between us and it needs to be resolved so that we can be close again.

It includes communicate our unmet needs with our friends and ask for change in the relationship. By doing this, we are prompted to reflect our needs and how to fulfill them. We don’t punish or blame our friends, we explain our wish and needs (hope) and ask for change in relationship.

To simply put it, we don’t avoid conflict but we proactively express our concern in a constructive ways and this leads to more satisfying friendship.

In friendship too we can choose to confront issues instead of letting them fester until they’re beyond repair. The problem is we too often dismiss gripes with friends, hoping we’ll get over them instead. We think we’re too sensitive or making a hubbub out of nothing. But the only litmus test for whether an issue is worthy of being addressed is if it continues to bother you.

Problems always arise in friendship. But when it comes, when should we decide to mend or end the friendship? The rule of thumb is that friendship should makes us feel more good than bad. If problems arise, take a step back and think about this. If this relationship brings more bad or harm than good, maybe it’s time to end it.

When we choose to mend our friendship, it’s good to always think what the other friend brings to our life when no one does. This keeps us reminded the essence of the friendship.

Insecure people become overwhelmed by emotion during conflict because they confuse it with combat instead of reconciliation. Secure people are collaborative, approaching conflict as a way to get both parties’ needs met.

How to communicate anger in friendship:

• Calm your feelings
• Feel and validate the emotions, tell yourself that it’s normal, other people would feel the same sometimes
• Meditate
• Tell to third party who will let you vent
• Prioritize constructive conflict by expressing how much you value this relationship and how this conflict can help you through the problems
• Ask and communicate the behavior you want to see in the future
• Respond to your friends’ concerns with:
• Understanding: rephrasing what your friend said back to them
• Validation: telling them their concern is valid and understandable
• Care: sharing what you will do to improve. Make sure you commit to something you will follow through with.
• To get better at admitting fault, unglue your mistakes from your self-worth, see screwing up as normal and inevitable, and recognize that feedback is an opportunity for enlightenment on how to be a better friend.

Vulnerability as the Key in Long-lasting Friendship

Vulnerability is the deepest form of authenticity, and it involves sharing the true parts of ourselves that we fear may result in our rejection or alienation, the parts we feel most shame over. Shame is the sense that our secrets make us unworthy of human connection. It’s why, when we’re vulnerable, it doesn’t just feel like our secrets are at stake, but our entire being.

There’s a notion that expressing vulnerability makes us weak. This is the case for most people including me. However, expressing our true feelings with friends makes us look more human and inviting our friends to do so. It build trust and engagement between us and our friends.

To express vulnerability: not only from our words but also our demeanor. If your voice shakes, let it. If it’s scary for you to share, say so. If you start to tear up, let tears fall. Doing so communicates the magnitude of what you’re sharing and lets others know to be sensitive.

To practice vulnerability:

• Don’t overshare. Oversharing can drive people away and cause you harm. Your vulnerability should be a symbol of the trust and affection you share with someone. You’re free to conceal things from people you don’t trust.
• Be vulnerable first. Don’t wait for friends.
• Remind yourself:
• Others won’t judge you for your vulnerability as much as you think, and in fact they might perceive you positively, as authentic and honest.
• Being invulnerable doesn’t abolish your weaknesses; it just keeps you from showing strength alongside it.
• If you assume “if I share my pain, I will be shamed,” your internal algorithm may be faulty. The best way to correct it is to be vulnerable with a trusted source.
• Practice self-compassion, which involves:
• Self-kindness: being kind and understanding toward yourself. Ex: It’s okay that you failed that test. It was really hard.
• Mindfulness: having a balanced reaction to painful thoughts and feelings, not underreacting or overreacting. Ex: I notice I’m feeling sad right now.
• Common humanity: seeing one’s experience as part of the larger human experience. Ex: Everyone fails from time to time.
• Be vulnerable even if it’s scary. Remember that you’re not practicing it because it’s comfortable; you’re doing so because it aligns with your values and your highest self.
• Don’t keep being vulnerable with people who have hurt you when you’re vulnerable.

Platonic Reading Experience

After all, this his book reminds us to maintain friendship even though we have romantic relationship. Oftentimes, friendship is overlooked because the world keeps giving us notion that love is everything we need and we can only get that from romantic partners.

Event though the tips I wrote above is in context of friendship, it is also applicable in romantic relationship, too. This emphasize the notion that friendship affects and betters romantic romantic relationship.

For me personally, I learn so much that adult friendship requires effort, initiative and that it doesn’t happen organically as it did when I was in school. That’s what makes adult friendship challenging. I learned a lot about Taking Initiative, Expressing Anger and Vulnerability in this book. Therefore, I give this book a 4/5 🌟.