What Dr. Marisa Franco Taught Me About Being a Better Friend (and a Less Lonely One)
Dr. Marisa Franco’s best insights on friendship, loneliness, and attachment, from why connection matters for your health to how to become a better friend.
Fernanda
10/19/20267 min read
I recently listened to Dr. Marisa Franco on Doug Bobst's podcast, The Adversity Advantage, and I ended up pausing it over and over to jot things down. Dr. Franco is a psychologist, a professor, and the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic, and she has a gift for making the science of connection feel warm and doable. So many of her ideas are the exact things we talk about at Filled Cups, and I wanted to share my favorite gems with you. (I may earn a small commission from the purchase through the book link above.)
Grab something cozy to drink, because this is a big one.
Friendship is a health priority
Dr. Franco shared that social connection matters more for longevity than how much we exercise or what we eat. She laughed that a colleague took this to mean they could be a "social couch potato," which is not the takeaway she was hoping for, but it does show how much weight the research gives to our relationships. She also pointed to the commonly cited finding from researcher Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad that loneliness is as toxic to the body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
What stayed with me is the way connection changes how hard life feels. In one study, people estimated a hill as less steep when they stood next to a friend. Dr. Franco's takeaway was that "challenges feel less challenging when we're socially connected." I think about that every time I'm facing something big. Having someone beside me really does shrink the hill.
Loneliness is a state of mind
I appreciated how she described loneliness as more than a feeling. When we are lonely, our brains go on high alert, scanning for signs of rejection, which is a leftover survival instinct from a time when being separated from the tribe meant danger. As she put it, this makes no sense when you are trying to connect, because you cannot get closer to people while you are watching for all the ways they might push you away.
Loneliness also shows up in our bodies through inflammation, a weaker immune system, and a stress response that never fully switches off. The flip side is beautiful, though. When we connect, our bodies release oxytocin, which makes us more trusting and more generous, and she called it a "fountain of youth" hormone because it supports how long we live too.
Alone time and loneliness are different things
Dr. Franco explained that alone time feels satisfying, while loneliness is the sense that you have less connection than you want. If all of your alone time feels like loneliness, it may be a sign that you are handing your sense of self over to other people.
Her advice for this moved me. First, spend time with secure, healthy friends, because they help you feel more secure too. Second, become your own source of validation by talking to yourself the way a good friend would, with words like "I'm so proud of you" and "if you're upset, that's okay, I'm right here with you."
Your friends make your romance stronger too
This one is for everyone who is partnered up and thinks friends can wait. Dr. Franco shared research showing that support from outside a marriage helps us handle conflict at home with a steadier body and a calmer heart. She also mentioned a study in which one person making a friend led to less depression for both that person and their spouse.
She encouraged us to stop seeing a partner as an island and to see outside friendships as a gift to the partnership. She also reminded us to build connection before a crisis arrives, because when we are in a bad mood, we enjoy people less and it is harder to make new friends. Doug compared it to watering a plant before it wilts, and I loved that image.
How to tell if you're in the right friend group
Dr. Franco offered a few questions worth sitting with:
How do I feel after I spend time with them? We feel restored after being around people where we can be ourselves and exhausted after being around people where we can't.
Who am I when I feel safe, and is that the person showing up in this friendship?
Can I count on them to follow through?
Are they genuinely happy when something good happens for me?
She also shared a line that I keep coming back to: "inauthenticity is a form of loneliness." You can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely if you are not fully yourself with them.
Leaving friendships with care
If you have ever stayed in a friendship long past its season, this part is for you. Dr. Franco explained that we stay in relationships for three reasons: how satisfied we are, how many alternatives we believe we have, and how much we have already invested. That is why people stay in forty-year friendships that no longer feel good.
She offered some gentle options. Friendship is a spectrum, so you can lower the dose and see someone once a month instead of once a week, which she calls having "low dose friends." She also reminded us that on average we lose half of our friends every seven years, so a friendship changing is completely normal. To feel free to leave, we need to believe we can find new connections, and that is exactly why we love creating spaces where people can meet.
When protecting yourself starts to hurt you
Dr. Franco described two modes. In self-protection mode, we avoid initiating, sharing, and complimenting, because all of that opens us up to rejection. In pro-relationship mode, we reach out, show we care, and give our time, which does mean risking rejection. Her words here stopped me in my tracks: "At some point all the self-protection becomes self-harm."
She also explained how a fear of rejection can create what it dreads. When a friend seems distant, we might withdraw and get cold, and then people pull away from us in return. Insecure attachment can also give us a negative filter, so one forgotten plan erases ten wonderful memories. In her words, "People need to be perfect to be safe, and because no one's perfect, no one's safe."
Her gentlest tips for moving toward security were these:
Start from the assumption that people like you, unless you have evidence otherwise. Research on what is called the acceptance prophecy shows that people who expect to be accepted become warmer and more open, and then they are accepted more.
Savor moments of social safety. When a friend answers your text, congratulates you, or smiles at you, pause, take a deep breath, and let it land in your body as appreciation. Doing this for five minutes a day can slowly reshape what you expect from people.
Anger of hope
I wish I had heard this years ago. Dr. Franco shared John Bowlby's idea of two kinds of anger. Anger of hope is a signal that something between us needs repair so we can be close again. Anger of despair wants to punish or destroy.
She told us she used to be anxious about conflict and would withdraw instead of speaking up, which caused the very distance she feared. Now she practices anger of hope. That sounds like opening with "you're really important to me, so I want to bring this up so we can stay close," using "I felt hurt" instead of "you did this," owning your own part, asking for the other person's side, and sharing what would help in the future. Research she cited found that open, empathic conflict is linked to deeper intimacy.
Is your alone time restful or a hiding place?
For those of us who lean toward independence, Dr. Franco offered a tender question. Alone time can be restorative, and it can also be a way to avoid people we do not trust. Signs that you may be using it as protection include feeling threatened by intimacy, feeling uneasy when you are vulnerable, or being around people without feeling known by them.
Her remedy is self-compassion, which she describes as treating yourself the way a kind friend would. That means acknowledging your feelings, telling yourself it makes sense to feel that way, and remembering that this feeling connects you to every other person who has ever felt it. Feelings give us information about who we are and what we need, and that is a good reason to get curious about them.
Good company and a good friend are different
Here was my biggest takeaway. Dr. Franco said being good company means people enjoy being around you, while being a good friend means you carry a responsibility and a commitment. You support people through hard times, celebrate their wins, and care about their well-being. She reminded us that "positive intent will not feed a friendship," because our friends cannot see our good intentions unless we act on them.
She also shared that when people were asked what they value in a friend, being entertaining ranked lowest. The top quality was something called ego support, which is when a friend makes you feel valued and like you matter. You do not have to be the funniest or most impressive person in the room. You can be the person who makes others feel like they belong.
She encouraged us to ask ourselves questions we usually direct at others. Instead of wondering why no one reaches out, we can ask whether we are the ones initiating. She also pointed out that we hold marriages to high standards of effort and then expect friendships to run on good vibes alone, when "the same behaviors that are going to deepen your marriage are going to deepen your friendships."
A word on online friendships
Dr. Franco believes you can form real friendships online, and she honored how much that matters for people with disabilities, older adults, and people with social anxiety. She also shared that in-person connection tends to be richer. Studies find that people feel most connected face to face and least connected over text, and in person we can bring soup or give a ride to the airport.
What I'm taking with me
Friendship is worth the effort, and the effort is very doable. It looks like a text, an honest conversation, a celebration, or an invitation. Before you go, I'd love for you to sit with a few questions:
Where might I be in self-protection mode, and what is one small way I could step into pro-relationship mode this week?
Who needs to know I'm proud of them?
Is there a conversation I've been avoiding that I could bring up with anger of hope?
If you want to hear Dr. Franco in her own words, look for her conversation on The Adversity Advantage, and pick up Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. She also has a friendship strengths quiz on her website that sounds fun to try. I'd love to hear which of her ideas spoke to you most, so come tell me in the Filled Cups community. Your cup deserves to be filled, and so do the cups of the people you love.
photo credit: The Adversity Advantage Podcast with Doug Bopst
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