How Losing Some Friendships and Strengthening Others Is Key to Living a Wildly Authentic Life. Erin Falconer Tells Us Why
Erin Falconer was contemplating her next book, the follow-up to her wildly successful productivity guide How to Get Sh*t Done, when her personal life experienced a hiccup. “I had this situation with a very good friend of mine, and it was irritating,” Falconer tells me. “I realized by the end of the day that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
The riff with her friend was minor, admits Falconer, yet still, it consumed her. That’s when she had an epiphany: We spend endless energy worrying, navigating, and obsessing over drama in our friendships, but what do we actively do about it? Why do we let it sit in our minds and bellies and fester? “If I just said something, we could have cleared it, yet I spent all day going back and forth between why I was so irritated with the person and why I shouldn’t say something.”
Falconer did say something—ultimately 240-plus pages worth of words. In her new book, How to Break Up with Your Friends: Establishing New Boundaries for Modern Friendships she pens an insightful and proactive look at relationships of today. With vivid clarity, Falconer takes us through the various types of friendship, how we let complacency rule, and how when we look deep at who we have in our lives, we get closer to ourselves. She also makes the rallying cry that we don’t put enough attention toward our friendships when, in many cases, they are the anchors of our lives. “There’s individual therapy, there’s couples therapy, there’s family therapy, and yet there’s no friendship therapy,” says Falconer, who recently completed her master’s in psychology.
We talk about it all—and more—in our conversation here. And we touched on the title, which is truthful but not the entire story. “There’s only one chapter on how to break up with your friends, but there are nine chapters about the importance of friendship and how to do them better,” she says. “My whole idea with this book was to write a love letter to modern friendship and with the hopes that people find it aspirational and inspirational and enough to be a catalyst to then do the work in their own life. Because on the other side of that work is a lot of richness.”
A Conversation with Erin Falconer
Your first book, How to Get Sh*t Done, focuses on productivity. Your new book is about friendships, but there is a connection between these topics. Will you draw that line for us?
Our friendships have been these things that we don’t work on, and that is a really missed opportunity. When I thought about the example of the friend that irritated me, I thought of productivity. How much did that take me off course in the day? Not in major ways, but still, in small micro cumulative ways that really took my energy off task. And so even though there is not a direct line to productivity in this new book, that’s where the idea started. I thought, wow this is really a missed opportunity because friendships either are giving energy or they’re taking energy—and I don’t think there’s any kind of middle ground.
Also, when you look culturally, especially at female friendships, there are mainly two tropes: the cutthroat jealous, competitive female relationships; and the syrupy trips to the spa sort-of take. Neither of these are nuanced or real. They’re stereotypes that are perpetuated. This is why I thought it was really important to start having a grounded, real conversation about how to do friendship better.
You touch upon friendships as being some of the most meaningful anchors of our life. I feel that these days people are starting to realize the importance of friendships, and that they make our lives full and rich whether or not we have a romantic partner.
Absolutely. And often if you have really rich and full long-standing relationships, those relationships often outlast romantic partners. Those friends have seen you in many different phases of your life. They know parts of you as opposed to the curated part of you that you present. Of course, a romantic partner ultimately gets to know you, but, historically, friends often have a lot more insight and understanding about who you are and where you came from. It can be easier to share with friends, and so you are able to be the real you.
One of the things that is important about this topic, especially as we’re still going through the pandemic, is that 3 million women have left the workforce. Reproductive rights are back on the table. Childcare from a governmental perspective is non-existent. So of course, women are doing all the heavy lifting in that department. And I think when we look at the landscape of where we are, in my opinion, we are going backwards. So, I get hope when I see the strength of women coming together with a common message, a common goal, without judgment and marching forward. So this idea that you really have to practice getting your own individual relationships—really listening, really being supportive, really saying what you want to say—we can take that energy out collectively and start to take back what’s ours—which is equality.
Where do we start in being more proactive when it comes to our friendships?
The first thing, and this dovetails strongly with my first book, is to do an audit of yourself: Where are you? Who are you? How did you get here? Where do you want to go? What do you need from people? What do you want from people? What can you give? Without a self-audit, you’re out there operating blindly. You’re just going on whether you vibe with somebody or not and you’re not even doing that litmus test anymore. Because there are a lot of legacy friendships that you really haven’t even checked in energetically to see if you still vibe with that person. So the first thing is to check in with yourself and that, you know, answer those questions.
Then you have to be literal about auditing the people that are in your life. These are the people that you interact with a lot. Write down how you feel about that person. What is the importance of that relationship? What’s the value in it for you? What is that person providing for you and what are you providing for them? Get literal. Even writing down a person’s name on a piece of paper is very catalyzing. If you have a reaction to seeing that person’s name, well that’s information.
Once you’ve become clear about which relationships could be really valuable and meaningful, for both parties, then you have to commit to them.
And what does “commit” mean to you?
It’s very much like a recommitment ceremony. I’m not talking about having a ceremony, but mentally saying, I am going to commit to this relationship. And what does that look like? I am going to—and it’s different for every person—make time for them X number of times a week or a month, or whatever makes sense for that relationship. And then when I actually meet up with them or speak to them on the phone, it’s much better to have half of that time where you’re really listening to each other.
That commitment piece is so important because I even notice it in myself. When life gets busy, the first thing that comes off the schedule is the coffee with friends or the drink with a friend. But those are the things that often you need the most because they can really refill our energy. They can really help with perspectives. They can really help you problem-solve. They can really help infuse a sense of humor, whatever that relationship is bringing for you.
You go through the roles of different relationships and different friendships. Will you walk us through that?
When you look at what’s going on right now, and I am taking this back to how divided we are, one of the most important things to do when you’re looking at friends and at being really intentional with people is to understand what role everybody plays and what role you play for them. When you look at that friendship landscape, you want to see what the goal really is. I think it is diversity. You don’t want a bunch of friends that are all the same. You want to have a diverse range of people that are all filling up different aspects of what you need and what they need. That starts to pull at the nuance of who you are. That strengthens and fortifies the different parts of yourself, a lot of which remain kind of numb and untapped when we have very similar people in our lives. I’m talking about diverse personality types to race to gender to backgrounds.
Where things go awry in friendship is that you can have misaligned expectations. Somebody really wants to hang out all the time and the other person doesn’t have the bandwidth. Instead of having a conversation about what the relationship code should be for both people, it just ends up in frustration for both. That’s why it’s important to get clear about this and your needs from who you have in your life. You can have your core group of friends, maybe the inner ring or the closest group of people, but that doesn’t mean you say “bye” to everyone else. As long as you have clear expectations of what you need from somebody and you respect them and the relationship, whether it’s your school friends, mom friends, law school friends, or your work friends, if you understand the role and have clarity, the relationship itself becomes a lot more fruitful.
Erin Falconer is an author, digital entrepreneur and psychotherapist. Since 2008, she has been the editor-in-chief and co-owner of PickTheBrain. In 2018, she released the critically acclaimed self-improvement/female empowerment book, How To Get Sh*t Done: Why Women Need To Stop Doing Everything So They Can Achieve Anything. Her latest book explores the power of female friendships in How To Break Up with Your Friends: Finding Meaning, Balance and Connection in Modern Female Friendship. She is a Canadian living in Venice Beach, California.
