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Informationen zum Autor Dr. Marisa G. Franco holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Maryland and works as a professor there currently. She writes for Psychology Today and she has been a featured psychologist in The New York Times, NPR , and Good Morning America . Dr. Franco delivers talks about connection and belonging all over the country to private companies, universities, and non-profit organizations. Klappentext "Is understanding the science of attachment the key to building lasting friendships and finding "your people" in an ever-more-fragmented world?"-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 How Friendship Transforms Our Lives Connecting with Others Makes Us Ourselves "Some of the widowed sit at home and watch television for the rest of their lives. They may be alive, but they're not really living," seventy-three-year-old Harriet remarks, referencing the members of the grief group she attended after her husband's death. Harriet could have easily faced this same fate if it wasn't for one thing: friendship. Harriet didn't always value friendship. In fact, up until she married Federico at the age of fifty, it wasn't a priority. She was ambitious, working twelve-hour days and traveling enough to eventually meet her goal of visiting every country in the world. To ascend in her career, she moved across the US, chasing jobs-from the Northeast to the Midwest to the West and back to the Northeast again-disposing of friendships along the way. But her ambitions never impeded her search for a spouse. "That was the training of my culture-to live your life to find a husband," she says. She had a string of boyfriends throughout her life, and when those relationships clipped, she would hunt for someone new. She remembered visiting her co-worker Denise's home and envying how she had it all: an impressive job, a husband, beautiful twins. Single at forty, she struggled to accept the reality that she might never have the husband and children she dreamed of. But, without the towering domestic obligations that arose from family life, she filled her hours with work. Harriet admits friendship wasn't all that fulfilling in her younger years because of how she approached it. She was ashamed of her childhood, as she grew up on a farm, dirt poor. During the summers, she worked on neighbors' farms to pay for school. As she rose in her career, and her network increasingly churned with wealthy elites, she never felt like she belonged. Friendship was a place for her to live a double life, to perform the culture of affluence she never felt fully accustomed to: attending estate sales, dropping Benjamins on dinners, arguing over mundanities like the color of neighbors' lawns. She never let herself get too comfortable around friends, lest they figure out where she really came from, who she really was. Then, two things happened that resuscitated her view on friendship. First, when she married Federico, a social butterfly, she acquiesced to hosting friends in their home for regular gatherings. "People wanted to be around us because of how happy we were," she says. From him, she learned that being around others could be a joy rather than a toll. But it wasn't until Federico died that she truly understood the value of friends. To heal her grief, she attended counseling for the first time, where she learned how to be vulnerable. She transferred the skill of vulnerability to her friendships. When she did, she experienced old friendships in new ways, as her bonds ceased to be places of pretend. While some friendships buckled under the honesty of her grief, others deepened, and she realized that being vulnerable, asking for support, could be a portal to deep intimacy. In her old age, Harriet values friends more than ever. One friendship, she realized, has been her longest love story. She met Shirleen in c...
