Twelfth House+: Making and Maintaining Adult Friendships (it’s complicado)

Friendships. Some might say it’s the underdog relationship of our times. Yet, over the past few years, there’s been more talk about friendships as a central part of how we create, sustain, and cultivate happiness, community, and longevity.

Today on the Twelfth House+, Michelle and Wallis are musing on all the complicated aspects of friendship, how to build stronger ones, and how to navigate new friendship dynamics during significant life changes.

Michelle and Wallis are musing on:

  • Friend break-ups and how to overcome them

  • How to bridge disparate friend groups and create new opportunities to have friends co-mingle and pollinate

  • What Dunbar’s rule of 150 connections tells us about friendship and romantic relationships

  • COVID x friendships

  • Flaccid vs. dynamic vulnerability and how it affects trust in friendships and partnerships

  • How attachment styles show up in friendship and how to use them to get closer

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LEARN THROUGH THE HOLISTICISM HUB HERE, IT'S FREE! ✨

“Friendships should be simple. You should understand me. And if you don’t, then you’re not a good friend to me. Or we’re not a good fit. But you would never, you rarely treat romantic relationships that way.”
— Michelle Pellizzon
“Most of the time when I meet up with someone, I don’t really want to be their friend. They’re a nice person and I’m happy to be an acquaintance. I warm up really. And honestly, some of my dearest friends are just people who are really like persistent with me.”
— Michelle Pellizzon
“I feel like COVID was such a gift in friendship stuff. As much as it was hard, but it was very clarifying.”
— Wallis Millar-Blanchaer
“I think it’s very common for people to see the short sighted part of friendships and think like, well, it’s not working right now. It’s just not gonna work, we’re just not meant to be friends. When in reality, your friendships are probably often going to last longer than your romantic relationships.”
— Michelle Pellizzon
“When you really zoom out, the best friendships are the ones where where you can have patience of time, and trust in the dignity of someone else’s timing.”
— Michelle Pellizzon

    • Shifting focus from relationships to friendships

    • Would you ever send a friend to therapy?

    • “Friendship is like an underdog relationship in our lives,” Esther Perel - do you agree?

    • Fear of developing a very human attraction to people who are not your partner

    • Michelle’s worst friend breakup

    • The power of intensity in friendships

    • How drastically do people's lives change?

    • How do you deal with your friend's shifting seasons and priorities?

    • Reasons why it is more difficult for someone with a squiggly brain, ADHD, or a creative, intuitive person to form friendships and maintain those relationships

    • How has a previous breakup influenced Michelle's outlook on friendship?

    • Intensity versus frequency in terms of friendship

    • Engaging in something that is repeated over time

    • Getting together with others around a common interest or value

    • That heartbreaking feeling when you're having a good time and your friends can't be happy for you for whatever reason

    • Envy versus jealousy

    • What if someone wants to be your friend but you don't feel the same way? How do you deal with such a situation?

    • There are two types of vulnerability in friendship: flaccid vulnerability and dynamic vulnerability

    • Trusting in the dignity of someone else's timing

    • Trying to live a life without regrets

    • Attachment styles in friendships

Resources / Mentioned

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