Making & Keeping Friends with Shasta Nelson

Welcome back to the final episode of our friendship miniseries! In this episode we’re joined by female friendship expert and author of Frientimacy, Shasta Nelson to talk all about making and maintaining friends.

If you’d rather watch the podcast you can find the whole video episode on our Patreon.

We start the episode by asking Shasta why people have difficulty making friends and hear some different ways of making friends. Shasta explains that most people don’t know how to make friends in a meaningful way, or realise that making friends requires a lot of effort, so we talk about what not to do when making friends.

We discuss where to make friends as an adult (ie. outside of education, which many people struggle with) and Shasta names the three pillars of any good adult friendship and what we can do if we have a problem with our friends in one of those areas.

It obviously wouldn’t be an episode of Sextras without these, so we had to ask Shasta about how love languages and attachment styles affect our friendships and how that influences whether we feel valued as a friend and how we show affection towards our friends.

Thank you so much to Shasta for joining us for our final episode of the friendship miniseries, it was certainly very informative for us but we hope it was for all our listeners too! You can find out more about Shasta on her website https://www.shastanelson.com and make sure to buy any of her three books.

Thank you for listening, we’ll be back in a couple of weeks with our period miniseries!

What Do You Expect From a Friend?

Welcome back to our friendship miniseries! This week we started off talking about how to bring up conflict with a friend, and ended up talking about what we look for in friendship.

We began the episode asking whether you find it more difficult to bring up problems with a friend or with a romantic partner, and discussing our own experiences bringing up conflict with each other.

We then discuss what you should expect from a friend, and when it’s okay to bring things up if you friend isn’t fulfilling your expectations. There are different boundaries around when it’s acceptable to bring up something that’s a problem with the friendship itself and something about them as a person that you have a problem with.

We also cover what kind of people we choose to surround ourselves with— obviously we don’t expect our friends to be perfect people but we discuss whether it’s important to us for our friends to have the same values as us.

This is one of the few episodes where we’ve change our own minds about something by the end of the episode, we hope we change how you think about friendship too!