Janice McCabe

So that openness and curiosity, both about friendships and about who we are is really crucial.

Yeah, I think it's not too late to make friends no matter your age, no matter what your experience has been like in the past.

So, you know, finding other places where people are open to making friends are, you know, again, these friendship markets are a really helpful way rather than, you know, I talked to people who went to their local coffee shop and thought, oh, you know, if I go in there regularly, that would be a good place.

But people are often working.

They've got their headphones on.

They're doing their own thing.

They're not in the market necessarily for making friends there.

But maybe a group of new knitters at the coffee shop, for example, may be a place where people would find other friends.

Me too.

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.