Tiffany Watt-Smith
speaker
171 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Tiffany Watt-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thank you very much for having me.
When I started writing the book where I got interested in friendship, out of a moment of actual real crisis in my own friendships, it really kind of began in my late 20s and I'd just left a career and then I'd moved and all my friends from university were sort of scattering and I just felt like I didn't really have the close-knit group of friends that I wanted to have or that I imagined I ought to have or that you see in the movies and the TV shows and so on.
Yeah, or in Friends.
You sort of think your life is going to be one big hang at the coffee house.
Suddenly everyone's vanished.
They're busy with work.
They might be having families or getting married and so on.
So I really had this real sort of crisis where I thought, I don't feel like I've got any friends anymore.
I don't know how to make friends.
It was a really sort of terrible moment.
And because of that, I did start looking into the history of friendship and try and understand a bit more about what it means.
I'm really interested nowadays in
how many different kinds of friendships we can create in our lives, different friends for different reasons, different contexts for friends, different kinds of friends, some transient, some very long-lasting, some people we see a lot, some people we only see a few times a year, and how valuable all those different kinds of friendships are.
As a historian, I know that what we understand a friendship to be has changed quite dramatically over time.
And it's also quite different from place to place.
So sociologists, for example, looking at different cultures, find that people define friendship quite differently.
So there's one interesting study where sociologists asked people in Ghana what they thought a friend was.
And those respondents really emphasised the fact that they could help their friend and their friend could help them.
And they asked the same question to people in America.
And their response was much more emphasising the emotional, you know, I can cry in front of my friend was a really common response.
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