Transcript of Sunday Pick: Do all my friends secretly hate me? | from Corner Piece

Happy Sunday, y'all! Elise Hugh here, and today we are bringing you a Sunday Pick where we share an episode of another podcast from TED, hand-picked by us for you. You might remember Corner Piece from a recent Sunday Pick. It's TED's newest podcast, a show that starts small on life's biggest questions. Co-hosts Taha, Melissa, and Sabrina, lifelong friends and full-time nerds you might know from their YouTube channel Answer in Progress, take an everyday worry and launch a full investigation to figure out how much of the problem is modern life and how much is just part of being human.

When I was a kid, I had all these dreams of what I thought friendship would be like when I was older. Big apartments, large living rooms, pizza nights. The kind of thing that you'd see in the show Friends. I guess that's because my parents had it on TV all the time when I was younger. And what I've always found really beautiful about the show was the genuine connection these people seemed to share with each other. They have this casualness with each other and show up as themselves, unannounced, happy, sad, and everything in between.

I think I just, like, thought I told myself that it was fine and I was over it, but...

We were friends for years, pretty much all through childhood and into adulthood. But long story short, we had a small fight that unraveled into this year-long process of slow distancing, and now we don't really talk to each other.

I guess when you're just, like, friends with someone for so long, I guess, like, you have these expectations. And when things change so suddenly without any communication, you're just kind of like... You're just, I don't know, like, feeling left wondering what is going on for over a year. You're just confused. And so I just don't understand what the I don't know what the play space is, you know?

She was one of my oldest and closest friends, and I miss her a lot. And I think I'm still making sense of what happened and processing the grief of it all. Like, I'm too scared to even text her. So on this episode of Corner Piece, we're talking about friendship. Am I a bad friend? And what does it even mean to be a good friend? And not just the kinds that you see on screen. I mean real friends.

Do you guys ever just call your friends spontaneously?

So what do you think my answer is, Taha?

You schedule in spontaneous phone call with friend, and then you roll a dice and you have a system.

I don't anymore. But when I was a kid, I used to. When I was in elementary school, I used to just call my friends after school.

Elementary school? With a landline?

Yeah, you just grab the grab the landline. You'd be like, "Hello?"

So cute.

Yeah, I'd be like, "Hello, is Amanda free for a call?" And then they'll be like, "Okay, one second," and then you'll just talk. And then when you want to when you're sick of being on the phone, you have to, like, fake. Be like, "Oh, my mom my mom's calling me for dinner."

You have to fake.

I have to go now. Because you can't just talk forever. You have nothing to do. What homework do you have when you're in grade four? Like, go do your times tables and then you're done. But anyways.

She was really good at her times tables.

Jeez.

Don't brag about it.

But not anymore. Not anymore. I don't call my friends.

You can't do that anymore.

This feels embarrassing to admit that I'm struggling to hold onto friendships as an adult. Like, it felt easier when I was younger. Less complicated and more fun. I had people that I saw all the time, talked to, and felt really connected to. I don't know, but maybe life was just simpler then. We didn't have the complications of adult schedules and emotions to deal with. And so I couldn't help but wonder if there's something more to friendship that I just seem to be missing.

So my friends and I realized we didn't hang out for, like, over a year, and we were like, "Why?"

Like, your close friends and your group chat.

My close friends and I. Like, we have a very active group chat, but we didn't hang out in person because there was just so many scheduling nightmares that were occurring. And so we try and make plans to hang out in person once a month, which means that there are about four to five weekends that we have to negotiate. And something you learn in your 20s is that all of those weekends book almost a month in advance. And so it's just like, I just learn what they're doing on their weekends. It's fun.

Okay, how many times do they say, "Well, no"?

Listen, my friends, we're all desperate for an opportunity to hang out. It's really like something has to be restraining us or somebody doesn't want to hang out. And that's I mean, like, it's not the right context for the hangout. So yeah, they'll say yes. There's very little overlap in, like, times where I want to hang out and they're like, "No, you're not allowed to come."

I think I have most things scheduled and then I leave the door open for spontaneity.

That's true. Do you want to talk about your multi-calendar lifestyle?

We can get in the weeds, but the way I construct my calendar system is I have different calendars for different probability events. I have my high-probability calendar. I have my low-probability calendar. I have my unconfirmed calendar. Okay? Now, this makes up the bulk of how I socially organize my life. Now, the reason I have these three different calendars is because I have friends of different levels of reliability.

This sounds sweeter than "I'm scheduling my friendships." You're like.

Well.

You're like building out space for them.

Okay, is there a difference between someone who is an acquaintance and a friendship? Do you distinguish those two things at all? To me, someone who is a friend is someone who I can be myself with. And then there's just people that I know. Yeah.

I feel like this collapses the idea of a friendship into a binary, which I would like to wholeheartedly reject. The not friend to friend, I feel like.

I actually agree with you. I think that I've just become very strict in my use of the word friends because I think that ambiguity really stressed me out when I was younger. And so I've decided that if there is not that reciprocity in the relationship, they can still be an acquaintance that I care about, but I would not consider them a friend in my book.

I think I would and this is just what I do practically, which is if they call me their friend, I'll just call them my friend as well. Because I'm like.

But do you call them your friend in your heart?

I never in my heart think of the word friend because I think it means.

Taha doesn't have friends, actually.

Or a heart. I think I have I have friends who I definitely talk to about my life and, like, what's going on in my life, what I'm struggling with, what I'm excited about. Those type of friendships. And all of these aren't, like, neat categories, but there's a quality of friendship that includes that. And then there's another one, which is way more about enjoying each other's personality. That's, like, way more on the scale about banter and having fun and laughing and enjoying the shared interests that we have.

That's great. That is crazy.

Classic man friendship.

Yeah. I'm like, "Damn, when did you get married?" "Oh, 10 years ago." I don't think I could order my friends in terms of closeness. And so I also feel like when I tell people, "Oh, this person is my friend," like, I wonder if one is closer than the other. In terms of, like, I don't know where on that line anyone goes. Because there are some parts of my life that I would share with some friends, and there are other parts of my life that I would share with other friends. And neither of those parts of my life are more intimate than each other.

I get that. I think I think for me, I like I contextualize my friends. And I know that might sound a little bit weird, but it's because, like, I get to be a slightly different version of me when I'm hanging out with those people. So I am the type of person who very rarely will mix friend groups. I just I don't like it. I find it makes me kind of uncomfortable. And all of my friends the weirdest the weird part of it is that when I do mix friend groups, my friends become different people because it's a different environment.

I think I'm similar to you in that sense, but I think of it more as, like, sometimes you just don't want to be the full version of yourself with everybody.

I think that I listen, time to get into therapy mode. I don't know what the full version of myself is. And that's, like, a thing that I've been trying to unpack for the past, like, two years. And that's just going to be an ongoing journey. Like, it's kind of weird that I don't know me because I am me. But, like, I like sorting things into boxes, and I'll be who I am in that box. And there's going to be through lines. Like, I'm a pretty consistent person. But what does it mean to be me entirely as a whole without all of these contexts stripped away?

I wouldn't say I'm the same level of openness with all of my friends, but I don't think about whether or not they are my friend or how close I am with them. I just behave in the way that makes me feel good.

Honestly, it was strange to hear that when Sabrina and Taha are with their friends, there's this ease. At least they don't seem to overthink and second-guess who they are when they show up around their friends. And I can't really relate to that. Friendship was supposed to be this space that was the safest to be yourself, to be loved and accepted for who you are. So when the friendship that I thought would last forever ended, it really threw me.

Each time that I move to a new neighborhood, it seems to get harder and harder to sustain the friendships that I left behind. That same researcher made headlines with the finding that we lose half of our friendships every seven years.

Listen to the last sentence again.

Finding that we lose half of our friendships every seven years.

Man, every seven years, that sounds I don't know. I guess that makes sense. I mean, the friendship that I had lasted 20 years before falling apart. But when I look at other friendships in my life, that seven-year pattern does hold. You know, I think we grow and move through different phases of life, and not every friendship survives that change, whether it's moving to a different country or city or just getting a different job.

Hi, this is Anna Goldfarb. I'm a journalist and author of Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. One of the first things I learned about friendship is they can end at any time for any reason. It's a voluntary relationship between equals. It's one of the only ones where we have that equality in them. So they're really special relationships.

My name is Dr. Marcy G. Franco, and I'm a professor, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. I think when I was younger, I just really focused on romantic partnerships, and I thought that made me worthy. But I had been taught that friendship is trivial or secondary or menial to romantic partnerships, something to fill the space in the purgatory until you get married. But these friendships actually felt so powerful to me.

I feel like an alien trying to understand friendship. And it's like, these are just the most human things that we do. Like, we're social people. We want to connect with people. And why does it sometimes feel so hard and weird to do that?

It's a very different relationship, and it's very hard when we don't have cultural scripts on how to navigate it. It's really because we don't have a lot of models for these conversations. It creates this, like, deep loneliness of there's no one who understands all parts of me. I know all these people, and they all know a little part of me, but not too many people that know all of me. So we have an opportunity here to create new models. We have to figure it out ourselves.

So there's this model that I was presenting to my class on, like, why we're struggling with connection. And it can be for structural reasons, which means we don't have enough friends. Functional reasons, we're not reaching out to our friends to get our needs met. Or quality reasons, we don't have enough quality connections. And so when I thought about that in my friendships, I said, it's not a structural issue. I have a great group of friends. It's not a quality issue. This is a restorative people who I feel like my most authentic self around. But I realized I had a functional issue. I don't always reach out to friends to get my needs met.

One of the best things you can do is what's called social identity support. And that's seeing your friend for all the roles that they play. And the way to do that, Melissa, is, you know, if we met and I'm like, Melissa, I love that you're into podcasts. You're a great host. Like, I'm really interested in that. I'd love to see where you grew up. I'd love to see, you know, what foods you ate growing up. I'd love to see your traditions. I want to be a part of it. That's how you deepen a friendship, to see you for all the roles that you play in your life.

That sounds scary in some ways.

I mean, you don't have to do it. No one has to do this. It is totally optional. But if you hit it off with someone, I mean, that's how we did it in college. Like, you'd go home with a friend for Thanksgiving, and then you'd see their family dynamic. And then you know them a lot deeper. You know them a lot better in a certain way. So that's one thing we can give to our friends is to say, I want to be a part of it. I want to see where you grew up. I want to see what you like eating. I want to be a part of your traditions.

I think, Melissa, probably a lot of your friends are hoping to get out of that rut too. And so both of you are creating the norm. And I say that so that we could all recognize that, like, we have agency too.

I think that is, like, so beautiful in theory. But especially with new friends and people that you're, like, unsure how they're going to react when you're like, all right, what if I, like, show you more of myself? And, like, what if you don't like that?

You know, friendships are a risk. You know, this is part of the risk of showing people who you are. This is part of the risk of vulnerability.

Why do you think that sometimes those things feel hard to do, to be vulnerable?

From a psychological perspective, I think we don't trust that people love us. Our felt experience of being loved is very different from the reality of how loved we are. It's called under-sociality that we kind of underestimate how much people like us. We underestimate how much they care about our acts of affection, how much they care about our acts of kindness. When people on the receiving end are like, this is so meaningful to me. And so I think when you think people don't love you, how are you going to be vulnerable with them? There's this way that pain leads us all to be very self-absorbed in a way that is hard to acknowledge as self-absorption because we're always thinking about how we're coming off and our image, our sort of distorted image of ourselves in the other person's head that's often much more negative than the truth, rather than thinking about this other person.

It felt like at one point I had this. And relearning how to do this, that is being open, feels scary.

One thing that I wanted to say because I think you brought up some of your fears in friendship. And I wanted to say that they're absolutely normal. And what is vulnerable is universal, right? You know, there's fears of vulnerability, fears of reaching out, fears of taking a risk in friendship. And I've realized studying friendship, when you look at people that stay lonely, the reason that they stay lonely is because they think something's wrong with them and they're fundamentally defective. And so how can I try and reach out and connect when everybody's going to smell this defectiveness on me?

And I'll be honest. I feel like I've lost a lot of my confidence in making new friends and trying to deepen existing ones. They just all stay trapped in this state because I'm just terrified of breaking them. And it frustrates me because I want to feel held by my friends, but taking that step or reaching out that arm? Mm-mm.

I just wrote a message on my page right now. I got scared. It's just little letters on the screen, you know? Just letters on the screen. They don't hold any emotional weight. What?

But apparently, I wasn't ready to do that just yet. In the following weeks, I tried to practice what I learned from Anna and Marissa, that is, being more open, but with other people in my life.

Pause. You've been texting me more. You've been initiating conversations with me more as of, like, the past few days. It was noticeable because I was like, why is she texting me? She never texts me. I'm the initiator in our relationship, and that's fine. But it really threw me off. I looked at my phone one day because I got a notification. I was like, text from Melissa. Is she dying?

What do you mean? I do.

You don't text me out of the blue.

OK. I would. What did I text you? What did I text you?

You were texting me pictures of pudding. Really ugly pictures of pudding.

Help me understand what the heck is happening right now.

I kind of had a little friendship therapy session with two friendship experts.

In that someone said to you, hey, you can be more than just chill with your friends.

Well, it was a little bit deeper than that. Remember, like, months ago when I was trying to ask you guys, like, all the things that you do to maintain your friendships and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you probably knew that I was asking because actually, I don't know if you knew why I was asking, but I was kind of going through an interesting time in.

Is this the friendship breakup I have heard about? Like, in the snippets between meetings, I'll join and there'll just be, like, a little ooh, the friendship breakup. And I'll say, anyway.

Is this about your friendship breakup?

Well, not anymore, I don't think.

You get dumped.

Ooh.

Oh, no. I said it as a joke.

You said it as a joke.

Oh, no. Oh, no. But she's not laughing.

That's a woman who has never gone through a friendship breakup. I've gone through a friendship breakup, which is why I did not make a joke. I was like, I know what this is like.

Oh, God. What was it like?

It was complicated. It was emotionally heavy. For me, it came out of nowhere, to be honest. I had a friendship, an individual friendship breakup that did not break up the group friendship. But then we were just like.

Oh, yes.

We just switched to being cool, but no more solo friendship. And that was really hard because they continue to be tangentially in my life. And so I continue to emotionally feel it over and over again.

This sounds like an emotional entanglement. This sounds fraught.

Are you going to do just, like, burn your bridges with everyone else you know?

I'm hoping to never experience a friendship breakup in my life. Boom. Perfect.

Great plan. That's my plan. You know, you dream of forever, and then forever doesn't happen.

Sounds like a romantic story, both of you.

Well, I actually think it's actually more like, when you get into a romantic relationship, the possibility of breaking up is a known quantity that also has, like, social scripts around it. But I feel like for friendships, no one expects to have a friendship breakup.

It's a weird space to be in. And so I don't know how to talk about this with anybody else. So I was just kind of, like, sitting with it for a really long time, probably thinking that it was fine. And then I worked on this friendship episode, and I'm like, oh, wait a second. I'm not fine. I'm really not fine. I think I was trying to figure out ways to, like, fix it for so long. I thought that if I just, like, said how I felt, things would be fixed.

Also, did you send, did you send, like, a crazy person text?

No, I didn't send a I did not send a crazy person text, but.

You showed up to the house.

Showed up to the house with cupcakes and said, why did you dump me?

Yeah. With the Love Actually poster boards.

Oh, yes. To me, you are perfect.

No, I did the normal person thing. OK, I'm just going to text her. Something chill. I can do this. I didn't put my whole heart out there. But all I will say is that it didn't go anywhere.

So have you started hanging out with other people?

I can't believe it took me, like, a year and a half to do this. We'll be right back.

Hey. Are you free on Saturday morning? There's this farmer's market. I reached out to an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. We kind of knew each other through mutuals, but we were never ones to hang out one-on-one, so I was a little nervous. But what's that thing about friendship and small acts of risk-taking?

Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. Melissa, are you saying that your solution for showing up in friendships was to not show up?

But I said I'm on the other side of it now. We're reaching out. We're hanging out with people again.

You're not fading out into the background.

Exactly. That's really wonderful. So later that week, my friend and I went to the farmer's market first thing Saturday morning in the pouring rain. Oh, my gosh. You're soaked. Hello. I'm happy we're making this happen. Me too. I didn't want to go inside. I didn't want to spoil anything. OK, OK.

I think for me, the thing I love about friendships is that there is this seasonal constancy to it. My friends are people in my life at a time, and those can be really wonderful times. And then other times, they might move away or we might drift apart. But, like, there's always this knowledge that one day, like two ships in the ocean, we might find each other once again. There were four metaphors in there. But, like, I think the reason why when I imagine my friendships, they're like people who can come in and out of my life.

I also think that, like, you're still friends with someone even if you haven't seen them for years and years and years. I have a friend whose parents are from Syria, and their parents think of their friends from when they were 14 in Syria before they became refugees as their friends. And they reunite 45 years later and be like, oh, that's my friend. And they're still your friend. And there's a constancy to it that, like, transcends whether or not you even had contact with them. So I just, I just don't think you ever think about friends.

Ending.

Ending, yeah. And they're just over there, and you're over here, and the friendship is still between you. This is going to sound so crazy.

OK, I'm ready. I'm ready.

All right, bud.

I don't think that friends are fungible, but I do think and, OK, I don't think that friends are interchangeable. But I do think.

No, no, no. Say fungible, you freak.

Listen, I watched Succession once. You're fungible.

But what does fungible actually mean?

OK, I don't want to 100% know, but I will Google it. Fung that's fungal. Fungible and easy to exchange or trade. Fungible for something else of the same type and value.

So, like, replaceable.

Replaceable. But fungible is fun to say. Anyway, but I think that the romantic partner as, like, a role in your life will have their own very specific, you know, shape. But also, that role in your life can be replaced by someone else, and the details of how they would behave and your relationship to them will be different. But I think that friendship, because there are less preconceived notions of what they have to do in that role as a friend versus as a romantic partner, your friend can show up in really different ways and ways that, like, you've never even expected.

Yeah, I agree with you. I feel like people don't console you in the same way as they would for an actual breakup. And I think it's because collectively, we don't see friendships having the potential of holding the same weight as a romantic relationship. And going through a friendship breakup, let me tell you, it feels the same, if not even more intense, because friendships see you in a way that is so different than any other relationship in your life. But there's also special friendships that you have in your life that have this quality to them that feels even more intimate and more loving than just, like, regular friendships.

How does it feel for the people out there who are scared? Can you name that feeling and how you are getting over it?

It's this feeling of, am I the only one who is looking out for me? And are all the other people in my life secretly hating me? Which is a weird place to be because if you are around people and if you believe that they don't love you or like you even, how are you ever going to put yourself in a position to, like, open up and genuinely connect with people? Because you're just operating from this place of fear.

You think you're surrounded by ops.

Exactly.

You're actually surrounded by friends.

I felt like when I had my friendship breakup that I think that that sort of inner monologue around, oh, do people like me? is really, like, is really confirmed by the friendship breakup. And that trust and that safety is now in question. And I don't know. I definitely felt like I started to wonder if that was the case with any of my other friendships.

Exactly. But I've made a new friend. Or at least I think that it's the beginning of a friendship. I think we're friends. I'm not sure.

Bro, you're overthinking it again.

No.

Oh, no. It's starting over.

This is what a healed woman sounds like.

When I write about this in my journal and think about it in my head, I think that I'm coping with this totally fine. And I'm like, yeah, I'm totally healed. It's all good. I think it's still a little bit of a process, but.

Yeah, I don't think you need to be totally healed from what sounds like a 20-year-long relationship. You don't need to be out the other side and fully happy and cheery and know the answer to all friendship now.

You're right.

So we're not speaking to a healed woman.

We're speaking to a woman that's going to be OK.

I can deal with that. I can get on board with that one.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Melissa, that's just it's just the most it's just, you know, this just describes you to a T.

What do you mean? Melissa's a girl who's going to be OK and Taha.

A man getting back in the game.

I need inspirational music to play in the background. I need you to be in a New York City taxi cab with your hair blowing in the wind, and the taxi goes, where to? And she says, home. And then Melissa says her reflections in voiceover.

Perfect.

To end the episode.

Friendships can be messy. And while it can feel easier to retreat into yourself and the safety of the known, that's not where real friendships are built. It's not always about music festivals or international travel. Sometimes it's as small and silly as sending a random photo of a pudding because it reminded you of them. I used to think that friendship was an all-in-or-nothing kind of deal. But I think the real secret isn't that we know everything about each other or even do everything together.