Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link.
But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, everybody. I'm Gemma Spake, and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
hello everybody welcome back to the show welcome back to the podcast it is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s sometimes we have these episodes where i just go i cannot believe we have never spoken about this before We are like 300, maybe even 400 episodes in, and we have never spoken about this topic.
Today, we're going to talk about friendship trios. We know from countless studies and even so many episodes that we've done just how important our friends are, not just for our mental health, but for our
physical longevity even but what kind of happens what changes when it's not just you and another best friend and it's not a huge friendship group either it's like this weird middle ground three people the trio.
That can get, and I know we've seen examples of this, like really complicated, not just because friendships are in themselves complicated, but because of this unique platonic triangle dynamic. It can be a beautiful one. You know, you get to call two people your best friend. It can also get really, really messy. One person always kind of maybe feels slightly left behind or distant or like despair.
There are moments of jealousy and resentment. And I guess it's really easy to see why. It's not just two people navigating and bouncing their emotions between each other. Suddenly, it's like almost a bit of a project to keep three different bonds going at once, plus the entire friendship of the three of you as a whole.
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Chapter 2: What are the unique challenges of friendship trios?
We even dated best friends. My friends were bridesmaids at my sister's wedding. It has kind of been a fairy tale friendship situation in many respects until... Last month. Last month, me and one of my friends had a small falling out after she showed up two hours late to my birthday dinner to go on a date with a guy. A second date, might I add.
I expressed I was angry, and then she proceeded to not talk to me for three days, but did speak to our other friend. We semi-made up, but she didn't exactly apologize, and then flash forward to last weekend. I call up the girls to see what their Saturday plans are. And the friend who remained neutral tells me that they are on a trip together with two of our other friends in New York City.
And they had simply forgotten to tell me. I was devastated. We do literally everything together. And they know that going to New York was a dream of mine since even before we met. They said they made the plans in the three days me and my other friend were fighting. I hate to admit it, but I lost my cool and we haven't spoken since.
I can tell I've been blocked from seeing their Instagram stories and I'm feeling so lost, angry, devastated and hurt. Please, any advice? Am I in the wrong or how do I salvage this friendship? I think this dynamic is the perfect example of what we're going to talk about today.
And I think to give the listener a little bit of advice to begin with, like, your reaction to both those situations of firstly your friend not showing up to dinner and then this trip, like, that's fair to me. The exclusion, like, honestly, at this point feels deliberate, especially since you said you'd made up in the meantime. You said you'd been talking to them in the meantime.
And you are the one... who was originally offended or I guess like wronged. I think it's also hard because listening to that, like your friend saying, we just forgot to tell you. How can you forget to tell someone, let alone your best friend, that you're on a plane to their dream city without them when you otherwise talk like every single day?
I think your frustration is totally justified and you need to probably seriously consider what kind of apology you want, that you need, that you deserve, and whether you are willing to be the one who who instigates that and reaches out or who waits.
And I definitely think that at the very bare minimum, you need to send like a full kind of dear John, like hard on your sleeve message of like, I'm really hurt. And yes, my reaction may not have been neat and tidy, but it's because of how deeply I feel about you guys and about our bond and our friendship and also about the situation. I do feel like, you know, you need a proper apology.
And can those people give you that? We're going to talk through that in this episode. That is my most basic, very, very minor advice to you. But I think the concepts and the psychology we're going to discuss as we go further into this episode are probably going to answer this question for you. Are you going to be able to move forward? What is the dynamic of the friendship so far?
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Chapter 3: How do friendship dyads differ from trios?
We're going to discuss... what it really means to be in a friendship trio, the role of the third wheel, how people often choose a specific role in a friendship trio and how those roles evolve over time, and most importantly, how to avoid and how to deal with conflict when it inevitably comes up. So without further ado, let's get into it.
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Honestly, friendship trios, I think they're pretty special. And I know like that probably doesn't sound honest given the story we just heard. But when we look at the pros just for a second, you know, you basically get two best friends. It works really nicely on a practical level.
Like if one friend is burnt out or if one friend is busy or going through it, there's double the support, but also double the options, double like the people to hang out with. Arguably, it's more fun. There's more personality strengths, perspectives, more things to kind of contribute to your worldview. The in jokes are also like arguably a lot better as well because there's more shared.
And something I don't hear people talk about a lot is there's something uniquely affirming about watching your two best friends love each other the way that you love them. You know, it's one thing to know that you think somebody else is wonderful. And it's another thing to see that mirrored back by someone else you also deeply love. care about.
So they do have the potential to be these amazing ecosystems of friendship, but I think they are sabotaged by a few basic things. I will say most of the psychological research on close friendships or close relationships that you will come across is about dyads, so pairs of people, best friends, romantic partners, you and one other.
The sociologist George Simmel in the early 1900s, he was actually one of the first to say, like, hang on, what about a triad? What about a group of three? That isn't the same dynamic as a dyad plus an extra person thrown in there. The relationship behaves very differently because there are three people.
And Simmel focused a lot on how the exact number of people within a relationship and a friendship just completely changes the dynamic of the relationship itself in a really unique way, like a chemical reaction. In a dyad, you know, this is the most intimate kind of relationship or friendship you can have. It's also the most fragile.
You know, if one person walks away, the relationship simply ceases to exist. You know, it is reliant on both of you choosing to be in the friendship and to show up and to make it work. All the attention, all the conflict, the repair, the reassurance moves directly between the two of you. So there's kind of nowhere to hide. There's no buffer.
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Chapter 4: What roles do individuals typically play in a friendship trio?
Every single friendship trio has an organizer, has the center of command. They have this one person whose kind of calendar is like the guiding force of the friendship. They start the group chats. They remember the birthdays. They buy the football tickets. They book dinner. They tend to do a lot of like the practical maintenance that keeps these really intimate ties active and sustained.
Then there is the emotional anchor. This is the person who everyone seems to turn to when things are tricky. They are very emotive. They're a deep feeler. They're an advice giver. They also often end up being the mediator, the group mediator. I've noticed that the one person
who manages the emotions of the group is normally the one that's most likely to fall between the other two parties and is most likely to have to really deal with other people snarking about the other person and dealing with the other people venting about the other person in the group. They might not do a lot of the practical load. They do a lot of the emotional load.
So there's upsides and downsides with each role. The third role I often see is what I call the wild card or the energy bringer. These are the people that are just essentially the chaos. Like they always have an outrageous story. They always make the last minute plans. They always have the unhinged voice notes.
They might be less practically consistent, less emotionally consistent, but they are a source of what I would say is a huge amount of the group's fun, spontaneity, maybe even entertainment. Now, of course, these roles can overlap. The organizer might also be the emotional anchor sometimes. The wild card might also be the bridge builder or the organizer.
In a healthy trio, these roles are actually shared around. So there isn't one person doing all the emotional work all the time or all the planning all the time. But we tend to kind of fall into, if you're in a friendship trio, one of these three groups. And this dynamic can explain why trios exist.
can actually feel so comforting when they are working because, you know, everybody is kind of playing their part. It also kind of explains why small changes can feel really impactful because, you know, this entire social equilibrium will start to feel imbalanced if one person is angry or frustrated and stops playing their role.
You know, if the planner suddenly stops planning, things are going to fall apart. If the energy giver gives too much chaos, everybody else is going to be frustrated. If the emotional anchor feels exhausted and doesn't feel supported themselves, they're going to stop wanting to be somebody that the other people can come to.
The hardest part and the thing I think damages friendship trios the most... is that dynamic when a minor frustration emerges and it starts to impact how every single member starts to see each other, specifically when two people start to hang out without a third. Like the story we heard at the beginning,
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Chapter 5: How can jealousy impact friendship dynamics?
It's an experiment or experimental condition where participants are put into a group and they're told to throw the ball back and forth with two or three other people. either online or in person. They could be in a room, they could also be doing it as like a video game. At first, they toss it to you and you toss it back to them and everybody's getting a bit of the ball.
Then in this experimental condition, without explanation, all the other players just stop throwing to you. The other two people, the other three people, what you don't know is that they're imposters. The game carries on. You are never thrown the ball again. Like even talking about that feels like a school sports nightmare.
But this study is really important in seeing the effects of being left out. And there was a meta-analysis of I think like 120 specific cyberball studies. I think there was like 12,000 participants in these studies overall, which found that even this small artificial exclusion created a really large mental effect. Participants felt panicked, they got angry, they started crying, they got confused.
Sometimes they even reported like literal physical pain and And this effect, this deeply psychological effect, this happens even though there was no big drama. Nobody was hurt. There was no insults. Just quietly being left out was enough to have a significant impact on these people. Let's bring that back to the trio, to our friend at the beginning of the episode.
If this reaction in this cyberball game happens with strangers who you don't know at all, No wonder you're feeling so upset when it's your best friends and they metaphorically stop passing the ball to you. The initial pain of exclusion, like that's just the first layer, right? The second layer is the self-interrogation that comes with that.
We could also call this like social specific rumination, but it's when you've been excluded and then you start to look for an explanation within your own behavior. So you start to replay conversations, you blame yourself, you're scanning all your memories for what went wrong, you're hyper analyzing your behavior.
From an evolutionary standpoint this might make perfect sense even though it's really frustrating. You basically want to know where you went wrong and how you can fix it. For most of human history your survival depended on being part of a small group. for food, for protection, childcare, information.
Being socially excluded meant you would have less access to those resources, less protection, and a higher chance of literally dying. So it makes sense for natural selection to kind of build a brain that is hypersensitive to any signs of rejection, especially in a group, and even long before actual abandonment happens. In the 1995 paper, titled Need to Belong. It's one of our essential readings.
The authors argue that belonging and feeling seen and included is just as fundamental as shelter, as security, as warmth. A lack of belonging is linked to literal health problems, increased risk of getting dementia, increased risk of getting sick more often, virus susceptibility.
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Chapter 6: What signs indicate a friendship trio is becoming unhealthy?
You are not overreacting. There is scientific evidence here that this sucks. Biologically, your body is primed to push back against this and it really does. It hurts us on a physical level. I think it gets even more complicated with three people rather than with a big group because You now have the minimum number you need for alliances.
In conflict situations, there is always going to be an odd one out. Or when people are disagreeing, there's always going to be somebody who's left out. You can't split three evenly. Simple maths. Either the group splits three ways or more often two pair off. And this is when the fact that there are three of you and there is a quote unquote spare or an extra bonus member at any given time.
That is when this becomes a deeper unraveling for dynamics like this. There is a 2021 paper literally called Friendship Jealousy. Tools for Maintaining Friendships in the Face of Third Party Threats that was published in, I think it was the journal of, must have been the journal of social psychology.
And what this paper shows so well is how when there is a third person, when you can see the threat of you being replaced, you act differently. Across 11 studies, researchers found that often friendship jealousy is uniquely triggered, not just by... The idea that your friend might not like you anymore or could be taken away, but by third party threats.
So not just the idea of losing your friend, but losing them to someone else is more painful. And it makes us especially sensitive to cues of being replaced by the third person in the friendship. Because we can see this person. We can literally... We know that this person is a nice person. We know that these people have a good bond.
It's very easy for us to imagine them existing and going on without us. Friendship trios, they just make this so apparent. And so there is this additional level of competition around who is getting the most contact time? Who is getting the most enthusiasm? Who is everybody hanging out with more or less that kind of lingers? And it motivates what we call friendship guarding behaviors.
These efforts to protect or keep the friendship between you and the one other person safe.
when you perceive that the other person the third person is trying to take them from you and how this manifests is again back to those behaviors suddenly that you're in now that you're insecure you stop telling the other person about your plans you stop including them you stop talking to them even though you know what's wrong even though you love them when you feel a sense of threat sometimes it's just how we naturally behave and underneath all of this is
This like quieter, I think, running calculation about fairness. Here is where I'm going to introduce one final framework here to show why friendship trails can be so difficult. It is called the equity framework of relationships.
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Chapter 7: How can communication improve friendship trio dynamics?
Maybe you've even learned that lesson the hard way a few times. One of the easiest traps that trios slide into is that they have side conversations rather than shared ones. It definitely feels safer in the moment to be like, oh my God, this person is really annoying me. She really pissed me off when she did that. But over time, little alliances do start to form.
People start second guessing what's being said about them when they're not there and you start to think like, if I'm having those conversations with that person, they're probably having those conversations about me. And so there's like this low level paranoia. Basically, what we are describing here is the stage right before resentment.
And we know from many key leading relationship institutes and experts that resentment erodes relationships faster than probably nothing else. Whatever your impulse is to shove it down, to ignore it, you have to fight against that impulse. You have to swallow your pride and you have to say something because two options come out of that. A, You get through it unharmed. You patch it up.
You understand each other better now. I really don't think you know somebody, especially a friend, until you've had a first fight. And so it's kind of a rite of passage. You guys get through it and it's amazing. Or B, you say something and you realize like this person was never going to be able to survive tough times with me.
Anyways, and I can stop tiptoeing like this was never going to work because here is this opportunity we have to work through it and they're not taking it. So I think if nothing else, and this is going to sound so barbaric, but if nothing else, it's efficient. It's just purely efficient to talk to people about your problems.
Okay so we are going to take one more short break here before we get into my final three tips for maintaining friendship trios. The next one by the way is probably the most important of them all so stay with us. The next tip I have that I really recommend for flourishing friendship trios. It's like a tongue twister. Flourishing friendship trios. That's not that bad.
It's allowing the central or core person to change over time. Trios are... naturally dynamic like we've talked about these roles there will be phases when one person is more central whether that is because they are i don't know going through a breakup or because they're you know the ones who are organizing everything or i don't know like maybe they're like they're getting
married or the ones with like the most energy at the time. Transitioning this over time and letting people flow into different roles and flow into like different seasons and be the one that takes on more and be the one that takes on less, I think prevents the resentment creeping in when you feel like you always have to show up in a certain way. If you feel like this is kind of weird and you're
wait, this person isn't making as many plans, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it is your time to step into that role yourself. It is easy to see change as this thing that is life-ending, threatening, is going to ruin the friendship. But if nothing major or dramatic has happened, it may be that you're just resettling into a new way of relating to each other or just your new roles. So
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Chapter 8: What strategies can help maintain a healthy friendship trio?
And what happens if none of this is working, your friendship is just falling apart. It is in like a tailspin, like it is going down. What do we do then? What do we do when we're unsure if we want to continue the friendship trio or the friendship singular?
my advice is for this person again but also for all situations like this in general when you find yourself in a dynamic like this where something has happened a situation has occurred please talk about it as quickly as possible do not ignore that advice Do not let an emotional wound fester. If it has gotten to that point where like you guys are at a stalemate, be the bigger person and reach out.
And I know you probably don't want to hear that. You probably hate hearing that. But really the question is this. Is this friendship worth it to you? Is it worth saving? How long have you been friends? Have you made similar mistakes in the past and been forgiven? Is this something I think that we can recover from? It doesn't have to be a mutual decision.
But if you decide like, hey, yeah, I actually love this person. I'm going to regret not trying to fix this. I care about them enough to do the hard thing. You've got to follow that instinct and you've got to do it. Prepare to be honest. Go in it with like your heart on your sleeve. But I think you cannot fix... And you cannot get out of this if things aren't in the open.
You need to seriously be like, this sucked and I'm really upset and I'm going to let you guys also deal with the consequences of your actions through my emotions. I do want some kind of apology. I do want some kind of acknowledgement. But it doesn't mean that we can't get over this.
Everybody in this situation, and I think this is what friendship trues, and friendships in general, every single one of them will acquire this at some point. Somebody needs to swallow their pride. And if they do acknowledge it and they sincerely apologize, don't forgive them straight away. Go away for a few days. See how you feel. Has that apology helped? What kind of changes are you expecting?
What is going to be the line you don't want crossed? And move on from there. If they don't apologize, if the radio silence continues, if they don't take accountability... I'm sorry, but I just don't think it's in your hands anymore, and I think that's nice that you know you tried, you were the one who was the bigger person. Maybe you just need to let the friendship rest for a bit.
Nobody else can draw that line for you, but I think some red flags that often signal that the trio is doing more harm than good are when you do feel chronically left out. You do feel really anxious rather than excited or happy before seeing them. After spending time together as well, you know, you regularly leave feeling smaller than when you arrived.
You feel ganged up on, you feel belittled, you feel isolated. You might also feel kind of ashamed or overstimulated, like You really have to put a lot of energy into this rather than just seeing your friends. And I think the biggest sign that the friendship is done is when you just don't like who you are when you shop with the group.
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