You know the feeling. You’ve become part of a group of friends who get together regularly, and there are plans in the works for dinner, drinks, a day trip, etc. It sounds good at the time but, as the day approaches, you decide to bail at the last minute. And, it’s not the first time…
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Turning Conversation Into Friendship
We all know it can be hard to turn words into actions. But, when it comes to making new friendships, it’s necessary to go from conversations, to hanging out, to then becoming better friends with those around you. One concrete way of doing this is to simply ask them to hang out and spend time…
Helping a Friend Through Hard Times
When your friend is going through a hard time, it can be difficult to understand the best way to support them. They might open up to you and in trying to relate through personal experience (as we sometimes find ourselves doing), you can push them away by seeming self-absorbed. Recently, we’ve realized that,for different situations,…
Having 100’s of Friendships: Quantity vs. Quality
One of the consistently fun and enlightening aspects of spotting topical and interesting content for our Project BFF audience is discovering how frequently scientists and researchers study the unique characteristics and social impacts of friendship. And, we’re fairly confident that we’ve only located the tip of the scientific iceberg on this kind of information! This…
Do You Know It’s Over?
When there hasn’t been a big blowout, a fight through tears followed by a “never hit me up ever again,” how do we know that a friendship is over? Sure, we grow apart as we get older and our priorities change, even just as we make new friends that we feel closer to, but does…
Anxiety Alert: Making New Friends Edition
Everyone experiences anxiety at some point in their life. It’s a primitive emotion, similar to fear, and its job is to help us take care of ourselves. We may feel anxious before a big job interview or a date or a test. It’s a temporary feeling and its role in those instances is to help us prepare….
Power of Female Friendships
This article on Thought Catalog got us thinking about the power of friends in our lives. We’re social beings, and research more and more shows how bad loneliness is for our health. Lonely people are more likely to have heart disease and stroke, have immune system problems, and may even have a harder time recovering from cancer. Whew. That’s…
Helping a Grieving Friend
One of the joys of friends is getting to experience life with them — we’re with them to cheer on their successes and share in their happiness. That also means one of the less fun parts of friendship is being there when our friends are in pain. And when a friend loses a loved one,…
No Matter the Distance: Friendships Can Thrive Across the Miles
Question: How many of your friends live either a long drive, or a flight, away from you? The odds are that one, or more, of your dearest friends do not live in the same city, state or country that you do. But the distance doesn’t mean these friendships aren’t strong and thriving, because you truly…
Building Work Friendships — One Step at a Time
So many of us have a love-hate relationship with work. It brings us some combination of satisfaction, confidence, status, money. And, at the same time, stress, stress, and more stress — from feeling overworked or underappreciated. That’s just for people who basically like their jobs. (We won’t go down a rabbit hole of recrimination, unfairness,…