Transcript of How to make friends (and keep them) | Sheridan Voysey

She said, "Yes, being an adoptive parent is going to be great. There's going to be great joy involved, but also, it could be difficult. You're going to need a support group around you." And then she asked a question that burrowed under my skin and never left. She said, "Who could you call at 2 a.m. when everything has gone wrong?" And you know, I found myself sitting there with my pen hovering over the workbook because I couldn't think of whose name to write down. What about you?

Who's your 2 a.m. friend? You've seen the headlines. Call it a loneliness crisis or a friendship recession. Something is drastically wrong. Look around your workplace, your neighborhood, your train carriage. Every fourth person you see is regularly lonely. Now, if that is you, and there will be some of us here in the room, do not worry. You're not alone for a start. The problem comes when we stay there. Decades of research now confirm what we intuitively know to be true: that loneliness doesn't just hurt us emotionally.

It increases anxiety and depression, it drains us of meaning and happiness, it weakens our heart, it even shortens our lifespan. But here's the good news: friendship reverses all of this. People with close friends are happier, healthier, and they live longer. Friendship is a superpower. And the most overlooked relationship of our time. Decades of research to tell us what we now know to be true. But here's the thing: when I was sitting in that seminar room that day, I didn't really take on the picture of somebody needing friends.

I've spent years as a presenter. I don't have any trouble talking to strangers. In general, I've got fairly high social confidence. I wasn't your typical picture of somebody who needs friends. But as I sat in the seminar room that day, I was facing three of the biggest barriers that adults face in their friendships today. First barrier: mobility. Hands up, how many of you are living in a town or city different to where you were born? Keep your hands up if you've moved two times since then. Three times.

Four times. Five times. We could keep on going on. That was me. I'd recently moved cities, I had friends in other places, but I wasn't keeping in touch with them. Second barrier: busyness. Be honest with me. How many of you have had times in your life where you've been too busy to keep in touch with your friends? Thank you for your honesty. That, too, was me. But did you know that it takes 50 hours of meaningful contact to move a relationship from an acquaintance to a casual friend alone, let alone a good friend or a 2 a.m.

friend? Fifty hours. Simply put, I wasn't putting the hours in. And thirdly, there's neglect. Because for decades now, our culture has pushed friendship off into the shadows while we've shone the spotlight on its prettiest sibling: romance. If there's anybody who doesn't believe me, all you have to do is take out your Spotify playlists. When you get home this afternoon, I ask you, I challenge you to find one song in your playlist, one song about friendship.

And I'm not just talking about that cutesy song from Toy Story. If you find that one song about friendship, you will find that it is a mere drop in an ocean of love songs. Everybody knows the date of Valentine's Day. How many of you know the date of International Friendship Day? Our schools have sex ed, but little friendship ed. We have books and apps and courses and whole organizations to help us date and marry and raise kids, and I'm grateful for all of those resources, but up until recently, we have had next to nothing to help adults form, deepen, maintain good, quality, wonderful, life-giving friendships.

And because of this neglect, we don't even know what a friend is anymore. Are my workmates my friends? Is the person I help through my local charity a friend? Is it your barista who knows your order better than your spouse does? Is it your hairdresser who knows all of your family dramas? And even a few you didn't even realize you had? Comedians have tried to step into the breach and kind of provide us with a definition of friendship.

Jim Hayes said, "A friend is someone who helps you move house. A best friend is someone who helps you move a body." Or to paraphrase Groucho Marx, "A friend is someone who visits you in jail, a good friend is someone who bails you out, and a best friend is someone who turns to you in the cell and says, 'That was fun.'" At Friendship Lab, the organization that I lead, we define a friend as someone you can talk to, depend on, grow with, and enjoy.

You know, the kind where everybody dies in the end, but they die so meaningfully. Pursuing this kind of friendship does more than just quell our loneliness. According to Oxford University's kind of resident expert in this, Robin Dunbar, friendship is not just a factor. No, no, no. Friendship is the factor influencing our health, well-being, and happiness. We need to change the story on this one. We need to build a world of 2 a.m. friends. Instead of a friendship recession, we need a friendship revolution.

Want to start one together? A revolution requires a manifesto, and a manifesto requires commitments. Here are three. The revolution will begin when we treat friendship as a vocation. What if you and I were to treat being a friend as just as important as being a parent, a poet, or a professional? Because it is. Being a friend is a sacred calling.

Having a friend is a sacred trust. And just as we read books to become better parents, and we practice to become better poets, and we take courses to progress our professions, treating friendship as a vocation means getting skilled people. It is time that we rediscovered, maybe even discovered for the very first time, the forgotten, the unspoken rules of friendship. The revolution will begin when we put friends before screens. One of the romances that continually puts friendship into the shadows is the romance we have with our devices.

Hour upon hour, we gaze lovingly into its eyes, caressing, caressing, caressing. Yes, we're all busy. But when the average person spends five hours a day watching streaming video alone—that's the ONS figures—five hours a day, the problem is not so much time, it's priority. A check-in text to your friend will take you 10 seconds. A catch-up call will take you about 10 minutes. A meet-up will take just one hour out of your week.

Do that and you'll still have time to watch people renovate homes you'll never afford, or get voted off an island. We need to return our gaze to where it's most important, to where it's most valued, to where it's most needed: putting people before pixels and friends before screens. And the revolution will begin when we embrace the risk of mutuality. If you are always the giver, that is not friendship, that is charity.

And if you are always the receiver, that is not friendship. That's dependence. Friendship is a dance of giving and taking, seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, knowing and being known. And funnily enough, it's this mutuality that actually makes it risky. It can be easy, always being the giver. It saves you from being vulnerable about your own needs. And it's sure easy, always being the receiver, when everybody kind of surrounds you and focuses on you and listens to you and does what you want to do.

It saves us from the sacrifices that friendship requires: cooking meals when they're sick, giving up weekends when they need to leave, move house. Giving up sleep when they call at 2 a.m. But there is no friendship without this mutual vulnerability and sacrifice. And when we taste it for real, it can bring a tear to our eyes. In 2018, my father was diagnosed with cancer.

To complicate matters, he was also my mother's carer. And they lived in Australia, so there were a few stressful days as we tried to work out what to do. That's when a man from Dad's church stepped into our lives. His name was Helmut. He didn't know us, we didn't know him, but he'd heard about our situation and he wanted to help. Two days later, he appears on the front doorstep with a notepad. He comes in, he sits down, he starts making his way through a list that he's made up. He says, "Okay, when the chemotherapy starts, you're going to need somebody to deliver meals to you.

I'll arrange a cooking roster. Lawns. Who does your lawns? Nobody does your lawns? Okay, I'll organize that as well. Bins. What day do your bins go out?" Down the list he went, sorting everything. For two years, Helmut drove my dad to chemotherapy every Tuesday and Thursday. For two years, the fridge was full of meals, the lawns were mown, the bins went out on time. It felt like we'd been visited by an angel. But as beautiful as that was, what Helmut and my parents had in that moment wasn't yet friendship.

Instead, it was beautiful, sacrificial, life-changing charity. Let's all be like Helmut. But as time went on, something shifted. As those Tuesdays and Thursdays racked up, Helmut found that in my parents, he had somebody that he could talk to about the little things in the large and depend on to work through his own problems and to grow with as they encouraged each other.

And to enjoy. In fact, Tuesdays and Thursdays became his favorite days of the week. My father's battle with cancer ended in September 2021. Helmut was there, carrying the coffin. Not all relationships of charity can or indeed should become friendship, but this one did: equal, mutual, and fulfilling. Friendship gives us the change we need in times of stagnation and the continuity we need in times of crisis.

Thank you.

Additional support from Isabella Aslarona, Daniela Balareso, Valentina Bojanini, Banban Chang, Christopher Fasey Bogan, Cinnamon Horn, Laney Lott, Matthew Polis, and Yadi Vasquez. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.