We talk a lot on the Clutterberg podcast about decluttering and organizing and cleaning and getting motivated and getting off your butt and doing things that are good for you.

But what I don't talk a lot about is getting off our butt and strengthening the most

important thing, which is friendships, not only making new friends, but really nurturing the ones that we currently have.

And today, I'm so excited because I am interviewing Dr. Marissa G. Franco.

She is a renowned psychologist, author, expert on friendships, and definitely the author of the best-selling book, Platonic, how the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends.

I feel like she's got some really real life and profound

advice and insights that are going to help all of us just really foster a stronger community.

Hello, welcome Dr. Marissa G. Franco. I'm so excited to have you here on the

Clutterbug podcast. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

This is exciting. I feel like friendship is something I struggle with a little bit maintaining relationships for whole lots of reasons and you literally wrote the book on it.

So this is exciting to talk about this.

I'm curious though how you started specializing in friendship and relationships? I know you're a

psychologist but this is like it's different. Yeah in my young 20s I went through a breakup and I took it really hard and so I asked my friend Heather, hey Heather, do you want to start a wellness group? We can meet up, practice wellness, cook, meditate,

through yoga together. And we started this group and it was so life changing for me. And I looked around and I was like,

wow, I think I took this breakup so hard because I felt like I had no love in my life or I wasn't worthy of love once this romantic relationship didn't work out.

And I was like, why doesn't this love matter? Why have I been pretending this hasn't counted all along and I felt like my own assumptions was predicated on like a larger

social messaging especially to women around romantic love and what that means and what

friendship doesn't mean correspondingly.

So I got really curious about those messages and I was reading more and more books and I just really really the dignity that I thought it really deserved and eventually I was just like okay why don't I write it?

Oh that's actually really beautiful. I absolutely love that. Yeah I've always thought of

relationships as being a significant other and in my youth I was like a relationship bouncer like from like boyfriend to boyfriend to boyfriend but never really held on to the girlfriend relationships.

Like I didn't see those as important or as important.

...