Raina Cohen

Like to not treat friendship as this sort of added thing if you can fit it in.

and to consider it as something that is actually going to be an anchor or the central part of your life.

And one way to do that is really to think about how is the architecture of your life set up?

Friendship can be a lot easier if you are in close proximity to people.

And that opens up a whole process of how do you find your way to living in close proximity to friends.

But certainly one thing is when you're deciding where to live,

consider friends.

Consider friends as part of it.

I think for a lot of people, it is about a commute or maybe being near family or there are other kinds of factors, but treating friendship as something maybe worth making trade-offs for.

I think it can make life more meaningful.

It allows for more spontaneous interactions.

We are social animals.

We need people.

Let's build our lives around them or at least consider that as an important factor.

And the third thing is something that's just maybe on my mind right now about not expecting people to always come to you when they need something and not necessarily expecting that people are always going to accept your offer when you offer something and trying to make abundantly clear that you will be there to support them.

And like a conversation I had this week was with a friend who had mentioned that she has been really down a couple weeks ago.

And I spent time with her and I had absolutely not noticed that because she's good at covering it up.

And we talked about, you know, when she mentioned that, I was like, well, how can I notice this in the future?

You know, rather than waiting for her to tell me a week after she's had a really low point.

And I borrowed a kind of method from somebody else I know, which is that she would send like a specific emoji that meant that things were not going well to her close friends as a way of indicating, you know,