I'm your host, Meg Teats, and in the Extra Awesome series, we take a little time to talk

to awesome people who are doing amazing things in the world. You guys, I am so stoked about today's

conversation. I know that it's really going to hit home and really be so helpful for so many

of us. I am joined today by Dr. Marissa G. Franco. Dr. Franco is a psychologist who specializes in

the realm of friendships, and she's the author of the brand new book. It comes out today,

Platonic, how the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends. Dr. Franco, welcome

to Sorta Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. I was telling you before

we started recording that I pre-ordered the book. As soon as I started hearing the buzz about Platonic

on social media, I absolutely knew this is a book I have got to read. We've been making sort of

awesome for seven years. So seven years of talking with women and building community with women,

you can imagine that friendship is a topic that comes up over and over again, and sometimes it's

celebrating friendships. We try to celebrate friendship as much as we can here, but sometimes

friendship can be a pain point for a lot of us. So I'm super curious. You're a psychologist. How did

you find yourself kind of specializing into this corner of psychology, helping people in this realm

with friendships? So that's a great question. I would say in my young 20s, I did not focus on friendship,

I focused on romantic love, and I was going through all these breakups and they're making me feel

really lousy. So I started this wellness group with my friends where we met up, we cooked, we did

yoga together, we meditated every week, and I realized that I was feeling so bad about these

romantic relationships, because I thought, this is the only love that matters. I'm only loveable

if I have this form of love, and I looked around me and I was like, there's always been so much

love around me. Why hasn't that ever mattered? And yeah, I just really started to question this

hierarchy that we place on love, and why, you know, there's like gold under our feet with our

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