Here is the ninth and final part in this series. By this point there are some common themes and repeated ideas amongst different people, but that can be helpful for reinforcing shared opinions about friendship. Everyone seems to agree that friendship is difficult and something that has to be invested in, but that it’s worth the persistence and is a skill that can be practised.

Friendship with Amelia Liana – The Estée Lalonde Show

‘Do you think girl friends are always going to be inherently bitchy towards each another? Like, are girls really as catty as people sometimes stereotype? They can be, but also they can’t be. I also think that’s like a younger mentality… There’s that phrase “never trust a girl who doesn’t have girl friends”… There’s like a phrase of never trust a girl who can’t keep their girl friend relationships alive, and in a way I can understand that... I think that probably is the root of some bitchiness and cattiness is feeling a little threatened.‘

Estée Lalonde & Amelia Liana

‘I think no friendship is the same. Some people it’s more of like a surface level friendship, whereas like me and you it’s a much deeper friendship. Don’t get me wrong, we talk about surface level stuff all the time too much everyday, but when we need to get deep we want to get personal, like no one knows the ins and outs of my life more than you do.’

Estée Lalonde & Amelia Liana

‘How do you think we got to the friendship stage we are now? Well, I don’t think it happened immediately. I think it took a couple years. And it was kind of by coincidence. I remember we always liked each other, obviously, but we didn’t always hang out… but I think eventually we just built this trust and trust is just, like, so crucial… I think something else that happened with us is that when we shared something negative, and we started this rule kind of from the beginning, we wouldn’t bring it up to the other person unless they brought it up to us.’

Estée Lalonde & Amelia Liana

Friendship (PART 2) – Shmanners

‘This is probably the question everyone wants to know: how to make friends in your thirties, or I guess after school as an adult, however you want to phrase it. Right, and I think the real key to this is that you have to actively do it. There is no passiveness about making new friends and that’s the hard part. You have to go places, you have to talk to people, you have to participate in activities. You have to make a concerned effort, that is what’s hard… The answer is be vulnerable… Everybody wants to make friends.’

Travis & Teresa McElroy

Friendship – In Our Time: Philiosophy

‘He [Augustine] decides he was a fool to love this man, this friend, as if he were a god. And what you get in Augustine’s thought is kind of a triangulation that friendship is only good and substantial and trustworthy when it’s triangulated within the love of God. You love your friend through God.’

Mark Vernon

‘I would say in the eighteenth century friendship became a secular religion, actually… The eighteenth century’s the great period of clubs and societies… philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, they actually valued their culture as, I think they thought, the first true culture of friendship actually, because what they believed was that actually it was only in a commercial society, a market economy, you could really value friendship. Because before, for the whole of human history, friendship had been tangled up in other kinds of commitments and bond and obligation. And now, you could leave the market to get on with that and meanwhile off to the side you could enjoy these friendships.’

John Mullan

‘Although friendship was very important to him [Adam Smith] on a personal level, for these thinkers and writers, Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, one of the ways you can read that book is there’s a struggle to try to give friendship and moral sensibilities between people a public platform as well as a private place, and the trouble that Adam Smith has is that in a modern commercial society, the most important value is not happiness, it’s not virtue like the Greeks thought, it’s pure cooperation. As long as people cooperate and obey the law, then that society can function. And so friendship can’t really, doesn’t really rise to the fore as a great value in modern society because it’s not really needed.’

Mark Vernon

‘The novels of the eighteenth century, many of the great novels, are written in fictional letters, recording the consciousness of their characters through the writing of letters to friends, as if that’s the best way of catching a person’s personality.’

John Mullan

‘Not since the Greeks has friendship been considered a problem worthy of a solution.’

Nietzsche

198: How friendship affects your immune system | Lydia Denworth – The mindbodygreen Podcast

‘How much do you go out of your way to make your friends feel good?’

Lydia Denworth

‘We often get something different from the different friends in our lives.’

Lydia Denworth

#587: Understanding the Wonderful, Frustrating Dynamic of Friendship – The Art of Manliness

‘Friendships thrive on equality… there is some aspect of our relationship that functions as a leveller… Friendships are always about something, and so many times that common interest, we treat each other as equals in regard to that.’

Bill Rawlins

EP 36: The Adult Friendship Crisis – Every Day Therapy

‘We have this assumption that we’re meant to be friends with everybody, and we’re not. We naturally fit with some types of people and have trouble with others based upon our personalities, our histories, our who we are, just naturally how we like to exist. And one thing I’d like to say about that, is it takes some of the pressure off to develop a friendship with everybody. But I can be kind to anybody, and that’s a launching space too.’

Dr Sally H Falwell

Here is part eight in our ongoing series that shares some of the wisdom different women have about friendship. Below are a few quotations selected from a variety of podcasts.

How to Make & Maintain a Healthy Friendship, Julie Mickler – Lillian McDermott Radio Show

‘A friend is a diamond. Sometimes it’s in the rough; sometimes it’s really polished – but once you recognise that friend it’s very special.’

Lillian McDermott

‘Stepping out of my new comfort zone and stepping into a new comfort zone is what has allowed me to do the things, and all we need is 20 seconds of courage. That’s it. And when you muster those 20 seconds of courage you can do just about anything.’

Lillian McDermott

‘One thing that I learnt to shift… I cared more about listening to other people’s lives than I cared about sharing my own life… Listen to the other person and their story, and interject when they were asking me questions. That was a great shift for me.’

Lillian McDermott

‘You’ll see after a while. If the inquiry doesn’t get returned, you’ll kind of know [that they’re probably not a great friend for you].’

Julie Mickler

Ep 368 Female friendship: The good, the bad and the lonely – The Irish Times Women’s Podcast

‘I kind of realised that actually, I think it’s true of me and I think of a lot of people, there were loads of people, particularly women, in my orbit who I liked and admired, ’cause I worked with them or I knew them through, you know, a mutual friend of the handful I had back at home, who I liked and I kind of thought and often considered “I wish I was friends with that person”. But I never told them, I never asked them to socialise, kind of asked them out as it were, declared my intentions and said “You! You have excellent hair. Let’s go for tea!”‘

Laura Kennedy

‘It’s good to have people around you, if you don’t drink, whose social life doesn’t orient around it because you need those people. You know, you can do things that aren’t about pubs, essentially.’

Laura Kennedy

043 SelfWork: When Friendships End – The SelfWork Podcast

‘One of the first steps [after losing a friend] is to refrain from social media, or just to get off for a while. It is so tempting if not downright seductive to watch your ex-friend from the safety of Facebook or Instagram, and if they’ve unfriended you, you can really get obsessed and play detective, pulling other friends to help you figure out what’s on their page, which is really not too good for that friendship frankly. And all that detective work, all it really does is to prolong your own grieving and increase your sense of being replaced in their life. That’s a different type of grief, when something’s over and then when you’re replaced or you feel replaced that can really hurt your own sense of worth.’

Dr Margaret Rutherford

‘The second idea is to focus on creating fresh experiences and relationships in your own life. This can be hard if you have mutual friends. You don’t want them to feel as if they’re in the middle. And you don’t want your friends to bash your old friend or ex friend either. He was your friend for a long time, or she was, and bashing them will get you nowhere. So you really want to be proactive.’

Dr Margaret Rutherford

‘What was the friendship’s long-term value to you? Whatever inherent gift did that friendship bring to you that will always be yours? The friendship that ended for me, she taught me how to dance… and I’ll always be grateful for that. And as I said, what can you even learn from its ending?’

Dr Margaret Rutherford

Friendships & Breakups with Estée Lalonde – What I Know Now with Amelia Liana

‘… realising that another person really can’t make you happy, if that makes sense. They can bring happiness into your life, but they can’t really fill that soul kind of happiness. And they’re not suppose to.’

Amelia Liana & Estée Lalonde

Here is the seventh part of this series, gathering together and sharing some more brief quotations on the topic of friendship from various podcasts – any of which, I should say, you can find for free if they capture your interest.

#23 Finding Your Tribe with Freya Ridings – Adulting

‘I think the takeaway from that is that it makes so much sense, because you’re finally allowed to do exactly what it is that you want to be doing, so obviously you’re going to be around the people that do that.’

Oenone Forbat

‘[When you’re finally doing what you love] It brings out the best in you, and people bring out the best in them, and suddenly you just get to be yourself.’

Freya Ridings

Navigating Friendships :: Melanie Shankle [Ep 273] – Don’t Mom Alone (God Centered Mom)

‘What dawned on me was that new friends eventually become old friends but you have to start somewhere.’

Melanie Shankle

‘You can like somebody and not agree with them politically. You can like somebody and not embrace all their beliefs, but there’s still a friendship and our common human experience, and the things we’ve gone through, and the life we’ve lived with somebody, and I’m just not interested in ending the relationship over those kind of things.’

Melanie Shankle

Loneliness: The Vanishing Glass (Book 1, Chapter 2) – Harry Potter and the Sacred Text

‘There is abundance even when we don’t feel as though there is. I will often feel like “oh, I can’t take up too much of that person’s time” or “oh, what if I run out,” right? I’m always feeling rushed and I wonder how much of that is tied into feeling like nothing is enough… You know, an hour with a friend is enough, and I think that that’s just something I have to start reminding myself of. So I feel called to recognising abundance when it’s right in front of me rather than constantly feeling like everything is scarce.’

Vanessa Zoltan

Friendship: Halloween (Book 1, Chapter 10) – Harry Potter and the Sacred Text

‘We really have to learn the art of friendship.’

Casper ter Kuilie

‘I think we really learn about how friendship is formed and the kind of ingredients of friendship, in a way… there’s this element of shared memory and shared story that forms a foundation of friendship that you can always, kind of, remember together… The crucial piece is that if it just stays there it’s not enough, it doesn’t deepen.

The second ingredient is all about deepening that, which is shared work, a shared mission… physical, intellectual, moral work and that, that’s how those new memories are formed. So I think there’s something about shared work – not all types of work lead to friendship…

But then the final ingredient is also about having people who are not your friends… so there’s kind of a dark side of friendship a little bit there as well.’

Casper ter Kuile

‘If you don’t have a close band of brothers, then enough trust isn’t going to get built up to go on the real adventures together… If there was 100 of them and there wasn’t that total trust of “when I fall, you’ll catch me” that was built up, they wouldn’t be able to do the amazing things they do.’

Vanessa Zoltan

If you’ve been following this series for a while now, you know what to expect. Here are several quotations from various podcasts to offer some food for thought and some contemplation on the theme of friendship.

Belonging: The Polyjuice Potion (Book 2, Chapter 12) – Harry Potter and the Sacred Text

‘I think we as humans want to believe that we only belong in one place.’

Vanessa Zoltan

‘At the same time, so often we feel like we’re made not to belong. And if someone takes away our sense of belonging that’s like a primal would that is very difficult to heal.’

Casper ter Kuilie

‘I think that everybody gives a really hard time to teenagers that they’re rebelling, but that’s so good, right? Thank goodness that teenagers spend a lot of time questioning whether or not they really belong to their families… That period of questioning helps create new realities of regeneration.’

Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuilie

popularity and being ‘liked’: she doesn’t even go here – higher priestess

‘In childhood popularity is based on likeability. It’s who makes everyone laugh, it’s the class clown, it’s like, childhood. And then when you go through puberty, it becomes less about likeability and more about power. The idea of coolness, like confidence, power, influence, and the people that are the most popular are the “coolest”, I guess that works into status, and not necessarily the people that are the most liked.’

Persephone

‘Your body is working to keep you alive, to keep you popular, because to be popular means you can survive. To be popular means you are protected.’

Erin and Persephone

‘I also think at uni, like, you can really feel the age, ages of people. And you can just feel, and also the thing is, you can see who’s mature and immature, but beyond that and in adult life, I think it isn’t just at university, across all adult life you can feel in whatever way it plays out who was popular and secure in school, and that I think is really telling. It’s really telling because you look around and you see the behaviours that someone might pick up.’

Erin

Show Me Your Friends and I’ll Show You Your Future – The Porch

‘It’s not a perfect group – there is no perfect group, but do you have a group of people that are in your life walking alongside of you? Community, or the types of relationships that I’m saying, are like any relationships. They are forged not found. Any great relationships are forged, not found. In other words, they take work.’

David Marvin

‘Who you run with is gonna for good or bad shape the direction that you are running towards. Are you running with the right people in your life?’

David Marvin

Why Friendships End – The Love, Happiness and Success Podcast With Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

‘People are often friends for a reason, or they’re friends for a season, or sometimes we do have friends for a lifetime.’

Anonymous, quoted by Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

‘People have a much lower tolerance, I think, for working through inevitable problems that always come up in long-term relationships with their friends than they do with their romantic partners.’

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

‘The things that kept them together with their friends, some more of the partying lifestyle or just going out doing fun things, that was much of the fabric of that relationship and without that sometimes there just isn’t the substance, the depth, you know, where people really, like, there is a foundation on which to build, so people can begin withdrawing for that reason.’

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

‘There is very seldom a reason to not at least try… I think It’s also important to periodically just take stock of how am I feeling in this domain of my life?’

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

‘That is something that in many ways is really nice about friendships, because with romantic partnerships there’s so much intensity that, for necessary reasons, many times they either need to be on or off, you know. When people try to do a middle ground of just be friends… that doesn’t always work for both people. Friendships can be different in that way, you know, you can just back up a little bit.’

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

Usually I tend to listen to the same few podcasts. While sharing this series, however, I’ve found it interesting to instead trace a single theme through episodes from various different podcasts that I had never even heard of before. There’s a wider range of voices speaking on a single topic that way, and I’ve been finding it an interesting way to bring different voices into conversation. There are some more quotations continuing that below.

Friendship: The Half-Blood Prince (Book 6, Chapter 9) – Harry Potter and the Sacred Text

‘It reminded me – I’ve only heard of it, I’ve not read the study in full – a really striking statistic that if you grow up in a community with inter-generational friendships, people are 80% less likely to suffer from depression later in life. Which I was just like, woah, that’s a huge statistic.’

Casper ter Kuilie

‘I think one of the beautiful things about being loved by a friend is that they sometimes worry more about you than you necessarily worry about yourself.’

Vanessa Zoltan

‘It made me realise that my life is not just my business, which is kind of a confronting moment.’

Casper ter Kuilie

‘When I was thinking about this theme of friendship, that element of protection and being willing to assert yourself into someone else’s life, even sometimes uncomfortably, actually I think is a mark of friendship.’

Casper ter Kuilie

‘And, you know, my joke about Ginny being a sister or not, I think speaks to another really important element of friendship. And I think it is the thing that makes friendship special and distinct from partnership, is that friendship can be fluid. You can go from being best friends and talking every single day to sometimes not talking for three months and then just picking right back up. Whereas a partner, you know, life dictates a certain level of commitment. Whereas the fluidity of friendship I think… you can play so many different roles in friendship, and I think that is a real gift of friendship, and we see that with Ginny and Harry.’

Vanessa Zoltan

CC: Creating Conscious Friendships with my soul sis Alexi Panos – Over It And On With It

‘I think that comes back again to just honouring what’s alive for us, honouring what’s true for us, allowing what’s true for us, and not trying to be something that we’re not because we think something else is better. And now we’re into authenticity and just being ourselves. If you’re looking for a tip to make friends, that’s really it. Just be you… And there was a point in my life, in my journey, when it was authentic for me to say “I’m learning who I actually am.”‘

Alexi Panos and Christine Hassler

‘That would be my first tip: think about the places where like-minded people are. And a lot of it was I had to try different things… And then secondly, at those things not expecting people to be like “oh, Christine! You look lonely. Come and join us!”… So it was finding those events, and not all of them were, you know, successful. Like, I didn’t leave all of them, some of them were just fails. But going to enough and then actually initiating conversation, and actually connecting with people,and putting myself out of my comfort zone, and, you know, putting effort in.’

Christine Hassler

‘Women have been taught – I mean in my experience – women have been taught and shown that we are meant for and it is our job to make sure everybody feels good. Make sure you’re taken care of, make sure you’re taken care of. And we have this idea of “super-woman” and “wonder-woman” and “she does it all.” Right? Like, “She works really hard, and then she comes home and cooks dinner. And then she’s also still sexy. And She’s also super-mum. She’s saving the world.” And while I do think we can all have parts of that – I forget who said this quote – “you can be anything, but not everything.”… And I do think we’ve really got to ask ourselves, what’s most important for me?’

Alexi Panos

Esther Perel: The Quality of Your Relationships Determines the Quality of Your Life – The School of Greatness

‘You learn to love yourself in the context of your relationships with others. This idea that you go first to work on yourself here and then you prepare this nice little package, then you bring it to relationships – that is completely off actually. It’s interactive. You need a good amount of self-awareness, but you also need to be in relationships because it’s people who help you become more aware… It’s by being with others that you get to know who you are.’

Esther Perel

‘Make sure that when people remember you, they smile.’

Esther Perel

Continuing on from Part One and Part Two, here are some more quotations I thought were interesting from various podcasts discussing the questions and uncertainties involved in cultivating deeper friendships.

Ep 3: Friendship & Loneliness – Things You Can’t Ask Yer Mum

‘It’s one of those things where people say you pick up where you left off. We don’t have to be in each other’s lives constantly to know we still love and care about each other and we’d be there at the drop of a hat. And that’s actually the key of adult friendships. Not holding anything against each other when you’ve got no time… You just dip back into it or see each other after a few months, and it’s like you’ve been speaking to each other every day. ‘Cos you need that, and someone that makes it feel high maintenance is just not going to work ‘cos that’s not what you need from friendships, I don’t think. You don’t want someone making you feel guilty when you haven’t got time, or when you’re very busy or stressed, or something else. It doesn’t mean that friendship is less important; it just means life is happening, and friends stick by no matter what is going on.’

Lizzy Hadfield and Lindsey Holland

How to Cultivate Deep Friendships: LIVE with Callie Duke – The Woman Podcast

‘I think being able to be vulnerable is so important, and that’s where friendships really deepen.’

Callie Duke

‘I think we’ve got to look for people who are going to spur us along in our spiritual growth… You need friends that care more about your long-term holiness than your short-term happiness.’

Callie Duke

Are some Friendships too much work? Emotional labour, boundaries and pity friendships – I Said What I Said

‘Another thing is I’ve learnt to be honest with myself about whether this is actually my friend or whether this is just an acquaintance, or whether this is just someone I’ve outgrown… I wonder if we need to be clearer? I just don’t see, like, my male friends going round calling people friends as easily as I do. And I wonder how that hurts people, how that confuses people. I think the difference between men and women in this context is that men aren’t socialised to edit themselves for people’s comfort… Even if that means lying to ourselves and others, women are a lot more willing to overstep our own boundaries or to lie to ourselves just to make people comfortable.’

Mukundwa and Nyak

‘I’m curious about what friendship is to begin with. I think, when you do these really fun interviews with your nieces and nephews and you ask them these questions, and you ask them a question “what is friendship?” and some of their answers were, you know, “I know someone’s a friend if they talk to me, if they share with me, and if they smile at me.” It’s so simple for them. And so much, so much of that is true. Like, “if I have a good time with you and you’re kind to me, we’re friends.” But now there’s so much more complexity. Like, very few of my friendships now, few of them reflect that still. Some of them are, there’s just added complexity because of geography, because of time, because of you’ve got this partner and that partner and now you’re divided. This is what your work means for your time, and your mental health is coming to the party now. When you’ve got all of these dimensions I just never had to deal with.

So I used to be a very good friend because all I needed to do was to show up, and at school I had no choice but to show up because I had to show up for school. The structure of your life literally is conducive to friendship. And I think now that a lot of us have friends spread around the world, it’s hard to, it’s starting to distance in terms of [not just] geographical distance but emotional distance. [It] starts to tease out the fissures in your friendship, and the nuances… I think that’s just a bit complex, having these partitions in our friendships because I just feel like that wasn’t what we were told. We were told a friendship – for women – a best friend is everything. And that’s just not the case.’

Mukundwa and Nyak

#1 Teaser | Flying Solo – Adulting

‘It seems as though one of the resounding aspects that affects all of us when becoming an adult is a feeling of isolation and maybe even loneliness that we really didn’t expect. I think it can be quite a shock to the system when a huge number of us; you spend a vast amount of time in education, and at school you kind of have no choice but to be involved in some kind of peer group, and of course you’re all on the same wavelength, you have the same goals. And then perhaps when you go to university, once again you’re still not quite adulting. In fact, I’d say uni is a little bit like a waiting room. Like, you might get some people who pass it and go straight into work. And already the structure that made up your background bubble starts to break apart and then some people never leave the waiting room. I’m sure we’ve all got friends who seem to be perpetually studying or studenting or travelling. And once you’re flung from the comforting arms of education – never really thought that I’d say that – the world seems a lot bigger and then a lot smaller all at once.

And then the thing that you seem to have been preparing for all you life – which is your career – isn’t at the end of the tunnel, it isn’t directly ready for you all packaged up neatly once you’re out of education. And when you’re at uni or school, I think it was a bit more of a relay race, a team effort… it’s still very much like you’re all in this together. But then suddenly you’re on a straight and narrow… and suddenly it’s very uneven and you might feel like you’re lagging behind, or you might feel like you’re doing slightly better than your friends. And it doesn’t really matter where you are on the scale. I think for everyone it’s slightly uncomfortable to feel as though, oh, I don’t know what’s happened to that really comforting array of people that were around me and are now spread out maybe all over the country, maybe abroad, maybe in completely different fields to [what] you thought… I think what it forces you to do is really look into yourself in a way that maybe you’ve never done before, and kind of see yourself in a whole new light as a whole individual rather than as part of a team. And I think that can be quite difficult.’

Oenone Forbat