Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the HER Living Room this week, and at the time of this recording, it is mid-summer. So I hope you all are enjoying some of the summertime while being safe, because I just want to remind everybody the pandemic isn't over. So please take care of yourselves and be very safe while enjoying some of the fun that summer affords us. I'll tell you one of my favorite things about the summer is some of the food that is seasonal where I live. So most of you know that I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and this summertime, especially this part of the summer, there are lots of peaches here. There are fresh cucumbers, and fresh tomatoes here are seasonal, and those are three of my favorite summer things. So I am enjoying all of that as much as possible.
Amena Brown:
We have been doing some new things on the podcast this summer. I normally do kind of a mix of solo episodes and interviews, and this summer I decided to try doing some episodes that were not interviews, but were more conversation. So if you all have been tracking the episodes chronologically, you have already heard my episode with my sister, Makeda Lewis. She was one of my conversation partners, and my friend Celita and I did a two-part episode on how to survive a friend breakup, but we were specifically talking about our own time of having had a friend breakup as friends and actually seeing our friendship come back together after all those years.
Amena Brown:
So that prompted me to ask all of you on social media what your questions are that you want to know about friendships, about how we navigate our friendships, and I thought I would do a solo episode, but it's not quite solo in the sense that I know you are here in the living room with me listening. So I thought I would bring some of the questions that many of you asked on social media, and I actually have more questions that I'm going to address in this episode. I have some other things that I'm working on. So if I didn't get to your question in this episode, just know that it is in the works because I have a couple of guests I'm waiting to hear back from that I might answer some of your questions with them. So we'll do a few questions here and I'll share some stories from my life and some things that I've learned so far that I hope will be helpful to you as we are all navigating friendships in our lives. So let's get into it.
Amena Brown:
First question is what do you do when friendships always seem one way? Great question. One-way friendships can be very draining, and it depends on the reason why they're one way, but I want to start by saying this. Typically, if you have a one-way friendship, you are one of two roles. Either you are the giver that's always giving but never receiving in the friendship, or you are the taker who is always taking but never giving. What does that mean? A friendship could be one way, because if you're the giver, you are typically the friend that may have a tornado of a friend, right? You may have a friend that always has some stuff going on in their life, always has things that they need to process or talk about or talk through, and somehow all or most of your time together is spent focusing on whatever is this person's latest situation or crisis in which they have found themselves. But you find that most of the time you spend with them, the conversation never turns around to you and how you're doing, what may be the crises in your life or not.
Amena Brown:
If you are the friend who is the taker, typically, what that means is you are the person that is getting most of the emotional energy of the friendship. You are the person that is always asking for advice, so your friend across from you, across the table or the phone, or however you communicate, your friend is the one that is advising you, is there to be close to you, gentle with you while you're going through this or that. But if you are running out of moments you can think of that you were really there for that person and just focused on them, on what's happening with them. Could be something great that's going on in their life and you are able to celebrate them and just celebrate them without making it about yourself, or they're going through a hard thing and you're able to hold space for them and focus on giving some care to them without making it about yourself.
Amena Brown:
So when we talk about having friendships that always seem one way, I think the short of it is that if you are in a friendship and you are the giver and your friend is always the taker, it's going to require you, as the giver, to set some boundaries there. It may require you to be less available. Maybe they are someone that always calls you in the middle of the night or wants you to drop everything to go be with them, and it may mean that you have to draw some boundaries to not always be that available to them. It may mean that you have to have a conversation with them about what your needs are as a friend and to see when you communicate your needs to your friend, if their response is resistant or defensive, or if their response is, "Yo, I hear you," in their own words, but, "Yo, I hear you. I see that. Let me think of some ways I can be there for you more, or let me make sure when we talk that I don't let the whole time that we're talking, the conversation is only focused on me."
Amena Brown:
If you are the taker, that's part of your job is to think about how you can make sure that you're making space and time for what's going on with your friend, for how they are doing. Have some time that even if you do need advice still, or even if you have more things that you want them to listen to or encourage you about, have some times that you just call your friend just to say hi to them and hear how they're doing without bringing up your own stuff, especially if you know you're taking up a lot of the space in the conversation.
Amena Brown:
This also brings up the idea of the strong friend, and I know there's a lot of conversation about this that we have on social media or that I've read on social media, and the phrase "check on your strong friend" is something I've seen a lot on social media. Sometimes the person that is the giver, it could be a couple of things. If you are the one that the friendship is one way because you're giving and you're not receiving any mutuality or reciprocity in the friendship, you could have unknowingly postured yourself as the strong friend, and so it could be that sometimes you have one way friendships because you have ended up in a friendship with someone that is self-centered, and that is never going to care for you or make room for you in the friendship.
Amena Brown:
So those one way friendships will have to come to an end at some point if you want to have healthy relationships in your life. But sometimes some of us, and I know I have been guilty of this in some of my friendships because I'm definitely a person that can be the one who wants to give and give and give and give and not always thinking about making sure I'm sharing what's really going on with me. Over the years, I had to learn how to do that better. So it could be that you've become the person that gives and gives and gives and gives, and that you are not also leaving space for yourself to be able to say, "Hey, I can't do that because I'm tired," or, "I know you need to talk to me right now, but I'm having these struggles in my mental health right now," or "I just need to have some time to myself so I do want to talk about that, but let's talk about it next week." Sometimes for those of us that have been the strong friend, it can be hard to admit to our friends that we are weak, that we are going through it, that we're struggling even though to be weak is to be human because to be human is to mean that you would not be strong all the time.
Amena Brown:
So, for some of you, you may have some one-way friendships that are like that because that person ain't going to change and they're just going to stay selfish and stay not loving you as a friend in a healthy way and you will have to evaluate, is that a friendship you want to keep in your life? But some of us who have been the strong friend, we might need to give our friends room to hear from us when we're struggling and to not feel like you got to be strong for anybody, or to not feel like you have to put up a front, put up a front like you feel all these things that don't involve you being a human being and just going through stuff and being tired and whatever else and so.
Amena Brown:
Think about your friends who you may think of them and think that they could be safe people for you to admit some things that may be going on in your life, and you might find that some of those friendships are one way because the friend, the other friend, is just self-centered and they don't really care about you, they just care about themselves. But some of our friendships are one way because we haven't invited our friend to know us and know what we're really going through. We've postured ourselves as the person that always gives advice. We have not allowed ourselves to also ask for advice as well. Sometimes when we do that, we may find that what we thought was a one-way friendship is a friendship that could go both ways if we open ourselves up to it.
Amena Brown:
So those are my thoughts on what to do about one-way friendships. Let's go to our next question. How do you maintain friendships when your family life is just really in a tough season? I feel this question so deeply. I feel this so deeply. I don't mean for this to be blunt, but I'm just speaking the truth to you. Sometimes when you're going through a tough season, you will not maintain your friendships and you will not be able to, and I think that's a real truth. It's very hard because I think sometimes when we find ourselves going through a really hard thing, we want to somehow go through the hard thing and also keep up our normal routines, keep up our normal capacity on how to handle things or juggle things, and I want to tell you as somebody that has experienced some tough seasons in life, some of those friendships, you just won't be able to maintain them. Period.
Amena Brown:
Also, when you're going through a really tough thing in your life, you may want to minimize the amount of relationships that you give attention to. In a time where things are not difficult in your life, you may be able to have six or seven friends that you hang out with in some way, whether it's on the phone or texting. Or, maybe you are in a group of friends and the group of you get together and hang out. Like when you're not going through a tough thing, you have a lot more emotional capacity and mental capacity for social functions, for not juggling, but for thinking about the different ways that we catalog all of the people in our lives.
Amena Brown:
Like, in a time of your life that you're not going through a hard thing. You can remember that this friend of yours loves to bake cobbler during the summer, and so that's a thing you all do together. You can remember that this friend is going on vacation, and you can remember that this friend right here is dealing with this situation with her children. You can remember that this friend is going on her fifth date with someone that she really likes. Like you have the mental capacity to, whenever you talk to those friends, be like, "Hey, how did the cobbler turn out last week?" and "Hey, like, did you ever go on that date?" and like, "You went to that new place for vacation, how did it go?" You have the capacity to remember those things.
Amena Brown:
When you're going through a tough season, you need to accept that most of your focus and most of your capacity will literally be on surviving whatever the season is. Of course, for some of us, some of the tough things we go through are not even a season. Some of the tough things we go through are going to become parts of our regular life, which means you may be making a life shift, a life change based on something hard that has happened. So I think one of the things that I've learned is there'll be some friendships that I won't have time. Like, some of my friends that when I was going through a tough time, some of the social functions they were having, like, I just can't go because that same night that you're having your social function, I can choose between having a night to myself, to finally have like a little bit of peace of mind and have some silence.
Amena Brown:
Of course, these are introverted things I'm saying that's not going to be true for everyone, but I'm using myself as an example here. When I'm going through something that's difficult, I do crave being in relationship with people I'm close to, but I crave smaller spaces, smaller environments, one-on-one contact or communication with a small number of people I'm close to. That's like my best case scenario. You may be a person that being around other people is a part of what helps you get through and you have to pay attention to that too.
Amena Brown:
So if you're a person that you need to minimize the amount of things, people that you need to keep track of or remember, then do that and, if you can, communicate that to your people. Tell them you're going through this difficult thing. They may not be hearing from you as much. You'll reach back out when you can, but you don't want them to, number one, be worried if they don't hear back from you, but also you don't want them to think it has anything to do with them or with your friendship. It's just stuff that's going on in life, you're doing the best you can to make it.
Amena Brown:
I will say think about who are the people in your life that can be low maintenance friends, and I want to talk about low-maintenance friends for a little bit. I don't know, I think in another episode, I want to talk about what it's like making new friendships in your 30s and 40s, but also what it's like maintaining those friendships too, and so we'll talk about that in another episode. But one of the things that has been such a wonderfully enriching thing for me in my 30 and now in my early 40s is having some friends that are close to me. These are my closest friends and they're also low maintenance friends.
Amena Brown:
What do I mean by that? These are people that if you have to cancel at the last minute, even though you totally wanted to hang out with them and do whatever it was, you have to cancel at the last minute because some life thing came up, not because you just lollygagging and you don't care, but like some life stuff came up and you have to cancel, a low-maintenance friend is going to be like, "It's okay, girl. It's okay. We'll get together next time. Love you. Let me know if you need anything." That's a low-maintenance friend. A friend that is not low maintenance is not going to be able to stick around while you go through a hard thing that will mean you're possibly less available. It's important to have low maintenance friends because low maintenance friends can still be welcoming to you, can still sort of have this open arms posture with you while they know you can't meet up every Friday. You can't go to the blah, blah, blah party or shindig or whatever it was that you all would go to every year and, to them, that doesn't mean your friendship's over. They love you. They know that when you have time or when the both of you find a time, that you'll connect.
Amena Brown:
I'll give you some examples in my life. When a lot of my friends started having children, that totally changed the quotient of how we could hang out. So I have some friends and if they listen to this, they'll know exactly that I'm talking about them, but I have some friends that are best place to meet up was going to be at a McDonald's Play Place. We would go in the Play Place, get our little McDonald's, let their kid run around in the Play Place, and I would sit inside the play place with them and that's where we would get together because the way their lives were at the age of their children and that season of their life, they may or may not have had a sitter. Their only time to connect with me may have been while they had their kid with them and we just had to figure out creative ways to hang out or get together.
Amena Brown:
Sometimes when my friends had kids, sometimes their kids would get sick and we planned a wonderful evening to get together and do whatever we were going to do and they had to call and say, "I can't come because so-and-so got sick." I'm also at the age in life where I have friends who were already caretakers of their parents or their grandparents or another family member, so that limits their ability as to how much they can go, hang out, do this or that at the moment, because they are a little bit tethered to whatever the schedule is for how they have to take care of their loved one. I mean, once we get to be grown folks, there are so many responsibilities we have that enter our world that make it more challenging for us to keep this sort of like willy-nilly schedule we may have kept when we didn't have as many responsibilities.
Amena Brown:
So think about the friends in your life, do you have any friends that are those low maintenance friends? Like, I have some friends that I love them dearly and because of our lives and schedules, we may only have a real conversation a few times a year, but when we do, we just get right in. Skip all the whatever small talk it is, I don't care. We don't care about it. We start right, like, "Girl, last time I talked to you, you said you were depressed. So catch me up. How are you feeling?" We just get right in and jump right in there because we only get a limited time to talk to each other. We have to make the time really count, but we're not keeping track of the amount of times we weren't able to meet up or the amount of times that we weren't able to speak about this or that.
Amena Brown:
I think having a way to be a low-maintenance friend, if you can do this, it is a way to really show love to a friend. To be like, "I don't care. I don't care like about talking to you every Tuesday or feeling like we have to talk every day, and that's what makes us good friends. What makes us good friends is that we love each other. We hold space for each other. We support each other. We celebrate each other and we do that whenever it works for us." That's the type of friendship I love.
Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody, before we get into the second half of our conversation about friendship, I want to tell you about a movie that I can't wait to see. Starring Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin, Respect is only in theaters beginning August 13th. Jennifer Hudson performed all of the songs live so you will love experiencing the sound and visuals of this movie in the theater. Aretha Franklin handpicked Jennifer Hudson to play her in this biopic, and the movie also is featuring an all-star cast of Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald, Marc Maron, Tituss Burgess, and Mary J. Blige, so go check it out. Respect. In theaters August 13.
Amena Brown:
If you're listening to this and you are going through a really hard time, first of all, take care of yourself. When you're going through a hard time, you need to take care of yourself. If you have friends in your life that love you, what they should be saying to you in their own words is I know you're not a bad friend. I know that you're doing everything you can to take care of yourself and survive; that's what they're communicating to you, so focus on yourself. If it's something going on with your family or work or whatever is going on, focus on taking care of you. Focus on being a healthy you and the people who love you, they will also make space for that.
Amena Brown:
You may discover that a friend you thought would walk through all the things with you, that you get to a point where you go through a hard thing and you realize, "Oh no, that friend is not going to walk through this with me," and that is hard. That's hard and it's hurtful, and it just breaks your heart to think about that. But it's the thing that, over time, you will come to accept, and it's better for you to know that now I'm going through whatever this is, I've discovered maybe this friendship is not going to survive that. Sometimes, and we'll talk about this a little bit later, too, but sometimes people, they come into your life and then you get to this tough thing and you realize they can't walk through that with you, and sometimes when we are able to, in a healthy way, let go of a friendship, it gives us space for the types of friends that we really need in our lives.
Amena Brown:
Next question is how do adults find and build new friendships? This person says it was so easy when the kids were little and we were at the playground or Gymboree classes. Finding friends as your kids grow up and move out is harder. So I think the person that was asking this question is talking about their experience as a parent as well, that a part of what brought them new friendships was all of their kids' different developmental stages made meeting new adults and building friends easier. I want to speak to this question even beyond those of you listening that are parents, because I think even for people who don't have kids, trying to find new adult friends and build those friendships is challenging because even when we think about when we were children, you had school, all those years, here in the States, the way our schooling is set up, you'd have elementary school and junior high and high school.
Amena Brown:
Then those of us who even went on to college, or if you went on to be in the military, there were just certain things that you went on to do in your early adult life that even still kept that similar set up to when you were in school. You were still in some sort of setting where maybe you lived near everyone. You were all living in the same area or living in the same building. You had classes that you took together, so you had these different things that really brought you together and then you look up, which, Celita and I talked about in our episode, you look up and if you've gotten away from that early college or early work experience that you had, you get to a point potentially in your mid to late 20s, where at that point you're like, okay, well now maybe you work at a job where you like some of the people you work with, but plenty of people work at a job where they don't want to be friends with any of those people. That makes it difficult because when you're in a work environment, you also want to be on guard about your personal life to keep your personal life personal, and your personal life is not always what has to be up for conversation in your workspace.
Amena Brown:
So making friends as an adult can be hard because we don't have as many environments where you can go and you're just going to automatically end up having to make a friend or making a friend in some easier way, like we would have when we were growing up in school. So I want to separate this into two ways that you could begin to try making some new friendships. One is online. I have made quite a few friends over the years from having online connection to people. There was a dating blog that used to be really, really popping when I was in my 20s and it was focused on dating here in Atlanta. But it got so much traffic that the comments section was really like a chat. It was like being in a chat room. So I was coming out of my church bubble at the time and was trying to figure out my dating life, and so that's what made me start reading this blog. Well, then over time, there were many of us who were at our nine-to-five jobs, and during work, would just comment on the blog, read different things, and we built community over time. Then after a while, it went from blogging during the business day to meeting up for happy hours and karaoke. So that was a part of how I gained some new friends. Some of those friends I'm still connected to online today.
Amena Brown:
Facebook groups is another way that you can really hone in on some things that you may be interested in and you can connect with other people on there. I mean, of course, certain ways that Twitter and Instagram and even TikTok, some of the way social media works. Yes, these platforms have a lot of ills. There's a lot of things that can be wrong, can go wrong, but it is a place, especially if you're in a space in your life where, and even now during the pandemic, sometimes you're in a space in your life where gathering with somebody in person or going to something like that may not be feasible. Like for many of us during the pandemic, it wasn't feasible to do that. For some people, wherever they are in their life right now, the pace of life may not be where they can just go out and bop, bop through a lot of in-person events. For some people, that's just not their best way to meet other people is in-person. Some of us, that's not going to be our strong suit to just be walking up at people, talking to people at events and saying hello. I mean, all my extroverts in the building, you feel me. You love it. You would love to just go to something, start introducing yourself to strangers.
Amena Brown:
So we'll talk about that in a minute, but number one, being a person that starts building relationships online can be so great because you can see some of those friendships that you built online convert in real life. If you're a person that doesn't necessarily thrive on being in person with people as the way you meet them at first, being online can provide a way for you to do that. So I would think about that as a mechanism and, in particular, use the online platforms to focus on things that you have interest in. I'll even tell you a website that I used to love. I mean, I used it in part for dating back in the day too, just to meet people and go to things and mingle, but you can use it also to meet other folks just for friendships is meetup.com can be a wonderful website for that because a lot of the meet-ups are organized, could be by age, could be by interest.
Amena Brown:
So think about some things that you've wanted to learn or wanted to do, or some things you're doing right now that you're very interested in. It could be professional. It could be hobbies you have. Like there are so many ways to connect with people online, and that could be a great start, and then you still have a commonality drawing you together. Like when we were growing up, we had the fact that we were all in school that drew us together to help us become friends. Even for the person that asked this question, you know, as a parent, you had these different places you may have been gathering with your kid and that space is what brings the commonality. You're gathering there with other parents. So think about some of those things and are there ways that you can take a step out there to try.
Amena Brown:
Another way, of course, is building these friendships in real life. Either way, it takes courage, it takes bravery, but I do find that when you're engaging with people in person, it does take courage to start going places and introducing yourself to people, but sometimes a part of why we are struggling to build new friendships as an adult is also because we may find that our social life is stunted. Like if you look at your social life and you're like, "I can't think of the last time I went to a concert, went to a comedy show, went to a fair or a festival," if you can't think of the last time that you really went to a social activity, that may be a part of it because sometimes we're saying, "Hey, like I would love to have better friends. I would love to meet new friends," but then we're hoping that we're going to have some sort of friendship. If there was like, instead of a romcom, if there was like a friendcom, which I'm sure there are.
Amena Brown:
There are comedies that are written like that, that are written like romcoms, but they're about friendship and sometimes we're expecting to have this serendipitous moment that we're in the aisle of the grocery store and we touch the cantaloupe and then the other person comes up and they touch the cantaloupe and we're like, "Oh my gosh, do you live in this neighborhood?" and then we start that conversation. Sometimes that happens. But a lot of times we need to also improve our social lives in ways. So we are still in a pandemic. There are going to be limits right now as to what you can do to gather in real life.
Amena Brown:
But here's a few suggestions and tips for you. If other people invite you to something at their house and you know that there are going to be people there that you don't know, go. Go to that. If you can, and it's safe in your area, go. One of the best ways to meet new friends is to meet some friends of friends. Sometimes people are inviting us to things and we feel I was going to go at first and then we don't go and then we're like, "Oh, like I need more friends," well, that's one way. You can also invite people to something yourself. Host something and ask people to bring a friend with them. That's one way you can do it.
Amena Brown:
Think about in a similar way to what I was talking about online, what are some other things you have interest in? How are people gathering in-person to also do that interest? Now, I'll tell you all about this at a different time, but when I was trying to get my dating situation together, I went and joined a hiking club in Atlanta. I can't tell you that those are friendships now that I have from being in that hiking club, but I met a lot of people that I wouldn't have met if I had not joined that club, and I got to discover some different places to hike in the city as well. So think about some things that you may be interested in that you've never tried, that you want to try, and try being brave, having a little courage, trying something new and something different. Number one, whether or not you meet a new friend there, you've had a new experience and that automatically does a wonderful thing for you, but it can also introduce you to some other folks that you might want to be friends with.
Amena Brown:
Next question says, "How do you make space for physical connection when life takes you to different cities, states, and schedules?" Okay, now I love this question because as a person who, prior to the pandemic, used to travel for most of my work, like there were so many times that my friends were having birthday parties, having holiday events, and I just couldn't go because I was traveling. Also, over the years of me traveling, I've gained some wonderful friends who don't live in the same city as I do. So we had to find ways to stay in touch with each other and use apps. I'm going to name some apps that I love. I'm sure there are more even than these. Use Voxer, which is an app where you can record messages. They could be texts. They can be audio messages. Use Zello. That's another app, works similar to Voxer. Use Marco Polo, where you can use even video to be able to stay in touch with people.
Amena Brown:
I have some friends who are on totally different time zone from me, even. So even for us to try to schedule a time where we were going to actually sit on Zoom or on FaceTime to talk is rare because of how far our time zones are from each other. But having a way to record a message means my friend can record her message when she wakes up in the morning, but I'm still asleep, and once I wake up, she might be already at work, I can listen to her message and respond.
Amena Brown:
Again, use some of these things. I know we all have a best case scenario of how we would love to hang out with our friends. Like my best case scenario is like, "I want to be with you in person. I want to be at your house. I want you to come to my house. I want to go to a restaurant. I want to be looking at you across the table and eating food together and whatever we're doing." Like, I want to do it that way, but life might not always afford me the ability to hang out with you in the most ideal setting. But if I wait only for the ideal setting, we might not talk forever for such a long time. So make use of those.
Amena Brown:
Also, if you're a person that loves to communicate in writing and you have a friend that loves this too, use email. I know I worked some corporate jobs where that's how my friends and I communicated because we were at our computers all day. So it was easy for me to like read an email and type it back or whatever and, of course, utilize your text. Don't wait for only the ideal moments. You can use text. Texting and some of these apps, the very big plus to that is that you can put the messages there when it's convenient to you and your friend can read and respond when it's convenient to them. That way, again, going back to the low maintenance and less pressure, that gives you some other opportunities. So check these out and try texting your friend, even a simple thing. When they come across your mind, when you see something funny and it makes you think of them, when you know they're going through a hard time, sending them a little something, just saying, "Hey, I'm thinking of you." If you're a praying person, you can say, "I'm praying for you." Those are ways we can have even small touch points in our friendships.
Amena Brown:
Okay, whew, you all, I have a thousand things more than I want to say to you, but I think we're at like a good stopping place to think about a few things as it relates to our friendships. If you've been listening to this podcast a while, you may have noticed that I've added an Ask Yourself This segment in a couple of these episodes, because it seems fitting to give all of us some questions to reflect on, some things to think about. So for this week's Ask Yourself This, talking about friendship can bring up a lot of feelings. Some of our friendships have been really enjoyable and enriching to our lives and some of our friendships have just really hurt us and broken our hearts. Having healthy friendships can bring care, joy, and mutuality into our lives. So here are some questions to reflect on as we have talked in today's episode about friendship. In your friendships, are you mostly giving or are you mostly taking? Who are your friends where you experience mutuality and how can you connect with them this month? If you are wanting new friends in your life, what is one thing you can do this week to make some new friend connections?
Amena Brown:
I love talking friendship with you all. If you have other questions that you want to make sure I answer or address in these episodes by myself or bringing in another guest, please feel free to DM me on Instagram. My Instagram amenabee, and make sure you check out the show notes where we will make sure we have links to things for every episode, including this one. Thanks for listening.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network, in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.