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Jan 2025
41m 8s

#236: How To Make Adult Friendships Easi...

Mary Jelkovsky
About this episode

If making friends feels hard, then this episode is for you.

You will learn...

  • why making friends as an adult feels hard
  • exactly WHERE you’ll find your people
  • how to make friends who live close to you
  • actionable tips to help you find, keep, and strengthen your friendships

Our guest, Kat Vellos, is a trusted expert on the power of cultivating meaningful friendships. She’s a speaker and author of the book, We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She’s also the creator of the Better than Small Talk conversation cards and the Better Conversations Calendar. Her work helps people transform disconnection and platonic longing into authentic connection and belonging.

In her former career as a user experience designer at Slack and Pandora, she helped millions of people find music they love and enjoy work a lot more. While working full-time at both of those iconic companies, Kat spent her free time researching and writing her debut book We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She couldn’t stop herself from writing this book because the thirty-something friendship desert is real and she refused to take “how about we meet up in six weeks?” for an answer. So she used her UX research-n-design superpowers to explore the question “how might we design a better experience of adult friendship and simultaneously put a sizable dent in the loneliness epidemic?” Thousands of readers use her book to improve their friendships every day and her writing is read in over 100 countries. She’s been interviewed by The New York Times, NPR, Communication Arts, The Good Life Project, and many more.

Sign up for Kat’s newsletter here and check out her course, Platonic Action Lab.

And if you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and share it on social media! Make sure to tag @maryspodcast

Mentioned In This Episode...
How Long Til’ Black Future Month? by N.K. JemisinEp. 195 on Mary’s Cup of Tea: The Most Underrated EmotionWhat if friendship is easier than you think?

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