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    The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up with Your Friends
    The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up with Your Friends
    The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up with Your Friends
    Ebook272 pages3 hours

    The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up with Your Friends

    By Andrea Bonior, Ph.D.

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Had enough of that bridezilla? Feeling alone in a new city? Dealing with the trauma of the worst breakup ever—with someone you never even made out with?

    We've heard the path to fulfillment has much to do with relationships. But while it's often thought that for young women, it's all about finding the right man, real women beg to differ: It's friendships that are at the heart of happiness. Unfortunately, they're also at the heart of drama, stress, and sometimes not-so-great escapades after that fifth martini. And, technology, from texting to Facebook, has made all friendships more complicated than ever.

    At last comes The Friendship Fix, jam-packed with practical ways to improve your life by improving your circle. From dealing with friends-with-benefits to coworkers from the dark side, from feeling alone to being desperate to defriend a few dozen people, Andrea Bonior, Ph.D. helps you make the most of your friendships, whether they be old, new, online, or in person.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 26, 2011
    ISBN9781429977876
    The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up with Your Friends
    Author

    Andrea Bonior, Ph.D.

    Andrea Bonior, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and author of the popular weekly mental health column "Baggage Check" in the Washington Post Express. Her expertise has appeared in such places as CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and Good Housekeeping. In addition to maintaining a private psychotherapy practice, Andrea serves on the faculty of Georgetown University. She lives with her family in Maryland.

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    • 2/5
      Summary: Friendships are good (who knew??). If your friend is acting distant or has a problem, she is probably jealous. And "bridezillas". wow.

    Book preview

    The Friendship Fix - Andrea Bonior, Ph.D.

    INTRODUCTION

    The Challenges of Modern Friendship

    In my many years of seeing young adults for therapy, two major things have always stood out. Yes, one is that the bubble skirt does no one any favors, but the other—perhaps more germane to this book—is that relationships can simply make or break our daily lives. Now, to anyone who’s devoted significant mental real estate to chick flicks, Match.com, or Judge Joe Brown, this will come as no surprise. But what’s often overlooked is that the relationships that give us reason to wake up in the morning—and sometimes reason to duck, screaming, back under the covers—are not just the romantic ones. They’re the platonic ones (which became romantic only that once, in 2005, when everyone was just way too friendly with Captain Morgan).

    It is our friends who shape the course of our lives. Consider this: For all the people who are either monogamous or without partners (whom does that leave—Mario López?), romantic relationships make up just one, at most, of our companions, whereas friend relationships—and friend relationships—make up dozens, if not hundreds, of the people who matter most. From that snarky coworker who helps you get through Mondays, to that shopping partner you grew up with because your parents were fond of pinochle, to that confidante you’ve bared all with every week since Physics 101, they are the faces in our personal halls of fame.

    Still, it’s often assumed that finding a man, keeping a man, leaving a man, or even embalming a man is where the action is for young women. Why is this? Not only does this obviously exclude those who just don’t go for men, but it also ignores the many people who went to see Sex and the City not for Big or Jimmy Choo, but for the four main characters—alone, together. Their friendship resonated. It mattered in a way that those of us who’ve relied on our friends as emotional life preservers completely understood. And we were willing to buy overpriced Jujyfruits and popcorn with the caloric equivalent of a hot fudge tanker in order to experience it on the big screen.

    Now more than ever, more and more people are relying on their friends. With American women getting married later (a fond farewell to the notion of spinsterhood at twenty-five!) and more likely to put career before children even once they do get married, friends are becoming the new family. Women are starting to realize just how much those connections can mean—how much bliss they can create when they’re fabulous and how much agony they can create when there’s drama. And increasing numbers of young adults are spending their days texting, Tweeting, and collecting their friends online, making them real or virtual vacation mates, doctor’s-office compatriots, and, of course, unwitting companions in the toilet stall.

    But there’s something very odd going on, and that’s where my therapy experience comes in. Ask someone how they came up with their circle of best friends, and oftentimes they just fell into it, inadvertently and passively. Maybe the person was a roommate, a cube-mate, or an aerobics mate. Such proximity can lead to wonderful relationships, but it is not sufficient in and of itself to the formation of a strong bond. Many people hope and expect to find soul mates romantically, but they often are more than willing to spend their entire twenties and thirties with a group of confidantes who are no more compatible with them than a bad toenail fungus. Why are expectations—and efforts—so low when it comes to choosing quality friendships? Why are there a million and one tips about how to go about scoring that first date, but the relationships we spend even more time with are sometimes fallen into at random?

    Indeed, making supportive, lasting friendships can be even harder than dating, as many women in the trenches will tell you. (It’s chapter 4, for those of you in need of instant gratification.) There are no standard courtship rituals for friend-making: no first-date protocols involving breath mints, skirt-length deliberation, or restaurant-choice analysis. When a man asks for a woman’s number at a bar, the intent is clear, and it’s not to compare notes on the stock market. When two work pals dance around the idea of hanging out after close of business, however, it can be much more ambiguous and awkward—there’s not even a word for a platonic date equivalent in our language.

    This book sets out to help you find your friendship soul mates. (Yes, soul mates plural. Luckily for all of us, the world of friendship—discounting those BFF lockets—is not a monogamous one.) It will also help you weather the storms inherent in any serious relationship, from jealousy and competition to growing apart, betrayal, and dealing with e-mail forwards that make you want to throw your laptop out the window. (Snopes, people!) Perhaps best of all, this book will do all the foregoing without once telling you what eyeliner to wear, the it jacket this season, or anything even remotely resembling 101 Sizzling Sex Secrets. For this, we can all be thankful.

    1

    FRIENDS

    Who Needs ’Em?

    There’s an old adage about friends doubling your joy and cutting your sorrow in half. Unless I’m forgetting a part about whiskey, the point of this proverb is to remind us that friends serve important roles in our lives—profound, meaningful purposes that go much further than telling us if our butts look fat—and that their mere presence can have a phenomenal impact on our experience of happiness and pain.

    HOW FRIENDS IMPROVE OUR HEALTH: WHAT YOUR GRANDMOTHER (AND A BUNCH OF DUDES IN WHITE LAB COATS) DISCOVERED

    In fact, friendships have a host of emotional effects on us. Clinical depression, a disorder whose prevalence is growing sharply and whose typical age of onset—like (sadly) the market for thongs—is getting younger and younger, appears more likely to target those who feel unsupported by quality friendships. Anxiety disorders, from the phobia that makes a person go screaming when in the presence of mayonnaise to the debilitating and uncontrollable panic attacks that can confine someone to his or her house, are also associated with a lack of adequate social support.

    The connection is especially true for one of the most extreme anxiety syndromes: posttraumatic stress disorder. Research shows that after suffering a trauma, whether it be a natural disaster, loss of a loved one, personal injury, accident, or assault, people with a higher level of social support in the form of friend and family relationships are much less likely to develop PTSD. We’re not talking about friendships merely helping you whistle while you work: PTSD is a serious condition that, when left untreated, can lead to a lifetime of nightmares, terrors, an inability to engage in the normal daily routines of life, and not uncommonly, suicidal behavior.

    Not only do solid relationships make us less likely to be afflicted with these and other psychological disorders, but they often make us more likely to recover from them quickly and smoothly if they do occur. Quality friendships can be both the apple and the antibiotic—a medley of prevention and cure.

    Consider, also, the ways that friends themselves can encourage us to get proper health treatment. From the coworker who won’t stop harping about that strange mole on our arm to the buddy who suffered from depression but shared the experience of how he got better, friends who have our best interests at heart can often push us in the direction of health. Certainly, for instance, if a loved one goes to therapy and extols its virtues, that destigmatization can do much more than any magazine ad ever could.

    Friendships also affect our physical health in a more intangible way. Experiencing emotional intimacy in the form of positive relationships can help boost our immune system to better fight and heal from infection. As anyone who’s tried to ignore a particularly bad itch most definitely knows, it can be virtually impossible to distinguish between mind and body. If that smells too much like patchouli for you, consider this: Social support has a significant effect on the prognosis of someone who has been diagnosed with HIV. We’re talking about actual life spans here, affected directly by whether or not someone feels they have friends they can count on. Research upholds similar results for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—and that’s probably just the tip of the

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