Are we actually in a friendship crisis—or is something more complicated happening?

Americans have been hearing about a “loneliness epidemic” for years. But research from The American Friendship Project suggests that most Americans do have friends. So what's happening in this mismatch of data and perceptions?

To find out, in this episode Maria talks with Dr. Natalie Pennington, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University and co-lead of the American Friendship Project, about what the research actually tells us about friendship in the U.S., and how to make and maintain meaningful friendships as an adult.

They explore why adult friendships take time to build, how vulnerability creates closeness, and why the pandemic, moving, and the decline of third places can make maintaining a social life harder. They also tackle how technology has changed friendship: when it’s okay to let an old friendship go, whether texting is actually good for connection, where voice notes fit, and what AI can—and can’t—offer as a substitute for human friendship.

This is Part 1 of Our Pandora’s Box’s two-part exploration of friendship and loneliness in America. Join us for Part 2 in two weeks as Maria talks with friendship coach and Connection Feast creator Alexandra Friedman about the practical work of making friends and building community.

For show resources, head over to the Substack.

Maria Eliades: Which is why for the next two episodes of _Our Pandora's Box_, we're taking on the subject of friendship, starting at a macro level through what social science says about Americans and loneliness, and finishing the exploration through a conversation with someone who's out there on the ground helping people make friends.

Maria Eliades: With all that I just said about loneliness, I believe that friends are the rock of our world, even if you have a significant other.

Maria Eliades: Our friends come in ranges. Some are chosen family. Others are the people we see during our hobbies. Some are the ones you've known since you were 11, and others are the ones that you just met in this season of life.

Maria Eliades: Whoever they are, you know they're important. But maybe also the friends that you have just don't seem enough for where you are. So that's why I'm opening this two-parter with a conversation with Dr. Natalie Pennington. Dr. Pennington is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University.

Maria Eliades: So let's talk to her to find out what the data says about friendships in the US and what we can do to make better and stronger friendships.

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Maria Eliades: Well, I’m really excited today to welcome on Dr. Natalie Pennington. Dr. Pennington, welcome to _Our Pandora’s Box_.

Natalie Pennington: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Maria Eliades: So to start out, you describe yourself in your 20s?

Natalie Pennington: You know, 20-year-old Natalie was... very social. I was a college student, through the totality of it because undergrad into grad school. so I also moved, uh, three times during that as well from undergrad to each school I went to.

Maria Eliades: Did you have a favorite place you traveled to during that time?

Natalie Pennington: You know, what was fun with it is I got to go to some places each year, so it was fun to go back to them. So you kind of built some routines around that, and then just the people I got to see. But you know, when you said it, the first thing I thought of was San Francisco.

Natalie Pennington: I got to go there, two different times, and it was just stunning getting to drive along, and I'd never seen the ocean because I'm from the Midwest.

Maria Eliades: Ah.

Natalie Pennington: and then I got to go for a conference a few years later, and so just, exploring, walking around Chinatown, just getting to see the city.

Natalie Pennington: It was, it was beautiful.

Maria Eliades: There are so many places that make an impression on us when we're especially, I think, younger.

Natalie Pennington: I would agree with that.

Maria Eliades: It feels like the loneliness crisis is being covered all over the news for a while now. But your research for _The American Friendship Project_ found that Americans actually have friends. So what's going on there? What are we actually talking about when we're highlighting a loneliness crisis?

Natalie Pennington: It's such a good question because it was one of the first things when we started _The American Friendship Project_ we wanted to understand, was is there a crisis? What is it? Or, is the crisis a question of do people have enough friends? And there were absolutely headlines that I think led us to think people don't have as many friends.

Natalie Pennington: And in fact, as you said, our study found three different years now that the number of people who say, "I have absolutely no friends," is really quite small. And people are also actually pretty happy with the number of friends they have.

Maria Eliades: You've worked a lot with Dr. Jeffrey Hall, who has estimatedhow long it actually takes to be, you know, an acquaintance, a more solid friend, a close friend, and you just highlighted time.

Natalie Pennington: Yeah.

Maria Eliades: And that leads me to my next question. So having time as an adult is a huge challenge. Do you have any recommendations based on that work, the research that you've done, or even your personal life, on how people can make the time that they need to have those, it sounds like, satisfying friendships?

Natalie Pennington: It's such a good point, and I love that you bring up Jeff's study. It's such a good one. "How many hours to make a friend?" Uh,he did look at college students, but he also thought, you know, broader life experiences. And, I teach about this in my classes, too, and I say, you know, "It's 50 hours to just move fromacquaintance to I'm calling them a friend, and it can take 250 to 300 hours to call someone a best friend."

Natalie Pennington: So a big part of what Jeff's study says, and a lot of the work that I do as somebody who studies communication is, "We gotta talk to people." So making sure that even if we don't have time, there's ways we could reach out and connect. If you've got a little time between things and you're scrolling, Instagram Reels or TikTok, when it makes you think of somebody, send it to them. Tell a friend you're thinking about them, and that can be one part to start to, especially if you haven't talked in a while, open things up, get you talking to each other. Another piece of advice I'd offer on the time question is that when you do have free time, ask people to get together.

Natalie Pennington: Somebody was just saying this at an event I was doing yesterday here on campus. It's New Student Orientation Week. And, um, they were like, "You know, it just, it never leaves the group chat."

Natalie Pennington: I absolutely fell prey to this in one of my own group chats last week that was like, "Let's get brunch." And we're like, "Yeah, we should totally get brunch."

Natalie Pennington: If you're just like, "Generally, anybody want to get together?" you might keep going back and forth.

Maria Eliades: That sounds like a good way of establishing frequency and maybe some of the intimacy that's required to feel like closerfriends.

Maria Eliades: But I'm wondering again about that closeness piece, especially with transitions. How can people establish closer friendships? It feels like with this loneliness crisis in your research that people are looking for their ride or dies.

Natalie Pennington: I do think that's right. Yeah, I'll go back to his study to say don't put so much pressure on yourself and the other person right away, right?

Natalie Pennington: You meet someone and you're like, "Oh my gosh, they seem really cool." We get all in our heads. "Wait, they didn't text me back," or, "Oh, do they actually like me?" People tend to be thinking about themselves more as a piece of it. So just acknowledge, you're not gonna be best friends overnight.

Natalie Pennington: And when we share about ourselves, people tend to share in response, so it creates that reciprocity in our relationships that helps us move through, we call them stage models of relationship development. So the more depth of disclosures we share, the closer we can feel.

Natalie Pennington: But it's also about the breadth of topics. So if you are in a book club, I'm totally in a book club, and if all you ever do in those book clubs is talk about the book, you're never gonna get that closer intimacy with people. The book club's a great starting point. You've got a shared interest.

Natalie Pennington: I love a psychological thriller. But while we're there, we can turn and talk with someone about, "Oh, like, what's something you cooked this week?" Or, "How's your family doing?" And build on and get more topics you talk about, and then greater depth of things as well.

Maria Eliades: Can you tell me more about those stages?

Natalie Pennington: The theory argues that we can peel away these layers to reach different levels of intimacy in our relationships, and that our breadth, again, variety of topics we talk about, the facets of things, but also the depth that we go on some of those topics, can help us signal, moving from, that more acquaintance level.

Natalie Pennington: So it's exploratory affective exchange, affective exchange, stable exchange, and stable is like really my closest couple people in my life, and very few people make it there. And in fact, one of the big things the theory pushes is that that exploratory affective exchange, is where most relationships end up.

Maria Eliades: I'm wondering and thinking how much the pandemic affected that. You know, what you've found in your research and also your time with your students of how that has changed friendship.

Natalie Pennington: The student piece really was heartbreaking for me during the pandemic, both as a professor and then somebody who studies these topics, and interviewing and talking to students who felt like they didn't know how to be social anymore. They were like, "I, you know, I'm terrified when I am gonna go back to campus of how I'm even supposed to figure out how to ask people to hang out."

Natalie Pennington: One of the longest reaching things that we've seen, both in the research we've done with _American Friendship Project_, but other public-facing data too, is that people aren't inviting people into their homes as much anymore. And so when we think about that question, we're like, we wanna spend more time with our friends, but we don't host dinner parties.

Natalie Pennington: And so while, we have a shift now to things are more in person, we still see the social ramification, and I think that's true of public spaces too.

Maria Eliades: Yeah

Natalie Pennington: who maybe used to go out all the time, like, "Do you go to the club still? Do you go out to public spaces, or are you worried about getting sick?" And that spills over to time with people and being social, and then we stay in our houses, andyou know, if you've got a family, amazing, great, but that's only a piece of it, and it's the acknowledgement that we need to have different people in our lives who serve different roles, and inviting them in.

Maria Eliades: the loneliness crisis that he highlighted. And, a piece of that was community organizations making space for people, government on multiple levels of doing that.

Maria Eliades: It's not enough of a recurring space for people to meet each other, but it is at least a public space where the barrier to entry is, well, it's free, so it doesn't matter what your income is. But I'm wondering about just with the US and compared to other places, that added challenge of a lot of places have gotten privatized,

Maria Eliades: So the spaces where people can hang out has gotten so limited

Natalie Pennington: --Third spaces or third places--

Maria Eliades: exactly. Those.

Natalie Pennington: What we call them. Yeah. You know, I just worked with a really fantastic graduate student where he interviewed and talked to people who had moved

Natalie Pennington: not for school but for a job, in the past three years, and just wanted to learn about how they built a new community in a space, right? And one of his biggest takeaways was it's not just about the people, but about the space and the place itself.

Natalie Pennington: But to your point,

Natalie Pennington: it could cost quite a bit depending on where you at and where you live. There were absolutely people he talked to as well who felt like they were really struggling with building that community. They were like, "There aren't spaces or places for me that feel comfortable or familiar," and that's, that's a problem.

Natalie Pennington: I'll say a really cool shout-out I'll make is that there were some researchers in Canada who brought a big group of us together worldwide to create, social connection guidelines, that were, situated as what are things individuals can do for social connection?

Natalie Pennington: What are things, that like the community but also the government level. Some of these things are very individualized, so I can offer advice on what I can do, but also there's constraints on where I live. And we see that in our _American Friendship Project_ data, where people said, "Okay, I'm sad about the time I can spend."

Maria Eliades: That's a great report to have of making these recommendations and thinking about it in international, but I suppose North American

Natalie Pennington: Yeah

Maria Eliades: because of the ways in which we socialize and the ways in which, Canada and the United States are built, are physically built to then say, "Okay, based on how car-centric we are, with rare exceptions, how do we work

Natalie Pennington: with

Maria Eliades: this?"

Natalie Pennington: It's really cool. I'll make sure, I'll send you a link to it. They have it posted online, and it's got lots of really practical tips for people, and also shares cool case studies of times where, a community had something that worked really well. I remember seeing one on there that was about, if we go to the, what's something we can do for free?

Maria Eliades: I'm gonna shift gears. I have a

Natalie Pennington: Sure.

Maria Eliades: Actually from a listener,

Natalie Pennington: that I

Maria Eliades: think relates a lot to one of your studies about the loneliness among young adults because of life changes.

Maria Eliades: So, I'm going to let the listener take this away.

Natalie Pennington: Oh my God, I love that question. You know, when I think about that, it immediately made me think of a couple different studies I've done. I'll go pre-tech on this because I think technology is a big part of it, So Facebook launched my freshman year of college, so I have a lot of people I've managed to then from high school I got connected to because our freshmen were like, "Oh, oh my gosh, everybody adds everybody."

Natalie Pennington: And

Natalie Pennington: you were like how you met somebody, and how you knew each other, but Facebook's been around for 22 years now, and so I have people who I'm Facebook friends with who I knew in high school who I have absolutely not talked to in the past 22 years. We call this virtual tie signs.

Natalie Pennington: We have this connection that exists digitally because we both agreed to be friends, but we don't ever actually talk to each other. And so if technology didn't exist, we would call this, a dormant or a commemorative tie. So there's a really fantastic friendship researcher,

Natalie Pennington: Commemorative are the, if you went to a day camp, or a summer camp for a few weeks and you connected. Or, for a lot of people, high school and we might look back on those things fondly and what they represented, but they are more commemorative for us because we're not actually actively talking to them, and we aren't maybe even interested in reactivating that connection.

Natalie Pennington: The dormant friends are in the weird space where you also probably have people from high school and possibly camps and other spaces who you would reconnect with but you're not actively talking to right now, and so that's where you place them in that I wouldn't call it a friendship, but maybe I could.

Natalie Pennington: But now because we add everybody in different ways, suddenly we can stay digitally connected and that might cause us to feel the pressure to stay, emotionally invested otherwise and sometimes that's great 'cause we really do want to and other times it's a pressure thing. I think tech is the issue, also a delightful solution.

Natalie Pennington: And, you gotta internally ask yourself, "Is this somebody I really wanna be friends with?" If it's you are just doing this because it's a question of pressure, it's okay to let friendships go. Sometimes they are just commemorative. They represent a certain time period for us, a moment, a season of our life.

Natalie Pennington: There are absolutely people who I was friends with in my 20s that I am not friends with now, and I'm okay with that, and I look back- back on those friendships fondly, wonderful humans, but we just, we were there for each other then, and now I'm in a different space.

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Maria Eliades: Have a complex idea or a concept that you think would be great for a podcast, but don't know how to pull it off or don't have the staff to do it in-house?

Maria Eliades: Get in touch with us at pentelicproductions.com. We'll help you find the clarity, narrative, and strategy to make it happen. That's P-E-N-T-E-L-I-C, Pentelic Productions. And now back to the show.

Maria Eliades: I'm wondering also, now that AI actually very useful, but I'm sure you've also read the articles about people falling in love with their AIs,

Natalie Pennington: building

Natalie Pennington: It makes me nervous, if I'm being completely honest, and I think a part of that is my role as a teacher makes me nervous. But, but interpersonally and the emphasis I have on, on relationships and friendships it's so funny, literally sitting on my desk next to me right here.

Natalie Pennington: My college just put out new hats for our college that are 100% human. We really try to push that piece. And so what I'll say is, I think the reason why we can't consider AI a friend is that AI is built to flatter you. It's built to, to agree with you. And so even if it might offer a contradictory point at one point, if you correct it, it will just, "Oh yeah, you're right.

Natalie Pennington: It was this thing." And when we're trying to complete a task, we have to correct it. It messes up. It messes up a lot. Uh, but from, an interpersonal friendship, we want our friends to be honest with us, right? Like we literally asked in _The American Friendship Project_, "What are the most important characteristics you have in a friend?"

Natalie Pennington: It's good for us to have a broad network of people that we can interact with and enjoy low stakes conversations with. You know, just go out and talk to another human and that will be better for your connection than just AI being like a yes man for you.

Maria Eliades: But there is a genuine part of American culture that is not good with confrontation or discomfort, and that's a very difficult thing with friendships. And AI gives you zero discomfort.

Natalie Pennington: It is totally the easy answer, and I agree with you. I think that we... again, there's a fear of, upsetting someone, of being vulnerable, of, what if they don't like me? I can't actually say that thing. A lot of impression management and, self-management that goes into things.

Natalie Pennington: But you gotta get to a point to be okay with that. So, what I would offer is any type of technology, in the work that Jeff and I have done at least. If you're, like, literally not talking to a single person and getting zero social connection, then there's a chance that a conversation with a chatbot that's trained appropriately could start to help you a little.

Natalie Pennington: And my reference point for this is we know texting is something people love to do. People love to text message. Jeff and I have actually found pretty consistently that texting is actually not that great for us, even though we do it all the time.

Maria Eliades: Oh why is that?

Natalie Pennington: So it's, expectations related to it.

Natalie Pennington: Even though we've gotten all these great new emojis or the use of GIFs you can use, or people get creative with their use of, all caps or elongate something or, reactions that you can do.

Natalie Pennington: We make efforts to decrease miscommunication, but it's considered a lean medium comparatively, right? Now, you and I see each other. Now, it's not just that there's no time delay, but, I see your face, you see my face. We hear our voices as we say things. I'm a hand talker, and so my hand's moving.

Natalie Pennington: and we miss those things in a text-based medium. And so while it's great to quickly send a message, the risk of miscommunication can be so high that it's just not as satisfying. But the trade-off is that we know if somebody's, again, particularly lonely, really struggling, having a hard time, research is definitely showing just sending a text.

Natalie Pennington: The phone call just kind of fell by the wayside. And before that, email. Email used to be a very social, and now... I think both of them are kind of represented by, honestly, the blurred boundaries of technology. So communication technology can be used with our friends, with our family, but it is also, 90% of the phone calls that I, get on my phone are spam calls phishing attempts or, scheduling appointments or meetings.

Natalie Pennington: And the same thing with my email is overwhelmed with all of those things. But when they were first introduced and a part of our daily lives, they were encouraged to be interpersonally social.

Natalie Pennington: One of the things people critique about texting is, texting really long messages to each other. And I'm like, that's basically an email." And I'm like, "Well, but emails are still good, right? And letter writing is good." There are really cool initiativeswith in-person stationery stores creating pen pals for people.

Natalie Pennington: and she's a part of it. But it's an international initiative. I think actually the store that originally did it was in the UK.

Natalie Pennington: But people can come into the store and pick out stationery and write letters to people, and it just encourages us to go back to that, more longer form style of communication, and that's what emails can offer. But, we sign up for the coupons from the store and then it's, and then it's just your email is not personal anymore.

Natalie Pennington: Phone calls gone the same way.

Maria Eliades: So texting, not necessarily bad.

Natalie Pennington: Yeah.

Maria Eliades: Phone calls are better. What about voice notes?

Natalie Pennington: I love it.

Natalie Pennington: I haven't seen a study about it yet, and I'll say it's gotta be my next one, Maria. Like, I gotta include it because, it's come up a lot with my students.

Natalie Pennington: I think it's such a perfect blend of right where we said, part of the problem that's lost with a text message is that, that leanness where you don't hear the voice, and the sense of something.

Maria Eliades: I'm in Colorado, and my sister is in Missouri, and so we are in three different time zones.

Natalie Pennington: Before I was here, I was in Vegas, so I was even further time zone away. And so, I think about those times where if we, we wanted to connect, that that could have been a really creative way for us to interact with each other, and we didn't use it. But I'm seeing it come up more and more often, and I think it's really cool as an in-between, right?

Natalie Pennington: And I would suspect from a research perspective that we would see that it's more valuable.And I think that's the thing with any tech is we just have to negotiate those boundaries. Jeff did a really cool study, with Nancy Baym. She was like one of the very first people to ever say, "You can have relationships on the internet."

Maria Eliades: Hmm.

Natalie Pennington: She did her dissertation about, soap opera listservs in the '90s, which I think is so cool.

Natalie Pennington: They looked at mobile maintenance expectations. And so I think voice notes we could say the same way, where if you and your friends all like to use them, amazing, and then just being on the same page about what it means to use them and what they look like, and then they're gonna be really good for you.

Maria Eliades: Yeah, and harder to get people around you to adopt.

Natalie Pennington: Yeah.

Maria Eliades: So after you've been studying friendship professionally for so long, is there anything that you've changed about the way that you approach your own friendships?

Natalie Pennington: You know, I do try to adopt a lot of the things that. I'm offering as advice. I have the great friend of mine who we are always sending each other the "We Rate Dogs" on Instagram, who can send it to each other first. We used to work together. We haven't worked together in, oh gosh, I think like seven or eight years now.

Natalie Pennington: You know, you send the meme, and then you start chatting with each other and catching up. We both live in different time zones, so we know we're not gonna talk right away. So trying to, you know, give myself grace and others grace, right?

Natalie Pennington: I did go through a period where, because I was studying especially social media and this frustration about the virtual tie signs, I, like, deleted a ton of people from my social media and cut it really tight for a period.

Natalie Pennington: I'm actually a little sad I did that because I've decided that, it's okay to have some people hang out there because I could reactivate them. They could you know, move to more active friendships.

Natalie Pennington: I have always been a lover of email. Me and my brother send, long emails to each other, and I've always enjoyed it. and I've tried to be, a little bit more active in that.

Natalie Pennington: and then to talk to people. I'm, I'm totally an introvert, Maria. Like I, and people are like, "I don't believe it." I'm like, "I'm a teacher, so I have to stand in front of rooms of people." But like, at the end of the day, I am not a aggressively social person. Um, and so I do try to make sure that I get out of the house and talk to people, and not the same exact people and, if I'm out buying a coffee, I say hi.

Natalie Pennington: just, little things where you're like, " Oh, hey, that thing's cool," and just see where it takes you when you talk to people.

Natalie Pennington: I had a really beautiful network. And then my husband and I moved across the country, and we had nobody there. Our family was all the other side of the country. Everybody New York, Pennsylvania, Midwest, and we were in Las Vegas and knew no one. And so I had to start fresh, and I think that, being able to know things like it's just gonna take time.

Natalie Pennington: And I can't just magically have a best friend here and be okay with that. I built some really amazing friendships there. And then we had a chance to get closer to family and landed here in Colorado and each time I think it's gotten, you know, it's same thing like, exercising, stretching the muscle.

Natalie Pennington: I've done it a few times now, and so I knew, what worked when I moved and made those friendships and what can I be doing now here in building relationships and the different types of friendships and knowing there's different people, is really nice.

Natalie Pennington: It's crazy to me we don't talk about it too. There's cool U.S. Census data that while Americans are moving less often than they used to in the past, they are moving at greater distances.

Maria Eliades: Interesting.

Natalie Pennington: So really saying like, "This is disrupting your social network." Like, what do we do? How do we... and the tension between I can just talk to all my old friends, but no, actually I need to be in this space and actually be a part of this community if I wanna build towards something. And so I'm excited that I think more people are acknowledging that.

Natalie Pennington: You know, one thing I'll throw out there, every time I do these types of talks, I say, sometimes I think we put so much pressure on the person who's new.

Maria Eliades: Hmm.

Natalie Pennington: And I'll get people who are listening, so like I hope you have listeners who have actually probably maybe lived in their communities for a really long time, and that's amazing that you get to be in this space, and maybe you have a fantastic network.

Natalie Pennington: But maybe you get a new neighbor, or you get a new colleague, and that person needs people, so invite them for a coffee, or check in and see how they're doing, or drop something by their door at their house to say hello and welcome to the neighborhood, because it's so much harder for the new person than it is for the people who are already there, and you can help make that easier.

Maria Eliades: And it is a lot on the new person to do it. I mean, maybe this is a new cultural call as a reminder to meet your neighbors.

Natalie Pennington: And, you know, we could circle back, you mentioned this earlier about the community piece of it, because I do think there's such interesting conversations that the loneliness epidemic might also be about a very individualized self-focused society. That if we have more sense of community and sense of belonging, not just individually and in my, like, little social circle, but in the spaces and places that I'm at, right?

Natalie Pennington: Like, I am a part of this thing, then that can also really bring us together and have, a shared cause or interest Or in this case, my shared neighborhood, right? and those things can be really nice for us. Absolutely know your neighbors.

Natalie Pennington: And so, an increase in the United Statesand globally of people choosing to be single and totally happy with it, and that's amazing. Or choosing to, if they are partnered, not have kids. And those things also make this increasingly harder each time because I am somebody who is happily married but has not had children, is totally fine with that, get to spoil the nieces and nephews.

Natalie Pennington: But that adds a layer when you move to a new space, right? Because people can build community around their kids' friends and parents, friends with parents and so that makes it a little bit harder. And then even more so for somebody who might not move with a partner, right? I'm lucky that each time I moved, I had Joe with me, as a support system.

Natalie Pennington: And so for those people, friendship becomes especially important.

Maria Eliades: And it'll be interesting to see over time what happens now that it is so much more common to either not be married or not have children, and how that affects our social spaces and maybe also how we decide to change things as a result.

Natalie Pennington: And so there are models in other countries and in history, that might be, worth thinking about in terms of how we socially interact and connect with each other. And so I think that especially, you know, it makes me hopeful for Gen Z, and younger folks that we're seeing pretty consistent evidence that

Natalie Pennington: if you're, like, asking them to rank what's most important to me in life, we're seeing a shift where it's actually, you know,I value friendship. And as somebody who studies friendship, I'm like, "Yes, please value it. It's important."

Maria Eliades: What's next for _The American Friendship Project_ and your research?

Natalie Pennington: So for _The American Friendship Project_, we're really excited to start thinking about now we have, three years of descriptive data about how people think about friendship, and we've started to ask, you know, slightly different questions each year. we're looking towards intervention, so

Natalie Pennington: And then, broadly with the research I'm doing, also looking at friendships that end and how we navigate those and make choices and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. And family group chats, which I'm really excited about.

Maria Eliades: I always ask my guests for recommendations on things that they think our listeners should read, watch, or listen in order to be more informed about the topic.

Natalie Pennington: So

Maria Eliades: I'll shout out _The Atlantic_ and Julie Beck. She actually had a whole series called "The Friendship Files" that she did for, quite a long time for them, that just spotlighted people's everyday experiences, with friendship and different types of friendship.

Natalie Pennington: You know, raised the question of what if friendship and not romantic relationships was, like, the center of our world, and what would that look like? And they did some podcast episodes about that, and I think she had, like, some summary pieces as it wrapped up too.

Natalie Pennington: Uh, Allie Volpe, also amazing person who does a bunch of really cool work, often with Vox, about friendship. And what I love about her is that she's somebody who goes and does and reads the academic published research and then makes it very accessible to the public.

Natalie Pennington: The last one I'll shout out,I think it's on my bookshelf at home, Jeff's book, _The Social Biome._ Him and Andy Merolla, adore both of them, and I think that that's such a great, book that, that is highlighting,

Natalie Pennington: like I said, it's this whole world we have of network of people, and _The Social Biome_ tries to address and think about that broadly.

Maria Eliades: Amazing.

Natalie Pennington: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.

​

Maria Eliades: If you wanna find out more about Dr. Pennington's work, _The American Friendship Project_, or the resources we mention at the end of the episode, visit the _Our Pandora's Box_ Substack and make sure you subscribe to never miss a thing.

Maria Eliades: Today, I wanna give a big thank you to our Substack and Patreon supporters, Victor Salazar and Carrie Donahue, and I also wanna thank you for listening today.

Maria Eliades: Join us again in two weeks for the second part of this conversation on friendship and loneliness in the U.S. with Alexandra Friedman, a friendship coach and the creator of Connection Feast in Seattle, Washington.

Maria Eliades: _Our Pandora's Box_ is a Pentelic Productions podcast that was created, hosted, produced, and edited by yours truly, Maria Eliades.

Maria Eliades: Remember to stay hopeful and stay curious. I'll see you soon on the next _Our Pandora's Box_.