Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes

Just because someone is your sibling, cousin, or best friend, does that mean your relationship has to look a certain way?

For episode 200 (I still can't quite believe I'm saying that!), I'm digging into the titles we give the people in our lives.

Every one of those titles comes with expectations. We assume siblings are close, best friends show up for everything, and relationships with in-laws are complicated. But none of those assump...

What if you stopped needing to “fix” your friends?

In this episode, certified trauma care practitioner Stacey Uhrig and I are talking about the “invisible backpacks” we all carry into our friendships.

Inside that backpack are the lived experiences, beliefs, interpretations, protective patterns, and survival strategies someone has collected throughout their life. And when you look at friendship through that len...

Have you ever seen someone else’s friendship online and immediately felt that little pang? 

One day I started thinking about the TV show Friends, and girls’ trips, and the friend groups online who live next door to each other or travel with five families or somehow make the version of friendship we imagined look effortless.

And then I had to stop myself, because I have beautiful friendships and do cool things with my...

Everyone is talking about building a village right now. It’s on social media, in parenting forums, in wellness content, in the conversations we have when we’re exhausted and lonely and wondering why support feels so hard to find.

But how many of us have actually experienced a REAL village? Today’s guest, Tom Karrel, has spent a lot of time thinking about it.

Tom is the author of The Lost Art of Random Conversations,...

Do you talk about money with your friends? Money can bring up jealousy, comparison, shame, judgment, and all kinds of feelings we may not want to bring into our friendships. 

But I also think there is so much power in these conversations.

You do not have to start by sharing your salary, your mortgage payment, or the amount in your savings account. Sometimes talking about money means sharing a budgeting app, a credit card strateg...

We have so many rituals for romantic love, between weddings, anniversaries, showers, and celebrations. But what do we have for friendship?

Today I’m talking with Jennifer Hobbs, owner of Rhinestone Wedding Chapel in Nashville and creator of Bestiemony, a friendship commitment ceremony she created after realizing that the vows she hears at weddings every day also sounded a lot like the promises her best friends had been keeping...

Have you ever realized that every time you hang out with certain friends, you do the exact same thing?

That happened to me recently with a group of friends. We were all sitting around my living room when one friend named what I think a lot of us had been feeling: the hangout was still good, but it had started to feel stale.

In today’s episode, I’m talking about what it can mean when a friendship starts to feel like it is ...

Today’s episode is for the parents who have messaged me over and over again asking, “How do I help my teen daughter through friendship drama?” But it’s also for the adults who are realizing that some of their current friendship patterns may have started in those very formative years.

Sheri Gazitt, founder of Teen Wise, helps teen girls and their parents understand what is really happening underneath their fri...

Last week’s guest said something that really stuck with me: “The cost of community is disappointment.”

We feel disappointed when a friend cancels at the last minute, when someone doesn’t show up the way we hoped they would, when we feel left out, and when the birthday or baby shower or hard season does not look the way we imagined it would. 

And most of us do not really want to admit how much disappointme...

Making new mom friends sounds simple enough until you’re actually in the thick of it, and that’s where Molly Menning found herself after becoming a full-time stay-at-home mom of two. 

Many of her mom friends had gone back to work or had kids in different stages, and the daytime hours at home started to feel really isolating.

So she decided to try something simple: a weekly, drop-in playgroup at her house for local mo...

Have you ever come home from hanging out with a new friend and you spiral, wondering if you shared too much or scared them off?

I call this a new friend hangover. And in today’s episode, I want to talk about what happens when we rush into new friendships, especially when we are really, really hungry for connection. 

So much of adult friendship advice tells us to open up, be vulnerable, share more, and let people in. I don&...

This episode will completely change how you show up for the people in your life when they are grieving or going through something.

Most of us have heard the advice about what to do when someone is grieving: bring the meal, send the gift card, walk the dog, take the kids, run the errand. And those things matter, but knowing what to say is where a lot of us panic.

Today I’m talking to Shelby Forsythia, a grief coach, author, and ...

Have you ever caught yourself on your birthday paying a little too much attention to your phone?

Noticing who texted, who posted, who sent a voice memo? What about who just “liked” your Instagram story but didn’t actually say anything? Who remembered, who didn’t, and what all of that might mean about how much they care about you.

For most of us, birthdays are one of the only times we explicitly tell our friend...

It’s impossible to talk about friendship or community without the topic of loneliness. 

What is loneliness doing inside the body? How is it affecting our hearts, our brains, our stress hormones, and our actual day-to-day health?

That’s exactly what we’re going to explore today with Dr. Alan Rozanski, a cardiologist who has spent decades studying this question: what allows people to truly flourish? 

Dr. Roza...

Have you ever left a hangout with a friend and felt like 95% of the hangout was normal, but the other 5% was just… off?

Maybe it was a comment that surprised you, or a value that seemed to come out of nowhere. And suddenly you’re wondering, wait, is this still the person I thought I knew?!

That’s what I’m talking about in today’s episode. Notice this isn’t about friendship breakups...

There is something dreamy about the idea of living close to your people. Imagine all of the spontaneous walks, casual dinners, and “come over, I’m on my couch” friendship vibes that so many of us crave.

Today I’m talking with Kelly and Kristi from The Friendhood, a group of four women in Atlanta who actually did it. They didn’t just talk about moving closer to their friends someday — they now live...

There’s a specific kind of loneliness that I don’t think enough people talk about — the loneliness you feel EVEN when you have good friends.

In this episode, I’m talking about why you might feel lonely, and I’m breaking it down into a few different reasons. Maybe you don’t feel fully seen, maybe this friendship isn’t the right container for what you’re carrying, maybe life circumstance...

Why does connection, caregiving, parenting, friendship, and community feel so hard right now? 

Author Stephanie Malia Krauss is here to talk about the “weather” we’re all living in right now: we’re overtapped, overworked, overstimulated, and overwrought. 

And honestly, when I read that, I felt like she had put language to something so many of us are carrying around without even realiz...

My book is finally out in the world.

This week, I'm taking you behind the scenes of the 6-year journey that became Are We Friends Yet? — from a food blog and a 40-page e-book idea, to a 120-page Word document, a friendship framework obsession, a major health crisis, an unexpected book deal, and more moments of crying on the floor than I'd like to admit.

This is the story of how this book came to be, the twists and turns I never...