Janice McCabe

Great to be with you.

I mean, sometimes people do say the wrong thing or get in their own way.

But I find that more often, right, there are times when making friends in our lives feels effortless and other times it feels really challenging.

And if it's easy, it might be a friendship market that you've stumbled upon.

Yeah, I...

Yeah, so I use that term friendship market to describe just what you'd captured there, which is the idea that sometimes we come to a new place, a new job, a new city, a new school, and we're looking for friends.

We're in the market, but other people aren't the other people that are there.

So we're there, you know, ready to like buy and sell our friendship to talk about it in this kind of crass sort of way.

And other people aren't nearly as open to that.

Yeah, that later point.

So, you know, there were people that I interviewed that did, you know, all the right things, you might say, personally, interpersonally, in trying to make friends, but they hadn't found a market.

And so the piece that I wrote in the New York Times talks about times when

People, you know, are shifting their identity or looking to deepen some part of who they are.

And they stumble into places like I talk about this group for new moms.

But there can be other things.

So rather than just taking a yoga class or a chess class, if you're really looking to become like passionately active,

part of that, you know, for that to be part of who you are.

You're more likely to find a group or a friend or possibly a community there.

Yeah, I think, you know, to look at your interests, you know, not to just show up to something that you have absolutely no interest in, in hopes of making friends, because that's not going to work out either.

But similarly, one of the people that I talked to spoke about an improv group being a place that they found community, too.