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Join us, feminist coaches Taina Brown and Becky Mollenkamp, for casual (and often deep) conversations about business, current events, politics, pop culture, and more. We’re not perfect activists or allies! These are our real-time, messy thoughts as we make sense of the world around us. If you also want to create a more just and equitable world, please join us on the journey to Messy Liberation.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Hi. How are you, friend?
Taina Brown:
Hello. I'm good. I just realized I matched my sticky notes.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Well, only for people watching this on YouTube. Since most of our audience are listeners, they won’t even notice. But if you are watching, just focus on the face.
Taina Brown:
Yeah, one day I’ll get around to painting the wall behind me in one of those two colors. I was thinking something looked different, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Did you notice I painted the wall behind me?
Becky Mollenkamp:
Okay, well, this is probably boring for the listeners, so let’s move on to something more interesting: friendships. We’re going to talk about adult friendships—making friends, losing friends, or ending friendships. You brought this topic up, so I’m wondering if there’s something specific that’s been on your mind that made you want to discuss this today?
Taina Brown:
Yeah, I was thinking about potential topics that might interest people. I put a poll out on Instagram, and "relationships" got the highest number of votes. Usually, when people say "relationships," they mean romantic ones. So, I thought, what other kinds of relationships could we talk about that would be interesting? And I thought of friend breakups because I came out later in life, in my early thirties, and lost quite a few friends because of that—friends I’d known for over ten years.
It wasn’t an immediate cutoff; it was a gradual separation where you realize your values no longer align, and people stop prioritizing connecting with you. I’m not sure what’s worse: an immediate “we can’t be friends anymore” situation, or the gradual disconnection and ghosting that eventually happens. Then one day you wake up and realize you haven’t talked to that person in years.
Becky Mollenkamp:
I have lots of thoughts on friendships, which is interesting because I think of myself as someone who doesn’t have a lot of friends. But that’s also because I have strong opinions about what makes a friendship versus an acquaintanceship or some other type of relationship. I moved around a lot as a kid. I don’t know if you had the same experience, but I changed schools often, never far, but enough that I had a hard time establishing long-term friendships. I learned a lot about people leaving or things not sustaining. So, for me, it was more about friendships for a reason versus a season or vice versa. I never really established long-term friendships because I grew up before the internet age, so staying in touch would’ve meant being pen pals at best. I hear some echo on your end. Do you hear that echo?
Taina Brown:
No, do you still hear it?
Becky Mollenkamp:
Let me talk some more. No, I’m good now. I don’t know why I was hearing myself echoing. But anyway, because I moved a lot, I never really established long-term friendships. For me, it was more like people came and went, and it was more about friendships for convenience, like, "I’m going to be here; I need somebody to be my friend." As an adult, I still struggle with who’s a friend, who’s an acquaintance. I even feel weird about calling someone a friend. So, when you talk about friendship breakups, in my mind, I haven’t had a lot of those, but I wonder if I’m that person you’re talking about, who you’re like, "I haven’t heard from that person in a while. They’ve ghosted me." Because I don’t know if I even know that we’re friends.
Taina Brown:
Yeah, yeah, I totally get that. It’s funny you say that because my wife is the kind of person who calls everyone her friend. When we were planning our wedding some years ago and working on the invite list, she was like, “We’ve got to invite this person, and we’ve got to invite that person.” And I’d be like, "Who are these people? I’ve never met them." She’d say, “They’re my friends.” And when I’d ask, “When was the last time you spoke to them?” She’d say, “It’s been a few years.” And I’d be like, "That’s not your friend." I feel like if you haven’t had consistent communication, even if it’s just a quick check-in every six months, that’s not really a friendship.
We don’t talk to some of our really close friends every day or even every week, but we send memes back and forth. There’s still a channel of communication open. But these are people she met once at a porch party, and she thought they were cool, so she wanted to invite them to our wedding. I was like, "We’re not paying $100 for these people to come eat at our wedding." But you make a good point. Where is the boundary line between an acquaintance or a colleague and an actual friend? I tend to think of that line as shared experiences, not necessarily a certain number, but ones that create deep emotional connections. You could call it trauma bonding if you want, but without shared experiences, you’re just not going to develop any kind of emotional intimacy.
The deeper the emotional connection in that moment and the more you have those types of experiences with the same person, I think that’s what creates a friendship. When the emotional connection is so deep that you have to rely on the other person for emotional support, that’s what creates bonds. That’s when you know people are there for you, that they can support you, sustain you, that they care. Without that, I don’t know if I can call someone a friend. They’re just someone I met or an acquaintance or someone in my network. I wouldn’t necessarily call someone a friend without that kind of experience.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Taina, this is also challenging, and I just feel like the universe is talking to me because belonging has been coming up a lot for me in different spaces. And friendship, vulnerability—you can’t have belonging without vulnerability and friendship. You have to be willing to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to allow others to hold you, to support you. That may be another reason why I don’t feel like I’ve had friendships. I’ve never felt that sense of belonging. I didn’t have familial belonging, and I haven’t had those kinds of friendships that developed that feeling. That leads to not feeling like I can trust, and you need trust to build vulnerability. But you also need to be vulnerable to build trust. So, there’s this weird catch-22 that sometimes feels easier to avoid. And you also mentioned that if you don’t talk to a friend in a year or whatever, they’re not really a friend. I know you were talking about porch party friends, that’s different. But I also wonder about introverted friendships because I’m deeply introverted. I hate small talk, don’t like phone calls at all. There’s so much about the way I show up in the world that I can easily go a year, even two years, without talking to someone and still think of them as a very good friend. But are they? I just don’t know. Like, would you consider us friends?
Taina Brown:
Yeah, I would definitely consider us friends. We’ve never met in real life, but I think the way the pandemic shifted how people connect is significant. I made some really amazing online friends during the pandemic, some of whom I haven’t met in person yet, and some of whom I have.
When I said you need consistent communication with people, right? I’m also introverted. I remember once, I had two roommates at the time, but they were hardly ever home. They had big families, so they were always at a brother’s house, a sister’s house, or their parents’ house. I had just recently lost my job, didn’t have a car, so I was in the apartment alone most days. I went about three or four days without ever uttering a word. Then someone called, and this was before texting and social media were as big as they are now, where it’s like, "Don’t call me, just DM me on Instagram or send me a text." But someone called, and when I answered the phone, I was like, "Oh my God, that’s my voice." It was jarring to hear my voice again. So, I understand the whole thing about not talking regularly, but I think there has to be some type of communication. If you’ve already done the deep emotional bonding, and then one of you moves away or something happens where you’re no longer sharing space together, you can go weeks or months without talking and just send each other funny memes. Then when you see them, it’s like no time has gone by.
I actually have a friend who I kind of call my soulmate because we’re so alike. I don’t see her often because she lives out of state, but we used to be roommates. And when I say roommates, I mean we shared a room, a bed—it wasn’t sexual at all. Whenever we travel together, we just get one room and one bed. We’re both so introverted that we’ll make plans to spend the day together, and we’ll hardly talk. We’ll go get brunch, talk a little, then go to the stores like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, whatever. Then we might go back to her place or my place, and we’ll just sit around reading, watching TV, or taking a nap. There’s hardly any conversation, but it’s because we’re just so comfortable in each other’s presence that we don’t feel the need to fill the space with meaningless talk. We’re okay with the quiet. There’s a sense of comfort in just being with her, and it feels safe. We’ve done the deep emotional bonding, and it feels safe to just be together without the expectation that we have to be talking nonstop or have a high-energy interaction. It’s different for everybody, based on your personality and what types of interactions with your friends help you feel safe. That’s what we have to figure out as individuals.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Well, I went on a podcast a while back called Friendship IRL with Alex Alexander, I think that’s her name, and we talked about introverted friendship. She’s an extrovert, so she had such a different view of what friendship looks like than I did. It was interesting because I think so much of what we see of what friendship’s supposed to be or what makes a friendship a friendship is from shows like Friends and other TV shows. What we see on TV is always this very extroverted vision of friendship, for good reason, I suppose, because it would be pretty boring to watch a show of two people sitting in the same room reading books and not talking. But so much of what we see presented in popular culture about friendship is like, best friends—people who go out together, talk all the time, are on the phone while they’re walking to work, always doing fun stuff and laughing. It’s just this constant interaction and living together, always fun and laughing. It’s this very extroverted vision of friendship. I grew up seeing that and thinking that’s what friendship was supposed to look like, which is why I always sort of thought I didn’t have friends because I didn’t have that model of friendship. I started to realize I think I do have a lot of friends; I just have introverted friendships, and those look very different. So, I think the important thing is to know how you show up in the world and find friendships with people who either show up the same way or who can respect that you aren’t wired for extroverted friendships. And if you’re an extrovert, to notice if you have friends who are more introverted because I think they can take it very personally if they don’t hear from you for a while. Their vision of friendship is that you talk every day, and they might wonder, "Why don’t you want to take my phone call?" So, I think that part—the shared values or at least the respect of each other’s ways of showing up—is what makes a friendship work. It was in my 40s that I finally realized, I guess I do have friends, and I need to give them more credit. There’s always this part of me too that’s like, do they think we’re friends? Like, is this a friendship, or are we just collaborators? Are we friends? It’s a weird thing to navigate. And after being on that show, I realized most adults are struggling with the same thing. That’s why so many people lean on their childhood friendships because those are solid. They know that they’re friends, they know what it is because finding new friends and making new friends as an adult and then getting that clarity around friendship as an adult is awkward AF. It’s like dating, and it’s really uncomfortable.
Taina Brown:
Yeah, it is. I’m glad you brought that up because I think when you’re a child and you meet people, you’re either going to be friends or you’re not. There’s no other reason for you to be interacting with that individual. But when you grow up, there are multiple reasons why you could be interacting with someone. It could be work. It could be because your children are on the same sports team or in the same class. It could be because you’re in the same neighborhood association. The boundary between knowing someone and becoming a friend gets wider as you get older, because you’re just like, okay, at what point do we cross that line between just knowing each other for reasons A, B, and C, and actually being friends? And I think also, as you get older, you don’t have as much time. There are responsibilities if you have kids.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Yes, especially once you have kids, but even if you don’t. There are times when months go by, and I realize I haven’t reached out to my best friend. She was just visiting me from out of state. We see each other twice a year. Even that is now occupied by a lot of kid time, and in between, we can go a good part of the six months without a lot of communication. We sometimes send funny Instagram reels because that’s one place we both hang out. We text occasionally, but we both know we’re just so flipping busy and tired. Friendships are hard when it’s like that. Even if you don’t have kids, it’s still tough.
Taina Brown:
It is. Yeah, it is. I don’t have kids. I have two dogs that take turns being sick because they’re old. And wouldn’t you know it, every time we’re getting ready to go out of town is when they decide to be sick. But I digress. There’s also just general life stuff—work, just being exhausted from life in general. The older you get, the more emotional work and labor you have to do as an adult, and that makes it hard to find the energy, the emotional energy, to connect with people. One thing I was just thinking about: kids usually make friends because they have a shared interest in something, right?
They might be playing on the playground and both want to do the monkey bars if that’s still a thing, or they might be on the same sports team, or they might both like the same book or video game, or follow the same YouTuber.
Becky Mollenkamp:
These days, it’s probably a YouTuber or a video game.
Taina Brown:
Exactly. If you’re having trouble making friends, no matter your age, making sure you spend time focusing on your hobbies is important. Not only is it an act of self-care, helping you take time out to do something that isn’t quote-unquote productive, but it’s also an easy way to meet people and make friends if that’s something you want to do. I tend to think of friendships as tiers of friendships. Did you ever watch The Mindy Project? Do you remember that episode early in season one where Mindy talks about her best friends, and Danny, her enemies-to-lovers colleague, says, "I thought this other person was your best friend. You can’t have more than one best friend." And Mindy says, "Best friend isn’t a person, Danny, it’s a tier."
Becky Mollenkamp:
It's like your S tier.
Taina Brown:
Right, right. So, I think of friendship like that. There are different tiers of friendship.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Taina, that feels very hierarchical. I'm surprised to hear that from you.
Taina Brown:
It does feel hierarchical in some ways, but you could think of it as concentric circles instead of tiers. The closer those circles get to you, the more intimate those relationships are, the deeper the friendships are. We sometimes fail to understand that, and we might put expectations on not just other people but ourselves about how to interact with someone without realizing that they’re not in my inner circle, so I shouldn’t try to engage with them in this way. Or they are in my inner circle, so I should be trying to engage with them in a specific way. But without that clarity, it can be tough. That takes inner work. That takes time to figure out, who are my people?
Becky Mollenkamp:
It reminds me, and I wish I could find it—maybe you know—but there was this guy, I’m sure it was a white guy, who said that any person can only have about 200 friends, or 200 people in the world that they can actually keep up with. I remember reading it, probably in Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It sent me down this journey with Facebook, which I have now basically left. I keep it only so I can look at Marketplace. But at the time, I had like 1,000 friends on Facebook, and I didn’t even know who half of them were. I just accumulated them over the years because it was like a default to just friend somebody on Facebook. I took that idea to heart and decided to see if I could get my friends list down to 200 people. Over time, I did, but it was hard. I had to let go of this person, that person. But then I’d have these conversations with myself, like, "I don’t talk to this person; I’m barely engaging with any of their stuff." It just helped me see what you were talking about. We only have so much capacity. For those deep friendships, most people can only have a handful of those. As you go out on those concentric circles, you’re giving less and less, and each one might have a few more people. But even so, all told, you’re not going to have more than... I think 200 feels unrealistic, but maybe dozens or whatever works for each person.
I wanted to mention before I forget that my most viral TikTok, which isn’t that viral because I’m not that viral, was me sitting on the toilet while my son was in the bathtub. I said, "Let’s talk about why it’s so hard to make friends as an adult." It feels impossible to make friends. That TikTok had like 70,000 comments; I couldn’t keep up. It’s what got me the followers I have on TikTok. It was all these people saying, "Yeah, it’s so hard to make friends as an adult," and talking about the awkwardness of, "Are we friends now?" and "Where do you even meet people?" I love what you said about shared interests, and I also wonder how many people are like me and maybe just aren’t giving enough credit to the people they already have in their lives. Maybe they could make an intentional effort to deepen those relationships that they might be seeing as an acquaintance. With some intentionality, you could make it into a friendship. We have to get past the awkwardness of saying, "Honestly, do you want to be my friend?" It feels so awkward, but I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve done that kind of thing. Whether it was that explicit or something close to it, most people meet you with, "Oh my God, thank you," because most people are struggling with the same thing.
Taina Brown:
And if "Do you want to be my friend?" feels too on the nose, you could say, "Hey, do you want to hang out? Do you want to get coffee?" and see where it goes. Have you ever had a friendship breakup?
Becky Mollenkamp:
Yeah, that’s what I usually do. I’ve had one big one. Well, actually, I’ve had a few big ones. You mentioned ghosting, and I wonder how many people thought I was the one breaking up the friendship by ghosting them, while I thought they didn’t respond to that one email, so I wasn’t going to reach out again. I can get pretty tit for tat with that stuff because I don’t want to seem too vulnerable, too eager, too annoying, or like a burden. So, if I reach out and they don’t reach back, sometimes I’m done because I don’t want to be the one to keep trying. Maybe they were just busy. So, you make me wonder how many hearts I’ve broken over the years, where those people thought I was the one who ghosted them all the while I was thinking they didn’t want to be my friend.
Taina Brown:
Yeah, it’d be interesting to go back and be like, "Hey, remember when that happened?" But I don’t know if dredging up the past is a good idea.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Yeah, you know, because there are a million of those. It feels like such a common trope from a rom-com movie where someone goes back to all their past loves to see why it ended. I would love to see that, but with friendships, to pass the Bechdel test and have it be about women exploring their friendships over the years with no men involved. Anyway, as far as big friendship breakups, I can remember my first best friend in high school. That friendship ended because she got pregnant while we were still in high school. I didn’t have the emotional intelligence at 17 or 18 to be there and support her or to understand how to remain friends with someone who had a kid. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it, and I feel shitty about it. Honestly, most of my big friendship breakups, I feel like I have a lot of the blame to take. I was young and immature. Then, my biggest friendship breakup happened through a divorce, which is pretty common. In divorces, you lose friends. People choose sides, and they don’t feel like they can be friends with both people. In this case, I felt like my best friend—and she would have a different interpretation of what happened, I’m sure—I doubt she’ll hear this, but if she does, I want to honor the fact that there are two sides to every story. But at the time, I felt very judged. I had lost a lot of weight because I was very depressed. Externally, for people who don’t understand, it might seem like I was feeling great about having lost all this weight. I was proud of my body at the time, but I was depressed and in a bad place. I felt this reaction from her like, "You think you’re so great now," or "You’re just leaving him because you look good in a swimsuit now," or something like that. Again, two sides to every story, but I didn’t feel supported. I felt like I wasn’t chosen in the breakup. That’s another situation where you have a breakup and realize who’s there for you and who’s not, or how they show up. What about you?
Taina Brown:
Yeah, like I said, I came out late in life in my early thirties. At that point, a lot of my intimate friendships were through the church I had been attending for over a decade. When I came out and started having those conversations with people, there were two general reactions. One was, "I don’t care; you’re my friend, whatever. Who you choose to love is who you choose to love." The other reaction, from a small handful of people, was more of a pitying, "Well, we love you anyway," kind of response. That was heartbreaking to endure. But even after that, we still hung out. They met my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time when we first started dating. But as the years went on, it became clear that we had less and less in common. It was one of those slow drifting apart situations where, after a while, you realize you haven’t talked in a while. And not just that we haven’t talked, but we haven’t texted, spoken, or sent any Instagram memes. It also felt like I was doing the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of reaching out and trying to connect. So, I decided to stop doing that and see what happened. When I stopped, we just stopped talking.
But there are some friendships that I’m embarrassed to say I’m the one who messed up. I remember this one time in high school. I had a really good friend, and I had a crush on this boy. I wrote out my feelings in a letter, and she asked, "Are you going to give it to him?" I said, "No, I don’t think so," and then I crumpled it up and threw it away. She said, "Can I read it?" and I said, "No." She insisted she was going to get it from the trash and read it. I begged her not to, but she kept insisting. Finally, I said, "If you read that letter, I will never talk to you again." She said, "Whatever," and I never spoke to her again. It felt like such a betrayal of trust, such a violation, that I just ended the friendship.
There are other friendship breakups where I was just emotionally immature and acted like a total asshole to people. Looking back, I wish I could make things right, but there’s no way to go back and fix it.
Becky Mollenkamp:
I tried with that best friend I mentioned. I wrote her a letter and didn’t hear back. After my brother died and when I got divorced, I was in a really bad spot, and some of my friendships fell apart. I tried to fix some of those later, but sometimes it’s just too far gone, and things are uncomfortable. The best friend I was talking about earlier—by the way, she’s my best friend, but I’m not her best friend, and that’s okay, right? Which is another whole weird thing. I guess when you look at it as tiers, maybe it’s not.
But the reason she’s my best friend is that she was there during the time I lost a lot of friends because of my bad behavior, because I was in a dark, depressed space where I was acting really poorly and not handling things well. I was much too old to be acting the way I was in my mid-thirties. She stuck by me through it and understood what I was going through. But that’s not easy to do. I’ve been on the other side of that, and it’s not easy. So, I don’t fault the people who don’t stick around either, because I was horrible to be around. But the ones who do are amazing.
I think we have to release ourselves from the shame around where we’ve messed up our friendships because, in that time, I messed up friendships. I wasn’t a great friend in many ways to a lot of people. I could hold onto that and be embarrassed or ashamed about it, or I could just say, "I was going through something." Often, when we’re a bad friend, there’s a reason. If we’re hurting, hurt people hurt people, or we haven’t developed the emotional maturity we need yet. We shouldn’t be ashamed of that. It just means we weren’t emotionally mature, and then we worked on those things and became that. So, we have to release some of that shame around being a bad friend.
Taina Brown:
Yeah, I agree. I think it all boils down to releasing ourselves and others from expectations about what it means to be a friend and how to behave as a friend. We’re all flawed, so we’re all going to mess it up at some point. And that’s okay. It’s okay for people to be flawed and still be in relationships, still be in friendships. We need to have grace for people and ourselves as we navigate how to be in relationships with people, which we’re not always shown through media or reality TV. Every friendship is not going to be the time of your life. There are those slow, steady friendships that sustain you, and then there are friendships where every time you hang out, it’s a wild story to tell. Letting people be who they are and letting yourself be who you are and understanding what you need out of that relationship is so important.
Becky Mollenkamp:
I think that piece about releasing the shame and having grace is part of why talking about relationships and friendships on a podcast focused on liberation still feels aligned. It might seem like talking about friendships doesn’t have much to do with liberating ourselves from oppressive systems, but I think it’s very connected. To me, it’s twofold. I’d be interested to hear if you think there’s more. One, I think community is a crucial part of creating collective care and collective change. Learning how to have community, how to open yourself up vulnerably to trust and share, to let people in and allow them to care for you, is part of that. Friendships are a vital piece of building your village that helps with collective change.
The other piece is all the messed-up ideas we have about friendship and how those ideas are given to us. I think so much of it looks different for men and women, which we didn’t really get into. Women are given one vision of friendship, and men are given a very different one. In some ways, I think the male version is more healthy, and in other ways, it’s less healthy. But there are these differences. The things we’re told about what friendship needs to be and how we make it a problem with ourselves when it doesn’t measure up to that vision we’ve been given—that’s why freeing ourselves from those expectations feels very liberatory. It’s part of this process of saying, "I’m done with these systems." Almost anything we could talk about can come back to this, but I think it’s important to keep driving it home because everything is political. Everything is part of liberation, and in all parts of our lives, there is work to be done on how to look at it in a more liberatory way.
Taina Brown:
Yeah, I 100% agree. We’ve talked about this in other episodes, where one of the insidious things about capitalism is that it breeds this toxic individuality. It’s this "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," "just push your way through it," "keep moving on, keep hustling" mentality. We are raised in a culture where the individual is above everyone else—your individual needs, assertions, ambitions. Not that those things aren’t important, but learning how to be in friendship and community with people is in direct resistance to that toxic individualism. Being able to allow yourself to be vulnerable with others, to lean on others for support, and to support others in return—that’s how we resist that toxic individualism. That’s how we resist the toxic capitalism we’re forced to operate in on a day-to-day level.
One thing I used to tell my students when I was teaching was, "We learn about all these things, and it feels overwhelming." I was teaching Intro to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the students would say they felt awful after learning about all the injustices. I’d say, "Look, we’re not going to liberate ourselves in one day, and we’re not going to do it alone." It’s not about trying to do all the things to get free. It’s not about doing it as quickly as possible or on your own. It’s about how far you can lean away from those toxic systems and how far you can push against them. Because unless there’s a radical revolutionary moment sometime soon, you and I probably aren’t going to see the liberation of all people across the planet in our lifetimes. But how much can we resist on any given day? How much can we resist in the community with others? The way we do community and friendships is a big part of that. My retirement plan is to buy a house on several acres of land where me and my besties can all live and take care of each other. Some of us don’t have kids by choice, and some do, and we’ve decided we’re going to do this together.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Right, right. And having kids is no guarantee they’re going to take care of you. My brother died, right? We don’t know what’s going to happen. So yes, I’d like to live on your commune because I want to find one. We’re talking about resisting and pushing against oppression. If you think of it as pushing against a boulder that we’ve got to get up a hill, you’re not going to get very far if you try to do it alone. It’s going to run you over. The only way we can do it is when we work together in a coordinated way. We can’t do that if we aren’t able to see each other and care for each other. Building friendships is important, and this is coming from someone who’s an introvert and thinks of herself as a pretty lone wolf. But I’m working on it, and I think it’s really important. I’m glad we talked about this, and I’m glad we’ve officially decided that we’re friends. I think maybe we both thought we were, and I talk about you as my friend to my kid, but now I can officially say we’re friends. Yay! And guess what, people—those of you listening who are like me, you may have more friends than you know. You just have to give it more credit and be willing to...
Taina Brown:
We’re friends. We’re friends, yeah, definitely.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Maybe we should do this every episode. But my biggest takeaway is to be daring. To be daring to do that thing that’s a little scary, to reach out to that person you find cool and say, "Hey, I think you’re cool," or that person you’ve talked to a few times but aren’t sure if you’re friends and say, "Hey, you want to hang out again?" Be daring, because that’s how you find and build those friendships. What about you? What’s your takeaway?
Taina Brown:
My biggest takeaway is that I need to try a little bit harder. I’m really good at sending memes—I’m the meme queen—but I hardly ever call or text people.
Becky Mollenkamp:
Listen, Taina, I just want you to know, for me, don’t ever call me. I hate when people call me. You can text me, but don’t call me. But the memes are awesome, and they mean a lot. I sent you one yesterday, and I don’t know why. It made me laugh so hard. It was the little kitty getting run over by the vacuum cleaner, which was horrible, but the dog’s reaction was so funny. I just felt like you’d enjoy it, so I sent it to you. I don’t know if I usually send you a lot of memes or whatever—reels? Whatever. But that’s like one of my love languages, so send them to me, and I’ll send them to you.
Taina Brown:
Okay, sounds good, sounds good. You too. Friend, yes.