Latest / Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes / Why You Feel Lonely Even Though You Have Close Friends

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Why You Feel Lonely Even Though You Have Close Friends · Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes

• 0:00
  Alex Alexander: All right, gang.
• 0:00
  Alex Alexander: Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship There's a specific kind of loneliness that I don't think many people talk about, because it feels like you're not allowed to feel it. It is the loneliness you feel when you actually have friends, good ones, people you love, who show up for you, who want to be there for you, and yet something is missing. You still feel alone, and the reason nobody talks about it is because it almost feels ungrateful, like someone is actively choosing to spend time or connect with you, and you're sitting there feeling lonely. What does that say about you? are you just impossible to please? Are you asking too much?
• 1:42
  Alex Alexander: You're not, and that feeling, I think it's more common than you think. I think a lot more people are feeling it than are admitting it out loud. When we feel this kind of loneliness, a lot of us do the worst thing possible. We pull back, we stop reaching out, we turn down the invitations, and then we feel lonelier because we've isolated ourselves, and we feel guilty on top of it, because we know our friends are right there. It becomes a cycle that's really hard to name, let alone break.
• 2:20
  Alex Alexander: So, today we're gonna name it, and we're gonna talk about it.
• 2:28
  Alex Alexander: Here's what we're doing in this episode. I have identified several reasons why you might be feeling lonely, even though you have friends, and I'm going to walk you through each one, explain what it looks like and feels like, and give you something concrete to try and shift yourself out of that feeling. But before we get
• 2:53
  there, I want to say this: you might listen to this episode and feel like every single reason I'm about to give you applies to you across various friendships, and maybe that's true, but it's more likely that different friendships are leaving you feeling lonely for different reasons. So, here's what I want
• 3:17
  you to do: pick one friendship, just one, and the one that you're thinking of, the one that's nagging you, the one that keeps you up at night. I want you to think about just that one friendship as we go through this episode together, because the goal here isn't a sweeping diagnosis of your entire social life, it is helping you identify what is actually happening in one specific friendship or connection dynamic, so you have somewhere to start. I have grouped the reasons why you might be feeling lonely, even though you have friends, into three categories, and we're going to go through each one.
• 4:03
  you to do: The first category is about the connection dynamic itself, not the circumstance, not the history, the actual dynamic between you and this friend right now. There are two reasons where you feel lonely, maybe because of the connection itself. The first one is that you feel unseen, and this can look different, right? There can be different things going on here. So, if any of these land for you, then I have some ways to help you out of this. The first one is that you are wearing a mask every time you hang out, and I don't mean a physical mask, right? We all know what masking is. You show up, but you're not actually showing up as your real self.
• 4:53
  you to do: You're pretending that everything is fine when it's not. You're acting disinterested in something that you actually really care about, but you're nervous about admitting that you are really interested in this, or you're pretending that you're interested in something that you honestly are not interested in, right? Maybe everybody there is really into sports, and you feel like if you're going to fit into this group, you have to really care about sports. This was me when I was younger, only to get years later, and now I'm like, oh, there's another sports ball game on, cool, I'll come hang out, but like, I don't really care.
• 5:32
  you to do: Whatever version of yourself you are performing for everyone else, the real you isn't in the room, and so, of course, you feel lonely. The person your friend is connecting with isn't actually you, right? If I tell my friends that I love sports and they start inviting me all to these sports activities, I'm probably just like, "Oh, I don't want to go to these, but I've kind of gotten myself in this conundrum because they think this is a shared interest that we have. The second is that everything maybe stays surface level, maybe that's you keeping it surface level because it doesn't feel safe to go deeper with someone. Maybe it's the other person. Either way, there are things that you want to talk about, and you never actually get there. You just keep circling the same safe, easy topics, and nothing ever gets deeper than that. The third is that you are actually talking, you are sharing, but you don't feel heard. Maybe your friend brings every conversation back to themselves. Right, you share something that's going on with you, and your friend is like, well, I've had that happen to me before, right? That can leave you feeling really lonely. Maybe they minimize what you're going through, maybe you need them to just listen, and they keep trying to fix the problem.
• 6:58
  you to do: You're showing up, you're being vulnerable, and it's not landing the way you need it to. All three of these things leave you feeling the same thing, like the real you isn't being seen in this friendship. So, if any of those sound familiar, here is where I would start. First, ask yourself, is this the right person to bring this to, whether that is an interest or a problem, and I know, I know, you might be thinking, Alex, this is my closest friend, I hear you, but if they've never been through what you're going through, or maybe they're in their own season of overwhelm right now. It's worth just pausing and asking the question honestly. Is this the right person for this topic or conversation or interest? If the answer is yes, or if you feel like they should be able to show up for you here. Then my next question is, do you have to dive deep from the start, right? If you've been wearing a mask or keeping things surface level, and now you want to share with them something really intense that is going on with your life, jumping 10 levels deeper in one conversation that can be a lot for you and for them, so maybe what you could try instead is to open up about something a little less vulnerable first. This is where I would point you to Episode 74 on small intimacy, it's linked in the show notes, because instead of going straight for the big vulnerable moment. Are there small intimacies you could offer first little ways of showing more of yourself that feel less terrifying? because a lot of the time the reason going deep feels so scary is that you haven't yet tested whether this friend can hold you small intimacies are how you build up that proof, how you feel a little safer opening up, and finally, if you are showing up, you're sharing, but you're not feeling heard from your friend. Have you actually said that out loud? Have you stopped, looked at your friend, and said, 'Hey, this is really important to me, and I'm struggling. I need you to just listen right now. I'm not looking for solutions. I just really need to be heard.' We carry this expectation that our friends should just know how to show up for us, but so much of being a good friend is trial and error, it's learning over time, it's noticing our own patterns, and maybe your friend has never had anybody bring up that they're always trying to be the fixer, your friend might just be doing what they do with everyone else in their life, and nobody else struggles with it. Now, it's not to say that's a problem with you. You might just like something different. They don't know that you like something different, so try telling them.
• 10:09
  you to do: Now, another reason that the connection itself might be the problem is because you're looking at the wrong container, this is a little different, because it's not about the friendship being broken, it's about the friendship being the wrong container for a very specific thing you are carrying in your life. Here's what I mean, you have people you love and trust, your Story Roots, which are the beliefs about your friendship are strong, you genuinely believe that these friends care about you, and you have something going on. Maybe it's a breakup, an illness, a grief, a divorce. Maybe it's not even a hard thing. Maybe it's an untapped passion, a life change you want to make, a path you're considering that feels really out there, whatever it is, you have this thing, and your friends love you and want to be there for you, but they don't quite get it. They've never been through it, they don't share the interest, and although you can have a deep conversation with them, it's not quite the same as talking to someone who actually knows, I think about my friend, who I've talked about multiple times on the podcast. She is a medical mom, meaning that her son was in the NICU for the first nine months after he was born, and honestly, he is currently back in the PICU, being a little, a little fighter, thinking about him every day, and I am constantly checking in. I'm telling her I love her. I'm sending prayers and thoughts, and anything I possibly can to them, but it is not the same as when she texts her other medical mom friends about what it actually feels like to be back in the hospital.
• 12:03
  you to do: I can never quite understand the way another mom who has been in the hospital can understand, and I want her to have that. That's not a failure of our friendship.
• 12:18
  you to do: Our roots are strong. It's just that this specific thing I'm not the right container, but I want her to have the right container, because I don't want her to feel lonely in this experience, even though she has great friends.
• 12:31
  you to do: So, by encouraging her to nurture and add medical mom friends into her life, it actually really strengthens our Story Root, our beliefs about our friendship. We spend more time talking about where she is getting support and encouraging her to do so than me giving her support, and that's okay. Now, I want to mention again that I think it's easy for our minds to go straight to the hard stuff, illness, grief, loss, and this applies just as much to the positive things in our life, that career you want to pursue, that none of your friends quite understand, leaving corporate, the unconventional life you want to build, where you want to take a career break and travel the world, the passion that nobody in your life shares for a very niche topic. Feeling lonely because nobody around you gets what lights you up is just as real. So, what do you do with this one? The first thing I do is look at your wheel of connection, which I talk about in Episode 100 and in my book, both linked in the show notes.
• 13:45
  you to do: If there is already someone in your life who has a similar experience or who would be a good fit for this specific conversation, reach out to them, maybe someone you haven't ever considered leaning on for this.
• 13:58
  you to do: If not, it might be time to find your people for this specific thing, a support group, a community, other people who have been through the same thing, who share the same passion, who want the same life change. My friend did just that when she made other medical mom friends, and that doesn't replace me or her other existing friendships, but it does fill a very specific gap, so she stops feeling lonely inside her friendships, who are not experiencing the same thing.
• 14:35
  you to do: Her friendships, by the way, that are actually really solid.
• 14:39
  you to do: So to really nail this in and drive this home. The reframe I want to offer is that when your friends find those people, the right response isn't jealousy or feeling replaced, it's celebration. I cheer my friend on for having her medical mom community. I ask her if she has the people she.
• 14:59
  you to do: Needs, I brainstorm with her when she feels like she needs to add someone, and that the act of affirming that she deserves support I can't give her actually deepens our friendship.
• 15:12
  you to do: So, finding the right container for the thing your current friends can't hold isn't a loss, it's just an addition that you deserve. Now, the second, like overall category. Remember, there are three overall categories of why you might be feeling lonely. The next one is different from the first, right?
• 15:31
  you to do: This isn't about the quality of the connection or what happens when you're together. This is about circumstance, the situation around the friendship, because sometimes you could have the most aligned, most loving, most connected friendship, and you still feel lonely because of factors that have nothing to do with how much you care about each other. Let's look at the two subcategories under here.
• 15:56
  you to do: The first one is drift, and drift can probably happen in a couple ways. The first one is that you have changed and your friend, they still see the old you. Something shifted for you, maybe it was a health diagnosis, a spiritual change, a big life experience, a value shift.
• 16:18
  you to do: Whatever happened, you came out on the other side, a very different person, and your friend who loves you keeps showing up for the version of you they've always known.
• 16:30
  you to do: They're not really doing anything wrong. They just haven't caught up to who you are now, and that gap between who you've become and who they think you are is where the loneliness lives. So, a personal example of mine, when I was thinking about this one, we all know I got some chronic health problems, right?
• 16:53
  you to do: Couple years ago, I got a trio of diagnoses. Part of me healing and feeling better was a lot of major lifestyle changes, including making a bunch of changes to my diet. Now, luckily, my friends adapted pretty quickly, but I had to cut out a lot of foods - tomatoes, soy, vinegar, fermented foods, like the list goes on and on. If my friends, after I told them I had to make all these dietary changes, kept suggesting that every time we hung out we go to a Chinese restaurant where almost everything has soy in it, which is amazing and great, except that soy makes me feel like I have drank a bottle of tequila, it makes me feel so sick, nauseous, shaky, migraines like this lasts for days. So, if I'm months into this lifestyle change, and I've told my friends a few times, like, hey, I just..
• 17:52
  you to do: I really can't eat anything at a Chinese restaurant, and they just keep suggesting that I probably would have felt unseen, not because they didn't love me, but because they're still operating around a version of me that doesn't exist anymore. The other thing could be a lifestyle mismatch, so if you've been friends for a long time, when you met, maybe your lives lined up right, you were in the same season, same energy, same availability, and then something changed for one or both of you.
• 18:27
  you to do: Maybe you both went from single to one of you having a romantic partner. Maybe someone became a caregiver for an elderly parent or a sibling with special needs moved in. Maybe there's been a really big financial shift.
• 18:40
  you to do: Somebody got like a wild promotion, or their startup blew up, and now somebody is just making like extremely more money than the rest of your friend group. Or maybe somebody is really committed to that promotion they want, and they've completely let their career take over their life, you know, they're traveling for work like 90% of the month, and they're never around all of a sudden.
• 19:08
  you to do: You're still friends, you maybe still care about each other, you maybe have a lot of history. The friendship is still intact, but the overlap that you had has really shrunk down. And here's what makes this one uniquely hard in a friendship versus other relationships. You don't always get a say in these life changes, like in my romantic partnership, right? My marriage, big life changes are often discussed before they happen, or they impact both people, right?
• 19:37
  you to do: We make a joint decision that if we are going to take this job, it means both of us are moving to a new city.
• 19:45
  you to do: In friendship, one person's life can completely change because they want it to, and the other person's is just left adjusting.
• 19:54
  you to do: If your friend suddenly became a full-time caregiver. And their time and energy got completely redirected. You didn't get a vote in that. You're just figuring out how to stay connected across a gap that appeared without warning. If drift is what's happening, here's what I'd suggest. So this one honestly probably needs a conversation, and I know that feels big, but what's happening here is that one or more of your friendship roots have shifted, and if you don't know what friendship roots are, go listen to Episode 12, so if your friend is still seeing the old you, your emotional intimacy roots in your friendship, a lot of them have, like, died and withered and shifted. If life stages have pulled you apart, then your shared experience roots are what have changed. And either way, the friendship has not caught up yet with this change. The problem is that most of us don't have language, right? You don't have the words, the shared experience, the emotional intimacy, the withered and died.
• 22:06
  you to do: Like, you don't have this framework to have a productive conversation. Normally, you would sit down and you just be like, yeah, something's changed between us, and maybe you'd say it in a way that felt neutral, but it might come out sounding like an accusation or a breakup.
• 22:27
  you to do: Then your friendship is even more on the rocks. My book, which is linked in the show notes, has the two frameworks you need for the language to discuss the changes in your friendship. It will allow you to have a conversation that is neutral, that names what is happening without blaming the other person, so that you can both tackle the problem together instead of pointing fingers. So, if you want the deepest dive into the roots, the most conversation I have about change, pick up a copy of the book, and if you just want, like, an overview, and you're like Alex, what the heck are friendship roots? Go listen to Episode 12, because I give an overview there. Now, another reason that your friendship might have changed, but it has to do with circumstance, is one that I think is really unnamed.
• 23:18
  you to do: You're not really drifting from your friends, you love them, they love you. The connection is solid. You're just drifting because you are logistically stranded. You can't actually get to each other. Example of this would be if maybe your closest friend moved across the country.
• 23:39
  you to do: I have a friend who has been a close friend since high school.
• 23:44
  you to do: She is one of the first people I text with my very random thoughts, and a few years ago she moved to the other side of the country. Again, I did not get a vote in this. I just got told at dinner one night, I think we're moving. And then I got really sad about it. Now, as much as we talk about how dreamy it would be to live in the same city again, right now we don't.
• 24:08
  you to do: Maybe it's not that your friend moved across this country, maybe it's just schedules, you could be a new stay at home parent and all your close friends work, or you're the only child free person in your friend group and everyone else is operating around nap schedules and school pickups, or your friend is in a season where every weekend is accounted for and spontaneous hangs just aren't possible, but you want to go to the workout class together. You want to call them up the last minute and go for a walk. You want to just show up at their house and lay around on the couch while they do their chores. And yeah, you can FaceTime, you can voice memo, you can text, and all those things matter, but there's a specific loneliness that comes from not being able to have those shared experiences in person anymore, and that's real.
• 25:02
  you to do: What shifted here are your shared experience roots. You have the connection, you just can't access it the way you used to, so if this is you, there are really two directions you can go. The first is to get creative with the friends you already have, so that friend that I mentioned, who moved across the country, what are the new shared experiences I can build given the constraints.
• 25:30
  you to do: Maybe a standing FaceTime date once a week, like Sunday morning, while we're drinking our coffee, we always hop on FaceTime. Maybe we watch the same show and text as we're watching it. Maybe we plan one in-person, like a long weekend where we meet up somewhere every year, and we would really just like make that count. The goal is to find new ways to build shared experience roots with the people you already love within the reality of your current circumstance. The second option, and the one that I really think is worth sitting with is to look at whether you need some new friends who maybe live nearby or have a similar schedule as you to fill that shared experience gap. I'm not talking about replacing the friends you have, but if your closest people are logistically inaccessible, you might need some new people who can actually show up to the run club, who can meet you for coffee on a Tuesday, who are in the same life season as you right now. This is what the wheel of connection is all about, like this will help you determine where your old friends and your new friends fit in your life, so go listen to Episode 100 because your long distance best friend can still be your long distance best friend, but you also might need a local hiking friend, a work friend, someone whose life logistics actually match yours right now, and they don't have to be your deepest friendships to matter, but filling in some of those simple spaces in your wheel of connection, they might make a really, really big impact. The third and final kind of overarching category of why you might be feeling lonely, even if you have friends. This is the sneakiest of the three, because loneliness here doesn't come from something that happened.
• 27:36
  you to do: Nothing changed, nobody moved, the connection is fine, the circumstances are fine. The loneliness is coming from something that was never fully named in the first place, so let me explain. First up, we have quiet expectations. These are the beliefs that you hold about friendship, often without even realizing you have them, about what a good friend is supposed to do, and they come from everywhere. How your parents talked about friendship, the shows and movies you watched, or magazines and blogs you read growing up, the TikToks you watch, the Instagrams you send back and forth, they come from past friendships that shaped what feel normal. Cultural messages about what loyalty and love look like you absorbed all of that, and now you have this internal rule book for friendship that your friends have never seen, don't have access to, and honestly have never agreed to. So, when something goes wrong here, it feels like these little zings, they're small. It's not one big thing, it's just your birthday came and went, and a certain friend didn't text you, or someone didn't show up the way you expected when you had big news, or a friend didn't offer to help you when you were clearly overwhelmed. Nothing blew up, but when you stop and think about it, something really stung, and it keeps stinging quietly over time. I list those examples, and you probably think, but Alex, a good friend would do blank, and I'm here to tell you, I think of myself as a good friend 90% of the time, but this story I'm about to tell you is hopefully going to show you that there is no answer for what a good friend does, and we need to stop acting like it's so black and white. Let's talk birthdays, especially in female friendships, we all carry some version of what we think a good friend does on our birthday, and I'm here to tell you that expectations can vary widely, because my birthday was last week, and certain friends did not message me on my birthday this year, and I genuinely have not thought twice about it, but you might feel differently, so differently, like 'Alex. What do you mean? Your friends didn't text you? That's crazy, that you're not upset.' I'm here to tell you, neither of us is wrong. We're just operating under different rule books that we have never compared, especially in an IRL out loud discussion, by the way.
• 30:30
  you to do: If your mind is completely blown that I am not upset about birthday texts, I would suggest that you go back and listen to Episode 36 How to Feel Very Not Alone, which I actually recorded on my birthday, I think two years ago... three years? Three years ago. About how I cannot receive a message from a close friend, and it just really doesn't bother me, like, what am I paying attention to instead?
• 30:55
  you to do: Because I am paying attention to other things, it's just I don't care as much about the birthday text now. For you, a close friend texting on your birthday might feel like the bare minimum, maybe you actually expect a call or a card or a gift or a party. If you don't even get a text, it might make you feel like that friendship needs to end. They don't value this friendship. So, what is happening here? Because this also shows up around big life events, weddings, babies, book launches, like the one I just had. So, what do you do about this? First, I think you should get clear on what you actually expect. If we're still using birthdays as the example, what is your bare minimum? What is your ideal? Have you ever actually sat with that and named it? Or have you just quietly hurt without fully knowing what you needed in the first place?
• 31:54
  you to do: Have you ever voiced your beliefs out loud? And by the way, this doesn't need to be a declaration or an intense combo with your friends. This could just be a nudge in your friendship culture, and you can learn more about that in Episode 179 What is friendship culture?
• 32:15
  you to do: The second way to deal with this, and this one might feel unexpected. Don't go to the friend that you're hurt by.
• 32:23
  you to do: Instead, I want you to go wide, and I want you to ask other people in your life, what their expectations are. Other friends, colleagues, even a casual poll on social media, or asking a friend of a friend, a random stranger to a party. This could be your next networking question. I don't know, but
• 32:44
  here's the key: don't ask somebody like, what should a good friend do? That question is going to get you that societal script that we're already being fed, like on social media, in the quote reposts. Instead, I want you to ask, what would actually hurt you if a friend didn't do it, because that is where the variation lives. Some people will feel genuinely hurt if a friend forgot to text on their birthday. Others truly won't care. Some will say that a call is bare minimum. There is no standard. They're different rule books, and I think getting a broad picture of how differently people operate doesn't mean you have to lower your expectations, keep your expectations, if that matters to you. I'm just saying that this activity, I think, is important and helpful sometimes, because it gives you context, and it makes you realize that when you go into have this conversation with your friend, it shouldn't feel like a verdict on their character, it should offer you a broader perspective when you're having the conversation, so that instead of assigning blame to your friend, you can actually sit down and have a nice civil conversation where you compare the different rule books that you're both operating from.
• 34:09
  here's the key: What's their bare minimum? What would be their gold standard?
• 34:13
  here's the key: And if you feel like having a conversation like this feels really hard, and you're really hurt, then I would suggest listening to Episode 176 with Colette Jane Fehr, because there are real scripts in that episode for how to approach a friend when you're feeling hurt, so you can have a conversation that is productive. Now, the final spot, the unspoken stuff, the other kind of like bucket in here is kind of related, but not really.
• 34:44
  here's the key: I really came up with this one on the fly, because I felt like there was something else here, and I really had to dig for this one. Quiet expectations, what we just talked about, are about your internal beliefs. What I want to talk about now is what I call stale friendship culture.
• 35:01
  here's the key: Friendship culture is kind of the operating system, the norms, the patterns that you and your friend are both running on, right? They are unspoken norms, patterns that have accumulated in your friendship dynamic.
• 35:20
  here's the key: Nobody probably voted on them.
• 35:20
  here's the key: Sometimes nobody consciously chose them. They just became the way you do things, right? The check appears at the restaurant, it's just normal to split it.
• 35:33
  here's the key: What else would you do? That's what you've always done. Now, sometimes you can end up with a friendship where the friendship culture doesn't actually fit who you are anymore, and the loneliness that you experience is this like slow, vague feeling of misalignment. You're like, this friendship is fine, but it just doesn't quite feel like me.
• 35:54
  here's the key: I did an entire episode on this recently, episode 179 and it goes really deep on what friendship culture is. How it forms, and most importantly, how to shift it without blowing up your friendship. So, if you are experiencing this type of loneliness, I would actually just say, go listen to that episode, because there's no sense in me like wasting your time and repeating the whole thing. Okay, so we have been through a lot, three categories, six total reasons that you might be feeling lonely, even if you have great friends, and I hope that you've been thinking about that one specific friendship this whole time, the way that I asked you to, and if you did that, my hope is that something clicked, that maybe one of these reasons, or maybe two felt like, oh yeah, that's what's happening here. Maybe you're realizing that certain friendship actually has kind of a bunch of these going on, and if that's so, I can really understand why maybe you've thought this isn't the right fit, or you want to move on. So, here's what I'm going to leave you with. The loneliness you feel when you already have friends isn't a verdict on your friendships, or how good you are at friendship, or how good your friends are to you. It's not proof that something is broken, or that you're too much, or that you're impossible to connect with. It's just information, it's your friendship telling you something very specific, and now you have a little more language for what that something might be, and remember at the very beginning of the episode when I talked about kind of this idea of like withdrawing, pulling back, isolating, guilt when you do that, when you kind of have that withdrawal spiral, it makes every single one of these reasons I talked about feel worse. So, whatever you identified today, the antidote of pulling back and spiraling about this friendship is always the same amongst every single one of the reasons I've given you today, it's to take one small action towards the friendship. It doesn't have to be a big conversation or a dramatic moment, just one small thing, a text, a question offering up a small intimacy, one small shift to see if your friend is also willing to do the work to shift your friendship back to something that feels more aligned and connected. Now, today's episode is full of a lot of new friendship language.
• 38:41
  here's the key: Right, I'm talking about different types of roots, different types of friends. So, I want to remind you that my book, Are We Friends Yet?, goes deep into the various types of roots, the ways they shift, and it workshops how to approach each one. The language in the book can truly change the game in your friendships. It can make it so that a conversation that otherwise has you fumbling through it, instead feels like it has a clear direction and intention. My final thought, I want to leave you with today.
• 39:15
  here's the key: You don't have to fix everything, in fact, you won't, so let go of that plan. Let's just set that expectation straight. I hope this episode left you with ideas for how you might shift friendships that feel a little off to you, I hope you might see that some small changes could make a big difference, and I hope you try new things, things that will hopefully make you feel less alone. With that, see you next week.
• 39:48
  here's the key: Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here.
• 39:56
  here's the key: Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.