When we write history, it tends to be tidy and led by great men. In real time, it’s messy but still astonishing. Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a private army called the Wagner Group, attempted what many have called a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Technically, it failed. He landed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, pledged to march to Moscow, and then turned around. Nothing about this series of events suggests expert planning or high competence. Prigozhin is a former prisoner and a former hotdog salesman. Staff writer Tom Nichols puts him in a league with “gangsters” and “clowns.”

But sometimes gangsters and clowns are the ones who shake up the established order. Prigozhin’s march lasted barely 48 hours, yet it seems to have changed the conversation about Russia. Putin appears shaken and, as staff writer Anne Applebaum put it, “panicky.” His response to such a direct threat has been surprisingly tentative. The mutiny may have technically failed, but it left some revolutionary thoughts in people’s minds. Putin is not, in fact, invulnerable. Which means Russians might have a choice.

In this episode, Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols explain this week’s wild turn of events in Russia and the door those events opened.

“We’ve lived with Putin for 23 years. We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever, and that he reigned supreme,” Nichols says about this remarkable moment. “That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia. A man named Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to start a rebellion. His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. But this weekend they turned their guns against Russia itself. They took over a major southern city called Rostov-on-Don and then pledged to march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny? Was it a failed coup? People are debating Prigozhin’s motives and whether he thought he had internal support. Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man—a guy who was in prison, then became a hotdog salesman, and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin—turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived. We’ve been told that Prigozhin is now in Belarus. Anyway, the news is moving quickly and there’s been lots of speculation. Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So Tom, the past week’s events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny; however, you refer to it as a falling-0out among gangsters. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families—you know, in the old Godfather movie—these are mobsters, and Putin is the gangster in chief. But he has capos under him. And there was some issue there about territory and control with Prigozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin’s cronies, the minister of defense.

And, um, things got outta control.

Rosin: So how does Prigozhin fit into that picture? Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Nichols: Well, he’s got his own crew. He’s a powerful captain. He’s got his own army. He has, you know, 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him. And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

Rosin: So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people?

Nichols: People have multiple motivations for doing things. I think a lot of what Prigozhin tapped into is real. People are, both in the military and back home, fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere. I mean, that’s a real thing.

It’s a real problem, but it’s also in part a struggle for power among these players. So there are multiple things going on here and, and not all of them, I think, are clear to us over here right now.

Rosin: Right. So Anne, looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Prigozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine. What types of things has he been saying, and why do you think they struck a chord?

Anne Applebaum: For the last several weeks and months, really, Prigozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment. I mean, he’s focused in particular on the minister of defense, [Sergei] Shoigu and the army chief of the general staff.

And he talks about them using very insulting language. He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life. And [Valery] Gerasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people. These are very personal anecdotal descriptions of them. Um, which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that’s true.

More recently, and right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique. In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself. He said, well, the war was—the only reason we’re fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance. He wants to be a marshal. You know, he wants a better rank.

And because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more. They got greedy and wanted more.

In other words, it’s not a war for empire. It’s not about the glory of Russia. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about any of the things that Putin has said. It’s just about greedy people wanting more. The appeal of this narrative is that it’s very comfortable for Russians to hear that there’s a reason why they’re failing. You know that there are specific people to blame.

Rosin: And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

Applebaum: I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and that didn’t happen. There’s been massive casualties [and] losses of equipment. It may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery. The economy hasn’t been going well for a while. People can see corruption all around them. It’s not like it’s a big secret. And pinning it on specific people saying these guys are responsible for failure might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

Rosin: Yeah. I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent. Like, it can be both of those things at the same time. Now, this question is for either of you: We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Prigozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military. If that’s true, and I know that’s a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

Applebaum: So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov-on-Don, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the Southern Military District and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city. He couldn’t have done that and he couldn’t have kept going without somebody being on his side. And it seems like he expected more, or he thought there would be more support, so that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, the precise names of who it was and what their motives were, I don’t think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press. But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Nichols: Yeah, I agree with Anne. I don’t think you march on Rostov-on-Don and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you’re on your own. There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think there was also a larger expectation—because remember, Prigozhin’s a pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military—that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way or that around Moscow would get word of this and say: We’re on your side.

And I’ve been curious about Putin’s tentativeness, his procrastination and all this, and I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units—if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative—which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice. But again, we can’t know that for sure. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that Prigozhin wasn’t going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don.

Rosin: Right. So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him. It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin’s side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

Nichols: It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious that had been either smaller early on and hidden, or that had somehow been papered over. But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges—that’s gone.

Rosin: Yeah, and that’s important. Now, Anne, if Prigozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn’t quite work out or technically failed, as we talk about it we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged. What did that tell you?

Applebaum: So I thought that was quite significant. We’ve all read many times these somber analyses of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin. What this showed was that the citizens of Rostov-on-Don weren’t particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin’s people down. Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down. And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with him. And they started chanting when the Wagner Group was pulling out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening—they were chanting, “Wagner, Wagner” in the streets.

That shows that the support for Putin is pretty weak. It’s passive. He’s the guy there and we don’t see any alternatives, but the instant an alternative emerges, well, you know, that might be interesting. I mean, Prigozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, he’s more honest; he seems more effective.

And as I said in the beginning, he’s offering them an explanation that’s psychologically comfortable. Why is this war going so badly? Why haven’t we won? Why is everything so corrupt? Why is the army so dysfunctional? Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well he just gave us a reason. The reason is because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they’re doing a bad job. And that’s something that people would like to hear. They want an explanation for this strange war that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Rosin: Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all of this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Prigozhin explicitly. And given what Anne just said, and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is, what is this hesitation about? I mean, this whole incident could have ended with Prigozhin dead, but instead he’s in Belarus, or we think he’s in Belarus. And he’s alive, or we think he’s alive.

Nichols: I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are and they’re both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate. In Putin’s case, he’s just isolating Prigozhin without naming him, saying: Hey, all you heavily armed crack commando mercenary guys, I understand that you were led astray. And it’s okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn’t Stalinism. He’s not saying, Oh, that whole unit, they’re all dead. He’s trying to plant internal divisions there. As is Prigozhin, who has been really careful to say, Look, I’m not trying to overthrow the president. I’m not trying to overthrow the government. But these two guys at the top, Shoigu and Gerasimov, the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff, they gotta go. And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So they’re both being very careful not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to. Now, for Prigozhin, that makes sense. For Putin, that’s very revealing. I mean, he’s the president of the country and here he is, kind of tiptoeing around, trying not to aggravate thousands of armed men who were part of a mutiny. So while they’re both doing the same thing, I think it’s really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Rosin: Yeah, and as much as I understand the iconography of Putin is important—who’s weak, who’s strong—as a unit of analysis. Strong man, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily wanna lose out to a hotdog-salesman ex-prisoner.

Nichols: Right. He actually appeared in public the first two times—he looked awful; I mean, it looked like a bunker video—where he is standing in front of a desk and he’s kind of raging to the camera. He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, coming down the big staircase and the honor guard snapping to attention.

And addressing the troops, the officers, he said something really interesting. He said: You prevented a civil war. Which is not true. Nobody actually did that. It’s certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing. Nothing like that happened, and to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president, to say: You’re my heroes. I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country. Which to me was a really striking thing to do. Again, as you and everybody’s been pointing out, Prigozhin is still—at least we think—still alive and running around issuing statements.

Rosin: So what comes next? After the break, we speculate. But with restraint.

[BREAK]

Rosin: Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future-prediction questions at you. Like, what does this mean for Ukraine and what does the weakened Putin mean for a global order? Is it just too hard to speculate?

Applebaum: I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don’t add up. I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at 7 o’clock on September the first, X or Y will happen next. Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it’s like the shadows on Plato’s Cave, you know? We’re seeing the reflections of activities. There are these Russian military bloggers who you have to follow in order to understand any of this. And of course, they’re telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin’s propaganda point of view. It’s not as if we have a reliable source of information who will lay it out for us and give us the facts. Even the story as we’re speaking. I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but as we’re speaking, we’ve been told by several very unreliable people that Prigozhin is in Belarus,—by the Russian spokesman and by the Belarussian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Prigozhin, I don’t believe it. He’s gotta have a photograph of him in Minsk and I need to know that it’s not Photoshopped. And then I’m sure it’s true. So that’s why I think it’s very hard to—you don’t wanna make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday. And what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody was certain was there. We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war. He did it on Saturday morning, and so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening.

Which is an indication, again, that there may be more to the story to come, but making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine—I mean, I’m not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine. Maybe it will affect Russian troop morale. Maybe it lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command.

But it hasn’t had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see. And until that happens, I’m just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Nichols: Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, No, wait. We’re not going to fight until we get this sorted out. Um, they’re still fighting. The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn’t really change because of this.

So what Ukraine has to do, and the support we need to give them—that doesn’t change … the reluctance to prognosticate. Well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn’t fall. People that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions, in part because when you’re predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate. This is all contingent on individuals, and trying to predict the behavior of these kind of Mafia-like characters is really difficult to do, because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So I’m with Anne here. I don’t want to get too detailed about what’s going to happen next week … This definitely wounded Putin and he is in a different situation than he was.

I don’t think there’s any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean that’s important enough. As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way. Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

Applebaum: It is also true that coups and mutinies that don’t succeed can have an impact on politics too. And there’s some famous examples from Russian history: There’s a revolution that doesn’t succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state. It forced the czar, Nicholas, to pass a constitution and create a Duma—a Parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived. And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other, different kinds of events that happened. And some of them were unsuccessful. The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful, but ultimately there was a revolution.

They did take power. And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time. And it’s too early to say whether that’s what this is. But it’s clearly the case though that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

Nichols: Right. The 1991 coup was a complete clown show, and it failed. The guy that was actually was supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was, like, drunk all the time, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Most mutinies and coups don’t succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Rosin: Now all I wanna do is ask you guys to speculate, because now it’s very interesting. Now I’m thinking: Okay, so which directions does it go? You know, Is there a future for Prigozhin? Is he making a play to replace Putin one day? Are there other Prigozhins out there? I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

Applebaum: I think you can talk about options. Again, you can look at the past. It seems to me, in the case of Putin, one possibility is: Now that there’s been a challenge that didn’t succeed but that revealed weakness, will there be more challenges? And so you might say, Well, that’s clearly now an option in a way that it wasn’t before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown. What do leaders do who have been weakened? Leaders like him. Dictators. Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance. And they do that by arresting people or purging people. I don’t know what that would be in the case of modern Russia. Cutting off the internet? Or shutting the borders? I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios, because he will now need to make up for the fact that he’s seen to be weaker. And I’m not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that, based on how these things have played out in other times in other places, you can guess at.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, as you look at this, I’m trying to put myself in your head. You’re sort of looking at the dictator’s playbook, watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past. Is that how you track these events?

Applebaum: Yes. And I’m also thinking of Russian history. In the history of the Soviet Communist Party, every time there was a failure or a disaster, they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down. It goes in waves, all the way from 1917 up to 1991. And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I feel like I’m going back to the toolbox of the old-school Sovietology that I learned back in the 1980s. And so, rather than prognosticate, I’ll just say the things I’m looking for. I’m literally now looking at videos of who’s sitting next to whom at these meetings. Who’s still in. Who might be out.

I’m looking for personnel changes. Does the minister of defense survive? Does the chief of the general staff get replaced? This now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people and their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Rosin: Tom, what’s the larger through line you’re tracking? You’re tracking the chess pieces—who’s going here and who’s falling off the board—but what’s the bigger story?

Nichols: I think it’s going to be: Is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him? I think that’s the thing to watch. You know, we’ve lived with Putin for 23 years seeming to be [invincible], except for when he first arrived in power and when he had a serious challenge around 2011.

We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever. And that he reigns supreme. That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him. And I think what Prigozhin did was to say, well, there could be at least some alternative. Maybe not good ones. But you can in fact oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Rosin: Yeah. Basically, Russians, you might have a choice. That’s as much as we can say.

Nichols: Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone, or kind of lost in his own head, Putin is? He conceived of the war in isolation. The military was never necessarily enthusiastic. Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who’s on his team, and I just got this vision of: dictator alone.

Applebaum: So we’ve had intimations of that for a couple of years now. In fact, Prigozhin himself has hinted that Putin doesn’t really know what’s going on [and] they’re lying to him. And many others have said that too. So we’ve already had this idea that he doesn’t really know what’s going on on the battlefield. And this incident did make it seem like he also didn’t really know what was going on at home.

I mean, for someone who’s now saying they had foreknowledge of this, he didn’t react like somebody who was confident of the outcome. The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky. It was about the civil war in 1917 and “our nation is at stake.”

He didn’t give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge. And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this by himself, surrounded by security guards in some bunker. And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, I guess a lot more to come this week. This year. For a while. But thank you both for helping us understand what just happened.

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Engineering is by Rob Smerciak. Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, A. C. Valdez, and Vann Newkirk. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

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The values of individualism that encourage us to go it alone are in constant tension with the desire for community that many people crave. But when attempting to do things on our own, we may miss out on the joys of coming together.

This season’s finale conversation features writer Mia Birdsong, who highlights the cultural and philosophical roots of Americans’ struggle to build community. In a culture pushing us to put our own oxygen mask on first, Mia argues for the quiet radicalness of asking for help and showing up for others.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip,” “Just Manners”), Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), and Yonder Dale (“Simple Gestures”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, do you remember the first time I approached you in the office?

Julie Beck: [Laughter.] Yes.

Rashid: I sent you a message from behind your desk, saying, “Hi, can I come to your desk?”—while…staring at you sitting at your desk.

Beck: From…let’s be clear…less than 10 feet away.

Rashid: Yes.

Beck: I was like, “Yes, you can?” I remember you being really tentative when you kind of crept up, and I was like, “You don’t have to ask permission to come say hi to me.” And then I was wondering if I looked really unapproachable or something. But I was really excited to meet you, because we’d been working together on Zoom for a while, but it was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: I promise that is not my usual approach. I think I just forgot how to human a little bit, and what it felt like to work with people in an office. So I think I thought I was being polite, but I maybe just made it a bit weird.

—

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

—

Rashid: When Julie and I first got together to develop the series—after my awkward desk approach [Chuckle]—we talked a lot about how we wanted the show to explore how small, everyday conversations can become the deeper connections that we want more of in our lives.

Knowing how to talk to people isn’t simply for the sake of starting conversation or fighting through the awkwardness of small talk. The point is to ultimately reach a deeper understanding of the people around us.

Beck: What I’ve always wanted, and what I think so many people long for, is this sense that you are part of a rich, interconnected community. That you have an extended network of support and love, full of many different kinds of relationships that serve many different purposes. And the types of conversations we’ve explored in the podcast so far are the stepping stones that lead up to that.

And now, we’ve arrived at our finale episode. And this is a big one. We’re going to talk about how you build a community, and that can be a really complex concept. The barriers that can make that rich sense of community feel hard to find are not just psychological, within our own minds. There are cultural barriers, too.

Mia Birdsong: The American narrative about freedom—which is deeply individualistic—is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself.

Rashid: Reaching out may be exactly what we need to do to find the community support we need.

Birdsong: I’m just like, Ugh, I can’t figure this out, and I’m like, Duh! Like, ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it.

Beck: Mia Birdsong is the author of a book called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. In our conversation, she explores how the injustices baked into our country’s history have limited people’s ability to connect with one another, and how we understand the definition of community.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave, right, was considered unfree, was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Rashid: Mia argues that today, too many people equate freedom with independence, and that can lead us to go it alone when we don’t need to.

Birdsong: And I think we’ve been told, right? The people who are strong—the people who are achieving and are successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own. And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering.

Beck: I think we definitely tell ourselves a lot of stories about how other people must have it more together than we do.

Birdsong: And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person.

Rashid: Mia gets into all of it. She shares real advice about how to ask people for support…without feeling bad about it. And how that can actually bring us together.

—

Beck: Mia, there’s been a lot of research on how lonely Americans are, how disconnected people are from their neighbors. And a lot of people feeling like they don’t have anybody to confide in, even. What do you think is behind all that?

Birdsong: There’s a Harvard study; there’s been a couple of Cigna studies. The BBC did a loneliness experiment, which was a global study. And, you know, Americans are lonely. Loneliness has been increasing, and unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it worse. The BBC study was interesting because it found that loneliness is highest among young people, men, and those who are in an individualistic society—a.k.a., America.

Beck: What is the role that you think individualism plays in all this?

Birdsong: When I think about individualism in America, I connect that very strongly to capitalism—how America defines what success looks like and what it means to be a good person.

And part of what capitalism has done is: It has inserted the exchange of money. I didn’t, you know, get together with a bunch of my friends and build my house. I paid for it.

What’s interesting is that among people who don’t have money, don’t have as much access to money, you see a lot more relational childcare. Like, where your neighbor—or your best friend or your sister or your dad—takes care of your kids. And then that social fabric gets built in, because it’s not a transaction. It is what family does.

And then I think the other piece is that the definition of success is so much about the idea that one can be a self-made man, right? Or pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

So there’s this idea that as an individual, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to make it on your own—which “invisibilizes” all of the help that people do get. Either from the systems that exist and the privileges and advantages you have, depending on your relationship with that system.

So I think about, you know: People who are born wealthy tend to stay wealthy. If you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re able-bodied, if you’re straight, there are all of these advantages that you end up having.

Beck: And there’s a sense, too, like acknowledging any help that you did get makes your success seem less impressive somehow.

Birdsong: And we think that asking for help is a form of weakness. The more attached you are to this version of what it means to be successful and happy and good, the less you are connected to other humans. Because you’re out there trying to make it on your own.

__

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave was considered unfree was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Beck: Wow.

Birdsong: And it added a whole other layer to how I think about the Black experience in America, from being kidnapped and trafficked from home. And if we think about our people as being not just the human beings around us, but also the land we’re from—our ancestors, right?

Through to: An intrinsic part of the way that America practiced slavery was about the threat or experience of being sold away from your family. To the prison-industrial complex, right?

And through all of that, there’s also been Black people’s resistance to it—from people jumping overboard slave ships because they’re like, I’m going home one way or another. Obviously, people running away from plantations.

After Emancipation there’s this archive where you can look at these online. There were all of these advertisements that we placed in newspapers, trying to find loved ones that we hadn’t seen for decades. Sometimes it was one of our children. Sometimes it was a parent. Sometimes it was, you know, a best friend. Sometimes it was a spouse.

They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, ’cause they’re all very short. But they’re people talking about how they’re looking for somebody and they were sold to this person. So their name might have changed. The limit on the kind of information they had about this loved one—but the determination that they had to find them—was just like…rejection of the ways in which slavery was making Black people unfree. It was this insistence, right?

Beck: And the freedom to reconnect.

Birdsong: Totally. And I think about how many Black folks I know who find out, you know, when they’re an adult that Uncle Bobby is not actually their dad’s brother, but is their dad’s best friend from elementary school.

I have a friend who told me about her and her siblings looking at these family photos and realizing they didn’t know who was chosen family and who was blood or legal family. And then also, ultimately, that it didn’t matter.

And all of that stands in such stark contrast to the American narrative about freedom, which is deeply individualistic. Which is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself. Which means that you need to hoard resources, so that you have everything that you need. You get everything through transaction, so that you don’t owe anybody.

It means you don’t ask for help. It means you’re not responsible for or accountable to anybody. The idea of freedom being you can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. Because we are fundamentally social animals. Like, we need care, right? And this American idea of freedom is so separated from that.

Beck: So when you say the American-dream narrative is antithetical to freedom, what do you specifically mean by the American-dream narrative?

Birdsong: So when I think about the fundamental ideals that were written into the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and who was articulating that...we had white, straight as far as we know, landowning men. Who represented a minority of the American population.

Women were not considered at all—that’s like half right there. No Black people. No poor people. So when I think about that, and I think about what the American dream is—that’s the ideal, right? And that you do that through working hard, not asking for help. And, you know, you’re amassing your kingdom.

Beck: Mm.

Birdsong: That is not being a person. That is not about being in community. It’s not about caring for others. There’s nothing in there about love. It’s such an existentially central part of the human experience—our pursuit of and desire for and need for love.

—

Beck: Can you tell me about a time your community really showed up for you?

Birdsong: Ooh, yes. In July of 2021, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And Stage 3 colon cancer. And I was going to have to have surgery and ultimately went through three months of really intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive chemo.

Beck: Ugh.

Birdsong: Yeah, it was no fun. But 20 minutes after I got the news, I had a phone call with my friend Aisha. We were working on a project together, and I was all anxious. Not because I had been told I had cancer, but because I didn’t know when I was going to be able to, like, continue the project.

So I totally got on the phone with her, and I was like, “Girl, I’m so sorry. But I just found out I have cancer, and I have to have surgery. So I’m going to have to postpone my work on this project.” She was like, “Mia.” She was like, “Let’s take a breath.”

And in that breath, I moved from kind of hiding from what was scary about this—behind “I have to get this work done”—to being in this place of being able to feel how afraid I was. But also, like, not alone.

Before we got off the phone, she had the meal train set up that would ultimately make sure that my family got fed while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, and then for the three months that I was going through chemo.

She then circled up with three other friends of ours. And this group of Black women who called themselves “Mia’s Care Squad” then basically coordinated all of the things with the rest of my community—like, my larger community—that I would need.

They made spreadsheets. They had email chains: a squad of people who would run errands for me. They collected everybody’s advice. So I wasn’t getting bombarded with like, you know, all kinds of advice. But I totally wanted advice, because I was like, “I’ve never had cancer before. I want the advice.”

I feel like there was this way in which they tended to my physical well-being—but they also were tending to my spirit and my heart. They created a “joy fund” for me.

Beck: Oh my gosh; what does that mean?

Birdsong: Which was like a pile of money for me to spend only on things that would bring me joy. I bought a lot of art supplies.

When I was having surgery, there was a group of people outside on the hospital lawn singing for me.

The way that this group came together. And I remember having this moment in the beginning of being like, I am absolutely going to tell my community what’s going on with me. I’m not going to be one of those people who secretly goes through chemo. I’m like, Everybody’s going to know. And I am absolutely asking for their help. I do not want to do this thing by myself.

Beck: What did it feel like to hear your friends singing outside your hospital room?

Birdsong: Well, I couldn’t hear them, because I was in the basement of the hospital having my part of my colon taken out. But I knew that they were there. And I remember as I was getting the anesthesia, holding—because I saw them when I was coming into the hospital.

I remember just holding them in my head. And oh, my God. Because, you know, I was terrified. It was so comforting to know that they were out there singing for me.

So I’ve now been cancer-free for more than a year. And when I look back on that experience, I mean: It sucked. It was terrible. Like, cancer sucks, chemo sucks. But there’s a way in which it wove the fabric of community together tighter for them. I mean—we have shared the spreadsheets with so many other people.

And I know that what my community did has been a model for other people who have also gone through cancer or just, you know, something terrible. I feel so grateful that I got to have that level of love and care, and that I didn’t have any shame about receiving it.

—

Beck: I want to talk more about asking for help and offering help, because I feel like that’s very loaded. Why are so many of us hesitant to ask for help?

Birdsong: I think that, one: We often don’t see people asking for help, so we think everybody else is doing it on their own. Which is a lie. Not only is everybody else doing it on their own, but that it’s easy, right? When in fact, all of us are just a hot mess if we’re doing it on our own. We’re suffering.

Beck: It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Birdsong: Totally. So there’s that piece: that we don’t have a lot of good modeling for it. And I think we’ve been told that the people who have their shit together—the people who are strong, who are achieving and successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering. When I was in my 20s and 30s, especially: the way that people would say how they got no sleep and were really tired.

Beck: Yes.

Birdsong: As like, something they were proud of.

Beck: “I worked so much. I’m so busy. My calendar is so full. I’m so tired.” Exactly. Like—congratulations?

Birdsong: Yes. Exactly—that thing, right? That is like, I have suffered in order to be productive. I have suffered in order to achieve. So that there is some way in which we have tied together “suffering and pain” with “being a good person and achievement.” I feel I’m at this place where I’m like, No, I want ease. Just because I can do something by myself doesn’t mean that I should.

I absolutely have to remind myself of this. I often find myself struggling—usually it’s something that I’m thinking about, not so much a task I need to do—but I’m just like, Oh, I can’t figure this out. And I’m like, Duh! Ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it. And inevitably—even if it’s just sharing the anxiety or stress or hardness of the thing—I automatically feel better, just because I’m being witnessed.

Beck: Is there a right way to ask for help?

Birdsong: Well, I’ll tell you what works for me. I often find, generally, that casting a wide net is better, right? Especially if it’s hard to ask for help. Asking one person and them saying “no” means you have to go do it again. When I text my neighbors for a lemon, right, I text all of them. I’m not texting them one at a time. I think the other thing is to tell on yourself and to say.

Beck: To tattle on yourself? [Laughter.]

Birdsong: Yes! To be like: I need help with something. I’m finding it really challenging to ask for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m going to do it anyway. And then, ideally, you’re able to have conversations with people, and they can reassure you that you’re not a burden.

I don’t know anybody who is constantly asking for help, that other people are like, Oh my God, Like, stop. That’s not my experience. I feel mostly we don’t ask enough. Maybe practice with things that feel like less of a lift—that don’t feel so critical to you, but that feel like they would bring you some ease.

If you know a friend is going to the store, ask them to pick you up some coffee because they’re going to be there anyway. And then you can go by and get the coffee.

Beck: And if they say no to picking up the coffee, that doesn’t destroy my confidence in the same way.

Birdsong: Totally. Maybe I already have coffee, and I’m just going to pretend I need coffee and see what happens.

Beck: What are your thoughts on the right way to offer help? Because a piece of advice that I hear a lot is that you shouldn’t ask “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” Because that’s more stress on the person: to then find something for you to do when maybe they’re in crisis or something.

Birdsong: Right, ’cause it’s not specific.

Beck: And then the advice is: “You should just do something without being asked.” But then, what if that’s unwelcome?

Birdsong: Totally. So this is where I’m also like, we need to stop trying to get an A in asking and offering for help.

Beck: I feel very called out by that.

Birdsong: We’re going to mess it up. I know, all of the high achievers are like, I want to get an A in asking and offering help. I think if we really have no idea what we can offer, we can say to people, “I want to offer some help, and I don’t know what would be useful to you.”

Beck: Mm hmm.

Birdsong: “Do you have an idea about something that would be useful, or is there someone who is close to you who does know what might be useful? And can I talk to them?” We don’t want to offer help that is not useful, because it feels risky.

And I think this is where we have to like, tap into what we know about our loved ones and come up with—here are three things that you could offer, right? And offer those and see if they want any of them. Or do a thing and see what happens. And bring them food. The death of a loved one is not going to be made worse by the fact that you gave them bread and they’re gluten free.

Beck: Small potatoes at that point.

Birdsong: Exactly. When I think about something like a joy fund, right? There’s a kind of imagination that was required to come up with that, that I think is harder in times where we’re all grinding with work and shepherding children and commuting and all of that. There was something about the slowing down of the pandemic. And in my mind, that was the slowing down of the wheel of capitalism that gave people room to show up for me in a particular way.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And I’m saying all of that because—especially right now, like we’re not post-pandemic, but we’re capitalism—the wheel of capitalism has started winding along the way that it was before.

And our mental capacity gets sucked up by, you know, both our paid and unpaid labor. And keeping our lives going. So I want us to give ourselves some grace when we find it challenging to make the space that we need for community.

Beck: Right. Because it’s not entirely our doing.

Birdsong: Exactly.

Rashid: Julie, there was an interesting survey on time use showing that by 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time to me. And there was an almost 40 percent decline from five years before that. So, it seems like there’s so much we’re pressured to squeeze into a week or a day that four hours per week is all many people can even manage.

Beck: That was even before the pandemic, too. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten better since. But you’re right, Becca, that time is finite, and life is full of demands. Which is breaking news, I know. I mean: It would be nice to see those stats go up. But also, no matter what, it’s never going to be possible to always be a perfect friend or a perfect neighbor.

Mia said, “You need to stop trying to get an A-plus in helping people.” And I felt very personally roasted by that, because sometimes I do think about community-building as…homework? [Laughter.]

Even though I want to focus on relationships more than personal achievement in my life, those values of hard work and perfectionism follow me into my personal life as well—where if I’m not living up to that ideal of creating a perfect utopian community for me and the people I love, then I’m subconsciously giving myself a bad grade. What a nerd!

Rashid: You’re not a nerd…you’re trying to stay on top of it! I now make it a point on Sunday evenings to kind of write out a list of things I want to do in the next few weeks. And then I try to actually set up social time with my group of friends—I actually started a little neighborhood supper club with my friends, where we do themed dinners every month.

I like that it’s created this routine for us—where I know we have this thing we like doing together, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Beck: I like that you attend to your correspondences on Sunday night. It’s very Pride and Prejudice of you. [Laughter.]

Beck: So Mia, we’ve been talking a lot about how communities show up for each other in a crisis. And I think most people are really ready to show up in a crisis. But how can we have that kind of interdependence when it’s not a crisis?

Birdsong: Right, because all of us are going to experience crisis. That’s just a given. I have met so many older white men who—their wives die, and they’re in this moment of crisis, and they have nobody. They have their therapist, is who they have. They will just start talking to anybody about what’s going on with them, because they are so lonely.

So I think about that as the opposite of what we want.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And part of it, for them, is that they’ve kind of put all of their social connection in the one basket of their wife. And when that person doesn’t exist anymore, they’re just set adrift.

Beck: So community is, by its nature, something that has to be built by multiple people, of course. But if you are feeling a lack of community in your life, what can you as an individual do to kickstart that process?

Birdsong: So, the advice people get is often to join a thing. And I’m like, that sounds lame in some way. But it’s also totally true. Especially as adults, right? We don’t have that built-in, kind of like a school situation—where we’re meeting people who we know we’re building friendships with.

Beck: Right. We have work.

Birdsong: Exactly. Which I feel is not actually where you should be centering your social life. Because despite what your boss might say, your work is not your family. I mean, people obviously build genuine relationships there, but that should not be your most important social interaction.

So I’m like: book clubs. Activism. If you have some kind of faith, a faith community. Because you’re not going to meet people sitting at home, like I’ve tried.

I think the other piece is that sometimes we know people, but we don’t allow ourselves to be known by them. We’re not having the kinds of conversations that allow people to see into the interior of our lives. We’re not really telling them what’s going on with us. We stick to small talk. Right?

It is a recounting of what happened that was interesting in your life. And, you know, you say that you’re “good” as opposed to what you’re struggling with, or how you’re actually feeling. Or something that you’re wrestling with that could even be, you know, an intellectual thing. It doesn’t have to be painful. But we keep things at this surface level, and we don’t allow things to go deep.

Beck: How do you figure out what you want a community to look like in your life and then bring that into the real world? It seems like a very basic question, but it also seems really hard to actually do it.

Birdsong: Yes. And part of it is to get quiet with yourself. Notice the part of you that is longing for something. And I think, to make some room for it, and to notice how you’re thinking about that part. Like, if it makes you anxious, or if you wish it didn’t exist, or if it’s beautiful in some way to you—sit and find that piece of you. And I think you have to ask it, right? What is it that it wants?

You don’t make a strategic plan for building community. So then it’s really about seeing what that leads you to, and seeing who it leads you to.

I think for many of us, it is like—we have people in our lives, but we want to bring them closer in some way. I think that we actually have more knowledge and wisdom about how to build relationships than we give ourselves credit for. And I think primarily what gets in our way is not “Do we know what to do?” but “Are we willing to do it?”

There is no way to be in close relationships without being seen in some way. And I think many of us—I am “many of us”—are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love. That’s the version that people will praise.

That’s the version that people will want to, you know, be around. But nobody is that version of themselves. We are all many things. Sure, we do good and we do well, but we also mess up and are unsure and insecure and have a hard time.

Beck: I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is “not hiding.”

Birdsong: Totally. Yes.

Rashid: You know, one thing I have noticed ever since the pandemic, Julie, is that most of my socializing is now a lot more homebound, which is not a good or bad thing. Yeah, but: I established a lot of new traditions with my community, like cooking dinner at different people’s houses or movie nights, or things in my life that used to be oriented around going out and meeting at bars.

And that still happens, too. But I have established a sort of newness in the rituals I have with my circle of people. What about you? I mean, have you learned anything in the making of this podcast that has changed your approach to your existing relationships, or helped you build new ones?

Beck: I wish I had a big update for you that would illustrate my personal growth. But I don’t think a lot has really changed with my friends or in my community. I’m not best friends with my neighbors yet. I think what I’ve noticed more is just patterns in how I think about my relationship to my community.

Rashid: I feel like that’s what we’ve set out to do, right? Sort of break down these steps of just bringing people closer to us. The initial awkward small talk, the hanging out, the scheduling the hangouts, the tough communication with friendships, and ultimately the sort of selfless disposition that you need to have if you want your relationships to feel more mutual and not feel transactional.

Beck: I think another hallmark of life in our capitalistic society is the pressure to optimize and self-improve all the time. I fall into that trap of thinking things will be better if I change this or if I change that.

So it kind of strikes me that a lot of my angst comes from feeling like I need to optimize my community toward some ideal through my own hard work—which is actually a very self-centered way to think about it.

The point of a community is that it’s not just in one individual’s control. And as much as it’s good to put effort into your relationships, you also have to just let go and be curious and see what’s actually there, and enjoy what’s there.

Rashid: And I think when you do try to control the situation, you can end up with our messaging-behind-the-desk situation, where before saying “Hi” I thought it was maybe a better idea to message you first, and make sure that you were comfortable with the interaction and all of that.

Beck: But you know, an imperfect awkward beginning like that can actually lead to something great. Because we’ve really become friends while making this podcast! You’ve been to my house; we’ve had many long, rambly, chatty drinks together. You’ve met my partner, you’ve met my sister, you’ve met a bunch of my friends.

Some of that was the result of intentional effort and reaching out and scheduling. But it was also the result of easing up on overthinking, and just being together. So I think it’s a balance of effort and ease—or effort, but not to a neurotic degree.

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Are we moving too fast for America’s national pastime? Hanna Rosin asks staff writer Mark Leibovich whether the changes MLB is making to the game could help him fall in love with baseball all over again.

Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game…it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I would’ve been in my late 30s. They had these scintillating couple of playoff series where the Red Sox finally came back. I mean, you know, those are some intense sports-watching things.

I mean, this was the culture of my youth, and that is just gone.

Rosin: And is it gone? Because life is just so fast now.

Leibovich: I think that’s part of it. I think baseball has gotten much slower. I mean, games literally took, you know, two and a half hours when I was a kid. Now, you know, as of last year they took three hours, 10 minutes or so.

Rosin: So it’s the two things moving in opposite directions. It’s like: Just as we were speeding up and getting faster, baseball just got slower.

Leibovich: You have these two things moving in opposite directions—baseball getting slower, and our brains getting faster and our attention spans shrinking.

And all of this was moving in a direction antithetical to enjoying baseball.

Rosin: It’s funny;. when you put it that starkly, it actually makes me a little sad. Like we just have no room for anything slow in our busy lives anymore.

Leibovich: Yes. I mean, it’s funny ’cause we have these conversations, and it’s like, “Oh, baseball is to blame. It’s these self-indulgent ritual-doers who are Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves all day.” Maybe this is just our problem. I mean, there are a lot of slow, reflective things we don’t do anymore.

Rosin: So, Mark: When you set out to write about baseball, you thought that the sport was dying. And then, it did something to save itself...maybe. What did baseball do?

Leibovich: They have initiated a set of rules [in Major League Baseball]. One, and most importantly, to make the game go faster. And two: certain rules to make there be more action and offense. Less waiting around in baseball; more fun to watch.

Rosin: Got it. So just like: faster everything. More exciting.

Rosin: What’s one thing they did?

Leibovich: Well, the big thing is a pitch clock.

A pitch clock is a new tool that has appeared in every major-league ballpark this year. In which there’s this big clock in the outfield and also behind home plate—

Rosin: —like a literal clock.

Leibovich: A literal clock. It counts down from 15 seconds.

A pitcher now has 15 seconds to pitch the ball, or 20 seconds if there’s someone on base. And the batter has to be in the box ready to hit by the eight-second mark. So there are only eight seconds left. The batter has to be ready.

Rosin: And what else did they do?

__

Bigger bases

Leibovich: One of the things they did was they made the bases bigger, which, you know, people can understand. It’s a bigger base now. What that does is it encourages stolen bases. It makes running bases a safer thing, ’cause you have more of a safe haven to grab onto, or slide into.

They’re reducing pickoff throws, which took forever. And things like that. So they’re encouraging more offense.

Rosin: This isn’t technical baseball language, but it does feel like a real vibe shift.

Leibovich: It very much is. And it’s hard to explain, but when you’re actually watching a game, there is urgency.

Urgency: It is not a word that anyone would ever associate with baseball in recent years.

Now, you sit and you watch—and people are not screwing around. And you sort of internalize that as a viewer or a listener, and you say, “Wait a minute; things are happening faster. I better pay closer attention. I better not check my phone as closely.”

And so the whole vibe is, yes, maybe less relaxing. But ultimately more satisfying, because more is happening, and it’s happening faster.

Rosin: And why did they make all these changes?

Leibovich: Well, part of it is just: Baseball was falling further and further behind things like football and basketball and other sports that are a lot more compelling.

They go much faster and, frankly, are more national spectacles. Like everyone gathers to watch the Super Bowl.

So I actually went to a World Series game last fall between the Phillies and the Astros. And I drove up to Philadelphia. And, you know, it was a World Series game, and it was a no-hitter. The Astros pitchers—four of them—combined to no-hit the Phillies. This was historic, or theoretically it was historic.

No one really noticed. No one remembers it. And this is a World Series game—the likes of which are routinely being outrated on TV by early-season NFL games.

I mean, as our culture speeds up, as brains speed up—you know, cell phones and computers and attention spans. Just the whole culture has sped up. Baseball has slowed down.

And finally, they sort of decided to, all at once, just get very tough and say, “Okay, there is now a clock in baseball.” Lo and behold, it has already shaved 25, maybe 30 minutes off of games in the first couple of months in this season.

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Theo Epstein

Rosin: So. Who is the main architect of speeding baseball up?

Leibovich: There are a few of them. But probably the best known is a guy named Theo Epstein, who is this legendary figure in baseball.

He was the youngest general manager in history. He was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28. He is known for bringing the first World Series championship to Boston in 86 years. He then left the Red Sox and went to the Chicago Cubs—who had an even longer World Series drought—and he delivered after 108 years.

So he sort of has this legend attached to him. And he left the Cubs a couple of years ago, and he joined Major League Baseball as a consultant.

__

Moneyball

Rosin: Isn’t Theo Epstein associated with the whole “Moneyball revolution” in baseball?

Leibovich: Yes. He did not pioneer it. Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s is given credit for that. But Theo Epstein is known as the chief disciple who applied some of these new theories in baseball and actually won World Series with it for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

Rosin: Tell me if this is right. This is what I understand about Moneyball. Okay. I read the book; I saw the movie. So Moneyball was a revolution that, as I recall, was supposed to modernize baseball. Like, instead of tracking one set of statistics about players, they tracked a different set of statistics about players. Which turned out to be the actual critical factors in winning a game, and allowed teams with fewer resources to beat rich, fancy teams.

But also what I understood about Moneyball was that it was supposed to have fixed baseball.

So didn’t we fix baseball?

Leibovich: You know, very interesting terminology here, and we’re gonna try to make it not complicated. It fixed baseball for teams trying to win baseball games—i.e., the Oakland A’s, right? Who have less resources and did more with less.

The innovations we’re seeing now? It’s not about winning baseball games. Because the commissioner of baseball [Rob Manfred] and now Theo Epstein, his consultant—they work for all of baseball. They work for the fans; they work for the interests of entertainment.

So it has nothing to do with a competitive advantage between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. It has everything to do with the entertainment attention span of someone watching a Disney movie or playing a video game or watching the Super Bowl or something like that.

Rosin: Moneyball fixed one set of problems, but then created another set of problems.

Leibovich: Well, they created a blueprint for teams to do better with less resources—but it was a terrible thing to watch. I mean, it created more walks, more strikeouts, slower action. So yeah: I mean, it solved one problem. It created any number of problems if you are a consumer of entertainment.

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Mental-Skills Coaching

Rosin: You know, I get why they need to move faster. One of the things that you wrote about from the slow era, which I really appreciate, was this mental-skills coaching. I was surprised and maybe happily surprised to learn that they teach baseball players how to meditate in real time while they’re on the field.

Leibovich: In a sense, yes. I mean, that’s been part of the 21st-century revolution in baseball, and in the service of giving baseball players and teams a slightly better competitive advantage. They have taught mental skills, imaging, little mini-meditations, visualizations, things that you do. Because sports, especially baseball, is a big mind game, right?

You need to put yourself in a very relaxed state, or a state that puts you in a good position to succeed.

Rosin: That seems so nice and enlightened, and that’s what we tell our children to do when they’re stressed out. That’s what we tell everyone. Like, we’re all supposed to slow down and meditate.

Leibovich: Yeah; it might be nice. But it also gets introduced into the culture, which by and large introduces more time and dawdling into the culture of baseball. So David Ortiz, Nomar Garciaparra, Robinson Canó: They have these rituals where they take their deep breaths, and they clap, and they sort of see the field.

And then the owner of the Seattle Mariners told me this: He was teaching his son’s Little League team, and all of a sudden half the Little League team is trying to imitate Robinson Canóby stepping out during the at-bat and doing his little ritual. And so: “Sorry, we gotta wait for Jimmy over here to do his little Robinson Canó–like ritual.”

And then John Stanton, the owner of the Mariners, said to me, “Look, we have just taught an entire generation of kids that it’s okay to pace around the mound for however long and waste all this time.”

And I guarantee you, it would be a lot more interesting to watch Johnny try to dunk like LeBron James or kick a soccer ball like Messi or something than it is Johnny from Seattle trying to imitate Robinson Canó between the 2-and-1 and 2-and-2 pitch.

And so, again, in a very crude way: The pitch clock sort of disrupts all of that all at once.

__

Juan Soto

Rosin: You know what: We haven’t talked about how the players feel about all of this.

Leibovich: Hmm.

Rosin: You talked to Padres star player Juan Soto about the pitch clock. Let’s listen to that.

Leibovich: Do you think the clock is a good thing? Like, did the times of the baseball games used to bother you? Or did you ever get impatient, sort of waiting for pitches to come and stuff, just watching a game when you’re playing in it?

Juan Soto: I feel like if you enjoy the games, you gotta give them time to think. And to see, look around and look at everything. I mean: I know for fans sometimes it gets boring. But for baseball players, they will never get bored.

Leibovich: So you were never bored at a baseball game.

Soto: No, never. Never. It’s never too long. It’s never too short. I’m just enjoying the game.

Rosin: What was your impression of what he was saying there?

Leibovich: He was saying like, “Look; this is my life. This is my job. This is what I love to do. I don’t care if you’re bored.” I mean, I’ve had many, many people I interviewed for this story say that a million different ways. Like: “I can’t worry about whether you’re entertained or not. You know, I’m gonna get fired if I lose this many games. Or if my batting average dips below  2.0, whatever.”

No one was saying, “Oh look—the ratings from last night’s game were higher than the night before. Oh, ticket sales are up around baseball. We are being more entertaining.” No one cares about that, huh? Nor should they.

Rosin: So, the players feel one way—and we, the fans, feel another. So I guess that’s why Padres star Manny Machado, in his very first pitch-clock game, was like, “No, thank you.”

After the break: Can Mark learn to love baseball again?

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Rosin: You’ve been to a pitch-clock game.

Leibovich: The first pitch-clock game.

Rosin: Ooh!

Leibovich: Well, the first spring-training pitch-clock game.

Rosin: You were in a box, sitting with all these guys, right?

Leibovich: It wasn’t a box. It was actually a couple of rows up from the field in a spring-training game, with, basically, the orchestrators of this from Major League Baseball. One of them was Theo Epstein. Another guy was Morgan Sword, who is basically the director of on-field operations for Major League Baseball, who has been putting this all in place.

Rosin: And what were you guys talking about?

Leibovich: Well, mostly we were watching the game. I mean, this is like the first day of school for Morgan and Theo. This is this thing they had been envisioning and trying to put in place for months, and even years. And this was the first game in which it was actually happening

Rosin: And were they nervous, like on edge? What was the vibe?

Leibovich: Morgan was extremely nervous. He was a basket case, and usually he’s pretty chill. So yeah, that was pretty glaring.

Rosin: Why was he a basket case?

Leibovich: He was a basket case because he had been thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong. First of all, he’s being scrutinized. Everyone in baseball is watching to see how this first pitch-clock game is gonna go off. But he’s also spent so much time talking to umpires, talking to players, talking to managers, talking to game officials, talking to clock operators. You know, it’s basically starting up a whole cabinet department within baseball that didn’t exist before.

And so obviously on Day One, you’re gonna be nervous.

—

Leibovich: So what’s your experience as a fan been during this interregnum for you? What about your son?

Theo Epstein: Yeah. I mean, my son—my 15-year-old—I can’t help but notice his lack of desire to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour game, really.

Rosin: So who is that?

Leibovich: That was Theo Epstein. He was telling me about what his personal experience is as a baseball fan during this time when he is not affiliated with the team.

Rosin: And he’s saying his son is bored? Like, can’t watch baseball anymore?

Leibovich: Yeah.

Epstein: And especially during the pandemic, I noticed so much of his life existed through gaming. Interacting and doing commerce and everything else, like all through the computer. And Fortnite—it’s like a 10-, 15-minute game. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché that the Gen Z generation grew up on their phones.

Leibovich: Yeah. The patience. it’s not a cliché; it’s brain chemistry. It’s real. It is very real.

Rosin: So it’s not just about our attention span. I guess what he is panicking about is that he’s got these sons who should be baseball fans, but they can barely pay attention for more than 10 seconds.

So it makes you feel like the future of the sport is not—

Rosin: Yeah. So this is a multitiered problem, right? So not only are older former fans’ brains adapting to a faster life and moving away from baseball; there’s also this new generation that doesn’t even see what the fuss is about to begin with, and aren’t exactly reading Moneyball and reading George Will columns and watching Field of Dreams to see what the fuss is about.

Rosin: Yes. It’s actually pretty cool that you were present at the creation of new baseball—the new era of baseball.

Leibovich: I’m glad. I’m glad you appreciate this. Because this was a momentous day. And of course it was also a very mundane day, but yeah: It felt momentous.

Rosin: Right. The first-ever game in the new era of baseball. Like, was it more fun? Did you like it? Did time move faster?

Leibovich: So the game was very crisp. It was 3 to 2; I think Seattle won. Basically, all these executives, they were rooting not for the Mariners or the Padres. They were rooting for this game to be very, very fast. ’Cause they knew everyone was looking at this as like, Oh, this is the new baseball. We want it to work.

And yeah, it was very enjoyable.

I was very glad that the game took less than two hours and 30 minutes. I know Theo Epstein was; he wanted to go take a nap. The person to my right wanted to catch a flight back to New York or wherever he was going.

Rosin: So people were living their lives. I gotta catch a flight, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And it fit into their busy lives.

Leibovich: Much more so.

Rosin: Hmm. I can’t really tell if you, Mark Leibovich, were into the game. Like, you know when you’re into a game.

Leibovich: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I’ve seen you be into a football game.

Leibovich: Yeah. Have you ever seen me be into a baseball game?

Rosin: No.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: You used the word enjoyable? Enjoyable is like a dead word. Were you into the game? Personally, I prefer just fast games; I like watching basketball, I like watching soccer. I want to maybe get on board with faster baseball.

Leibovich: Yes.

Rosin: And so I guess I’m wondering where you are. Like, are you on board with faster baseball? Like when you were there, were you like, Ah, this is gonna work?

Leibovich: Yeah. I saw a minor-league game a few years ago that had a clock, and I was like, Yeah, this is it. This is totally it. I was watching an NBA playoff game with my wife and my daughter Nell, who said, “You know, there’s something really nice about a game that you know is gonna last two hours and 20 minutes.” There’s a clock on the NBA game. And if you’re a soccer fan, it’s gonna take two hours. The commissioner of baseball himself, Rob Manfred, said to me, “Look, what in your life do you really want to do for more than two and a half hours at a shot?” Even people sitting up in the front office, or the commissioner of baseball, would be like: Wow, do we really have to watch this for more than two and a half hours?

Rosin: Yeah. Like the people who are supposed to be…

Leibovich: Management, managers, commissioners. Things like that.

Rosin: I guess I just have to accept that this is where we are now.

Like, we are just not people who have patience for a three-hour pastime. We just don’t have it.

Leibovich: Right. But here’s the thing: Games literally did not take three hours in 1969. They took much less, like two and a half hours. Or probably less than that. I don’t know; maybe people then would have had less patience. But again, these two things are moving in opposite directions.

Rosin: Let’s say we shaved enough time off baseball that it lasted the same amount of time as it did when you were a kid.

Leibovich: Right.

Rosin: Do you think you could ever feel about baseball the same way you felt when you were a kid? Do you actually feel like you could feel the same way?

Leibovich: I mean, look: Can you feel the same way about something as a 50-something-year-old as you did when you were 7 or 8?

I mean, you have a much less mature brain when you’re a kid, for better or for worse. You see the world much more clearly, much more innocently. With much less sense of proportion, and so forth. So, I don’t know, and maybe my fandom growing up is shaped by nostalgia. Now that I think about it and talk about it, I would think so—because right now I associate it with good times for my youth.

Rosin: So it feels like where we are this summer is that we—the fans—really want baseball to change. The players are somewhat resistant. The rules are in place. Do you think that this will save baseball?

Leibovich: I think it will help baseball. I think early results are that it has helped baseball.

If you go by the actual shrinking time of games, if you go by the ratings and the ticket sales and so forth, the first few months of the season have been very encouraging. The larger point is, you know: Is this putting a Band-Aid on a larger sort of existential problem that baseball is ultimately not going to be able to deal with?

Rosin: All right. So now that you’re done with your reporting, and there are no legends inviting you to sit in their boxes with them and talk to Juan Soto, are you gonna go to any games?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it comes down to…

Rosin: Was that like “Yeah,” or was that like “Yes”?

Leibovich: Yes. And I’ll tell you what probably the decider will be. I mean, I’m parochial. I care about my team, the Red Sox. The Red Sox were not supposed to be good this year. They’re kind of mediocre, but they’re an entertaining team, and I have cared about them. So I have watched. If they completely implode, I’ll probably stop watching. So like Juan Soto and him wanting good numbers, I want my team to do well. And I will probably drop off. But if I do go to a game this year, I’m thrilled that it’s not gonna go past 11 o’clock.

Rosin: Right. So it’s love, but it’s conditional love.

Leibovich: Totally.

Rosin: Like, they’ve won you back, but conditionally.

Leibovich: Hundred percent.

Rosin: I think where I’m at is: I still would rather see a Washington Spirit game. But if somebody, say a child—anybody’s child—asks me to go to a game, I won’t recoil in horror. I’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll try it.”

Leibovich: Here’s what I’ll say to you. And it’s very intimate. But I’m gonna invite you to a game. We both live in Washington, and so we’re gonna go. And whoever wants to join us can join us. And hopefully, the recoiling in horror will not transpire. And if it does, we can just leave.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checker is Michelle Ciarrocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, Kevin Townsend, Theo Balcomb, and Vann Newkirk. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

If you like it, tell some Red Sox fans or some Yankees fans; whatever. Tell all the fans.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Are commitment issues impacting our ability to connect with the people who live around us? Relationship-building may involve a commitment to the belief that neighbors are worthy of getting to know.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and offers some practical advice for how to take the first steps toward creating a wider community.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid. The managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

We don’t need you to bring along flowers or baked goods to be a part of the How to Talk to People neighborhood. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), and Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, tell me about your relationship with your neighbors.

Julie Beck: In our apartment building, it’s a huge apartment building. It’s basically the size of a whole city block. And there are tons of people there. The only people whose names I even know are my immediate neighbors, because we share a roof patio. Like, I can see them over the fence.

And when they first moved in, I remember my partner and I were gardening on the roof, And I was like, “Joe, we need to introduce ourselves to them.” And he was like, “Nope, we’re not going to.” He was like, “I don’t want to. You can do that.”

We did exchange names and say hi, and that felt like a big victory. However, we immediately thereafter went back to ignoring each other. Every time we see each other on the roof, maybe there’s a small wave—but like, that’s it.

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: It’s really strange to think that neighbors are the people who are literally closest to you, and yet so many of us don’t know them at all.

Pete Davis: You know, I’d walk around town, and I’d walk around the neighborhood and I’d be grumpy that everyone was so cold. And what are people like these days? They weren’t like this when I lived here 10 years ago. [Julie: Laughter.] But then I started practicing, you know? Well: I’m kind of like them, too, because I’m not reaching out to them. You know?

Beck: Pete Davis is a civic advocate and the author of the book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. He thinks one reason that neighbors don’t always bother to get to know one another is that our society has commitment issues.

Davis: What I noticed was that all the people that were giving me hope and giving my peers hope had in common was that they were all people who decided to forego a life of keeping their options open and instead make a commitment to a particular thing over the long haul.

Beck: So what does keeping our options open have to do with our sense of feeling like we’re connected to our community? What exactly about committing helps us feel connected?

Davis: You know, I moved back to my hometown after school. And I was gliding on the surface of everything when I moved back—just trying to get a sense of the place again—and I was feeling down on the place. I’m like, Why did we move back? Maybe we shouldn’t have moved back. Am I just moving back because I have this nostalgia? You know, all these things.

You know, when you think about becoming friends with a neighbor, those fears that I mentioned of commitment are fears that are present with you. If I have to commit every Thursday at 7 p.m. to go to this meeting, who knows what I’ll miss out on.

Beck: I do feel like there is a common refrain these days that people just don’t know their neighbors like they used to. Is that true? Was there ever a time when Americans were really good at getting to know their neighbors?

Davis: Yeah; I think it is true. I think, you know, there’s always been a spirit of nostalgia, but we actually have data to show that this type of nostalgia might be correct. The great cite here is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam: the book that was kind of famous in the early 2000s about the decline of community in America. And he has data set after data set, graph after graph, that show that this is the case.

So “neighbors” in the broad sense of the term—you know, people in your town. You look at any angle on it, and we’re seeing a decline. So between the 1970s and the 1990s, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of people attending public meetings: all major declines. Membership in religious congregations—it was 75 percent of Americans at the mid-century mark, and now, in the last few years, it crossed under 50 percent, you know?

You look at informal socializing: Putnam was able to find the national picnic data set. Where in the mid-’70s, we went on an average of five picnics a year with our neighbors.

Beck: Oh, my. [Laughter.]

Davis: And that was down to two by the ’90s.

Beck: Bring back picnics! Oh, my God.

Davis: Bring back picnics, and people doing dinner parties. The amount of people that say they have no friends—you know, in 1990, that was only 3 percent of Americans. In 2021, it was 12 percent. And so we do have numbers that show we’re in a neighboring crisis.

Beck: And well, I know we’ve already been talking about this with the spicy picnic data, but can you give us kind of an overview of how Americans’ relationship with their neighbors has evolved in the last 50 years?

Davis: Yeah. There was a famous essay even written back in the ’70s about the early rise of back patios. It was by Richard Thomas. And, you know, the front porch used to be the iconic appendage to a house. And starting in the ’70s and ’80s, interest in back patios started growing and then exploded in the ’90s and 2000s.

And now when you’re watching HGTV, or being toured in a new house or a new build by a realtor, they’re going to talk more about the back patio than the front porch. And both of those are socializing. The difference is the back patio is friends you already know, whereas the front porch is an opportunity to meet the people that start as strangers who live around you and turn them into friends that you know. Which is much less likely if the main socializing area is in the back of your house than in the front of your house.

And because it’s a front porch—maybe you don’t know this person yet. You don’t feel comfortable having them in your house. But we used to design our houses in a way that had this liminal space between kind of stranger and intimate privacy where community is built.

Beck: Maybe also a part of the barrier to talking to our neighbors is that we don’t have a lot of context for them beyond their geographical proximity. Maybe we know that they walk their dog at 8:00 every morning, but we don’t know what kind of person they are a lot of the time.

One thing that’s not given me a great ton of faith in my neighbors is I joined Nextdoor, perhaps misguidedly. And it’s a really tough space—just of people’s fears and worst sides really being on display. It’s just post after post about crime: “I’m afraid of this.” “Watch out for these two young boys that were looking at my house the other day.”

And I think people are often very reasonably wary of interacting with their neighbors in the sense that those people might be coming to those interactions with a lot of biases, unwarranted fears, and assumptions. And racism or sexism, or any of the things that can make our interactions with strangers in public ranging from extremely uncomfortable to dangerous.

Rashid: Right.

Beck: And so I do want to acknowledge that if people have that wariness of their neighbors not treating them as fully human, that is very fair. Simply getting better at talking to people is not going to dissolve racism or sexism or street harassment, or any of those deep-rooted societal problems that infect our relationships with our neighbors. That’s a much bigger problem than just “Do I know my neighbor’s name?”

Davis: I don’t want to be naive with all this messaging that every neighbor is going to be nice. And even among nice neighbors, there’s going to be this layer—just because of the culture that we’re living in—of seeing more, you know, I call it the Ring-camera culture of 2020s America. Where everyone outside your door is someone who’s out to get you, whether it’s a politician trying to get your vote or a door-to-door salesperson.

If that’s your experience of the outside world, because we live in such a low community time, it’s harder to form a community now than it is in a higher-trust society or a higher-trust era. I don’t think it’s something we all have to do alone.

If you’re the type of person that knows three other people in the apartment complex and you’re all friends, you’ve been there a long time and you’re more confident and outgoing and you have less to lose, and you’re less scared of this thing—which doesn’t make you any better, but it’s just like a quality you have—you need to give a little bit of that to everyone else. By being the person who has a little bit more wiggle room to have the vulnerability to lead in breaking the ice.

Beck: Yeah. As it becomes less common for anyone even to knock on your door, then it’s more alarming when someone does. Or you’re just expecting that when you’re at home, you’re going to be left alone.

So how can you build relationships with your neighbors that are as respectfully distant as they need to be, but also can be intimate enough to provide some support?

Davis: There’s a lot of ways to invite people to come be part of your life. So, you know, one of them isn’t knocking—it could be leaving an invitation. That will make them feel comfortable to receive this message and then make an affirmative choice to join or not. No one wants that person who immediately is way too vulnerable and intimate with you.

Beck: You know, Becca, sometimes I feel like there’s this sort of invisible barrier that feels almost physically effortful to push through before you can just say something to a neighbor.

There was a sociologist named Erving Goffman who called that barrier “civil inattention.” And it’s essentially, you know, the default polite posture that we have toward strangers in public. It’s essentially saying I see that you exist, and then you completely withdraw your attention from them and look away and look at your phone and leave them alone.

Rashid: So this is what always happens in the bathroom when you’re both washing your hands.

Beck: Yes, that’s right. The brief eye contact in the mirror, the tight smile. And then you look down and you’re washing your hands very, very solitarily. And that is exactly what happens in my building. Right.

You know, we’re walking down the hall toward each other. We’re looking down. And then there’s a little smile. And then we pass each other, and we don’t speak. That makes me feel like it would be invasive to try to strike up a conversation with them, like we’re both signaling that we want to be left alone.

Rashid: I’m going to tell you a little story about my neighbor who did invade my space.

Beck: Okay. [Laughter.]

Rashid: I’m fine, I’m safe. I was getting into one of two elevators in my building. We have our big moving-your-couch-from-floor-to-floor elevator. And then the small elevator that not more than one person should be getting into at a time.

Beck: And it was the small one, I’m sure.

Rashid: It was, of course, the small one. And he just slightly turned his body and said, “So, you’re a singer.”

[Laughter.]

Beck: Which you are, for the record.

Rashid: I think I am. And I just started profusely apologizing. I was like, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that my YouTube karaoke was playing that loud, and I was singing over it.”

But it made me extremely self-aware. As you said, someone popped that invisible bubble between us of never acknowledging that we have this relationship, whatever it may be.

Beck: So, do you wish he had just never said anything and continued the sort of fiction that you are just two strangers who know nothing about each other?

Rashid: I mean as much as it was a bit jarring, in the end it was actually kind of nice.

Beck: There is a weird intimacy that we do have with our neighbors, like he can hear what you’re playing through the walls. You share a wall. But if we pass each other, we sort of don’t acknowledge that weird intimacy, or we just pretend that we’re complete strangers with no context of each other.

Davis: Totally. And in some ways, sometimes people are relieved when the intimacy is admitted to, because it pops the tension of it all. You know, I can hear you. I can see you. I saw that you didn’t bring your trash out. Or something, you know, without being nosy. There’s always the—we don’t want uber conformity, and we don’t want invasions of privacy. But there’s something in the middle.

Beck: Yeah. My building, God bless them, they’re always trying to host these community events. So, you know, it’ll be like It’s Valentine’s Day, come down and get some free drinks and cookies. And people will go. And then they’ll just take the food and leave, or they’ll just talk to whoever they live with that they already came down there with. There’s no mixing. They’re not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we need to have some of these events run by the people themselves. You also have to have an aggressive host, where even though it seems like it’s really annoying to be the host that says, “Hey, I got to know you and I got to know you, so you should talk because you’re both nurses and you both have third-graders. You guys should talk.” You know, that is the type of thing that brings people together. It’s not just automatic of “You lay out Valentine’s Day cookies and everyone’s going to talk,” because you have to have someone that breaks the ice and brings people together.

Beck: Well, this is where I struggle, right? Because I can see how when you first move somewhere, that seems like a natural opportunity to introduce yourself to the people who live next to you or something.

But I’ve lived in my building for two and a half years now. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 10 years, and I feel like it’s too late. I don’t have that excuse of being new anymore. Now so much time has passed that it just feels really weird to randomly try to get something going now.

Davis: You know, it is nice when you just move somewhere that you have this excuse like, “Hi, I just moved here.” And people are going to give you the honeymoon period of that’s not a weird thing to say. That “get out of awkwardness free” card is gone when you’re not.

Beck: Oh yeah, it’s long gone.

Davis: But you know, I’ve always believed that this isn’t something that we need to overthink. You have to just walk up to a neighbor in some way and invite them to be closer to you, which is obviously really awkward. It’s so awkward. That’s the reason we’re all not neighborly with each other.

Beck: Right.

Davis: But everyone is waiting for someone to do that to them. You know, that’s the funny thing. And in some ways, we’re all playing a prisoner’s dilemma with each other where it’s like, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me. And they’re thinking in their head, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me, or Maybe they don’t trust me or whatever.

And the way to break that prisoner’s dilemma with each other is for someone to go a little bit above and beyond, to have an act of vulnerability. And so a gift is one example of that, which is—“I went out of my way to show you an act of goodwill, to show you not only that I’m trustworthy a little bit more, but also that I think you’re trustworthy a little bit more.”

Mention the concert you went to last weekend when you’re passing in the hallway. Mention something about your family. It doesn’t need to be totally too much information. It can just be the next level of personality.

Beck: You know Becca, even at the most sort of super-benign and cliched neighbor interaction of going over to borrow something, I’ve actually had a negative experience with that myself.

Rashid: Can you tell me what happened?

Beck: Yeah; it was a really simple interaction. I had moved into my current apartment building, and we had all of our taped-up boxes, but I realized that I had packed the scissors inside one of the taped-up boxes, and that I needed scissors to open the taped-up box to get the scissors.

I thought, You know; that’s fine. I’ll just go ask a neighbor. Everybody has scissors. That’s an opportunity to introduce myself and also get something that I need.

So I went down the hall and I knocked on the door that had a light on under it or something, where it seemed like somebody was home. And this very harried woman came to the door, and she had her phone at her ear. And she was like, “What?! What do you need?”

And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I just moved in. I just needed to borrow some scissors. Like, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but do you have scissors?” And she kind of huffed, and then went off and got the scissors.

She did give them to me, but in a very annoyed way. She probably wasn’t expecting a rando to knock on her door in the middle of the day, but I just went and used her scissors and then silently returned them. And then we never spoke again.

Rashid: Did she apologize when you returned the scissors?

Beck: No. She just took them back and just was like, thanks. I think she probably felt sort of interrupted and having her privacy impeded upon. But also I had a very benign request and was met with open hostility. So it did not make me want to knock on more doors, that’s for sure. It was just a reminder: Just because somebody lives near you doesn’t mean they’re going to be neighborly.

Beck: How can you ask a next-door neighbor for help without feeling like you’re an inconvenience?

Davis: You know, the amazing thing is that, with relationships, it all works the opposite of what our fears are telling us, the way that they work. So, you know, you think giving something away means you lose something. But actually, giving something is a gain.

You think that when you reveal something about yourself, it’ll make you hated because people will disagree with the particularities of you., But it actually makes you loved more, and being generic is what alienates you from people.

Beck: One of the things that’s been relieving, but also tough, is that on the one hand, the idea that having that kind of community you want feels so hard is not just your fault for not trying hard enough. Because there’s a lot of institutional things at work.

But then it also feels discouraging, because there’s only so much I as one person can do to change any of that.

Davis: It is none of our faults, and we shouldn’t be accountable. This is not a finger-wagging at individuals to solve this alone. Like, the answer’s just going to be all of us deciding to be nicer and reach out more.

It needs to be a mix of us individually doing that, and rebuilding the civic infrastructure that helps us do it. You know, it’s not just reaching out to your neighbors. It’s reaching out to your neighbors to talk about how we can reach out to our neighbors.

Beck: And what are some things that you’ve done in your life to be committed and stay committed to your neighbors? Do you bring them cookies? What do you do?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we are increasing our gift game.

Beck: Okay, [Laughter.] What’s your best gift?

Davis: We’re mostly doing baked goods and flowers now. And actually, the flowers is a double commitment—which is our local farmer’s market. We’ve become friends with the florist there, and we’re going to go visit the florist at their flower farm soon because we’ve decided to not just treat them as, you know, the person we buy flowers from. And then we bring those flowers to our neighbors and try to have a connection there.

The book that changed my life more than any other is called I and Thou by Martin Buber, who is a Jewish theologian from the early 20th century. He lays out these two ways of relating to the world. He calls them “I and it” and “I and thou,” or “I and you.”

And what “I and it” is: You see everything around you. You see other people, but also the whole world. You see them as objects—its—that have served purposes in your life. Only reflecting what they are to you, how they bother you, or how they help you, how they’re different from you, out there, similar to you.

“I and you” relates to all the rest of the world as “you.” They are fellow subjects. They are also players in the video game of life. They are full of life. They have a depth that you can’t understand. When you really are engaging with them, and you let all of the ways that they measure up or help you or facilitate you or bother you or compare with everything else.

When you let that fall away, you’re bathed in the light of their shared reality with you. They’re also there. And even just a small victory in that fight by building a tiny relationship with one other person isn’t a small thing. It’s everything.

Beck: That’s amazing. [Laughter.] Pete, thank you so much. It was really, really great talking to you and having you on the show.

Davis: Thank you so much. So appreciate what you’re doing with this.

Beck: Yeah, Becca: I appreciated Pete talking about tiny steps and the importance of small relationships.

I think I can get stuck in black-and-white thinking sometimes, where I’m like, Oh, the stakes are really high. Because either my neighbor is going to hate me like the Scissor Lady, or if I just do all the right things, then we’re going to be best buds and we’ll share beers on the roof in the evening. And, as with most things, I think the truth is often somewhere more in the middle.

Rashid: And there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. The psychologist Robin Dunbar has theorized that people are only able to actually cognitively handle maintaining so many relationships at once—about five deep, intimate friendships at a time. But you can actually handle about 150 or so friendships total in your sort of larger web of the friends of friends, and college friends.

So I feel like neighbors maybe fall into one of those outer rings, where it’s okay that you just sort of know their name and the name of their dog. And, you know, that type of relationship is enough.

Beck: So my very small update on my own neighbor relationship is: The other day I saw those same roof neighbors who we introduced ourselves to like a year ago and then never spoke to again. And I sort of made myself go over there and say, “Hey, you’re so and so and so and so, right?” Like, I remember your names.

I just said, “I wanted to offer, since we share a roof, and it would be really easy if you’re ever out of town and you need us to water your plants, we would be happy to.” And they were like, “Oh great! Like, same! We would be happy to do that, too.” So, we did make that tiny step toward a very small plant-watering relationship.

Beck: It’s actually a lot more than nothing to have someone right next door who’s a little something more than a stranger.

Rashid: I mean, now every time I sing, I know someone is listening. [Laughter.]

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What motivated two families to engage in the organized chaos of shared living, and how did they learn to talk through, and shape, new expectations for their family life at home?

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we hear from Deborah Tepley and Luke Jackson, who remember when they first asked their best friends to buy a house with them. The Flemings—soon to be expecting their first child—didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their real-estate agent and extended families warned against the decision, but the families shared a vision of a home where the values of community could flourish in practice.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of the How to Talk to People family. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: What are some common misconceptions about your home life that you find yourself having to explain to people?

Deborah Tepley: We’re not swingers. [Laughter.]

Bethany Fleming: I think a lot of people when we say like, “Oh yeah, we live with another couple,” they’re like, Oh, like they live in the basement.

Beck: No one’s banished to the basement.

Bethany: And then there’s like a whole slew of questions about “How does that work?”

—

Beck: Hi. I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: Deborah Tepley, Luke Jackson, and Bethany and TJ Fleming kindly invited us into their home on a Monday afternoon.

I first reported on their shared living setup back in 2019 in an article called “The Case for Buying a House With Friends.” But this was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: When Julie and I walked into their house, I felt a sort of ease and playfulness in their shared living setup. Their decor was simple and airy, with cream walls and dark accents. And two light-gray couches, where we recorded for the next few hours.

Beck: It was really cozy and honestly amazingly clean, considering two young kids lived there: one named Mary Hayley and the other named Pax. But as down to earth as they are, their home life is actually kind of quietly radical.

Rashid: It’s all well and good to live with friends when you’re young, but the concept of “settling down” can be a strong motivator in adulthood. And “single-family homes” are called that name for a reason because the expectation is a single family will live in them. As limiting as that may be.

Beck: So this all started a few years ago at a New Year’s brunch. The four friends who had met at church were enjoying some champagne, having some laughs. And then kind of out of nowhere: Luke proposed that they should all buy a house together. And all four of them were down. They were excited to try a more communal way of living.

Deborah: We are currently in our shared home, which is in Petworth in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.

Luke Jackson: And this is Luke. We are in our living room, which is great.

TJ Fleming: And this is TJ, and I would just add that it’s a bright, sunny day outside, and we can see many of the plants we’ve planted.

Bethany: I don’t have anything to add.

Beck: Okay, great. [Laughter.]

Beck: So after many logistical conversations and plenty of financial spreadsheets, they now have a group mortgage and split the costs of their home 50/50 between the two couples.

Rashid: While visiting with these families, I found myself wondering whether how we define what makes a house a home may be what limits us. I feel like our culture can pressure adults to orient family life exclusively around a romantic partner and children. But it’s not always immediately clear to me how to build community in a different way and what that looks like.

Luke: Yeah; it’s always like, “Oh, so you’re renting together?” and I’m like, “No, no, no. We bought a house with other people.” People assume that we regret it.

Deborah: I think people are very curious about the logistics of the arrangement. They’re curious about the kids and how that works. Before offering that information to someone, I do think about it: Do I want to have this conversation? And so that is something I actually do consider before sharing about our shared living situation.

Beck: How much energy do you have to explain yourself today?

Deborah: That’s right. Yeah.

Beck: Do you think it’s just that our sort of American ideal of “one family, one home,” “my home is my castle” vibes is so strong that they’re like, They must be in the basement. They couldn’t possibly be upstairs.

Luke: That’s what I think. Yeah—that people think about what their life at home looks like, and they assume that ours must be some recognizable version of that.

TJ: The message of the American dream of  “Buy your own house” ... the National Association of Realtors has been really successful in making sure everyone believes that’s for them. [Laughter.] You know, we still get most of those benefits. It’s just, we share it..

Deborah: And I think that is a difference, from either renting together or one household renting to another. There is not the same sense of shared ownership. There’s also, I think, maybe a power differential if one household owns a house and one is renting.

But we’re all in it. So if something breaks or if something needs to be repaired, we’re all invested. We all really care about the outcome. And I think that actually helps us to avoid conflict, because we’re all so invested in this property and we love this house.

Beck: And whose idea was it first to buy a house together?

Deborah: I had been pitching Luke on living in community for a couple of years. I grew up in a big family, and I really love living with other people. I loved living with roommates. And so I kept sending him different articles or podcasts about different people who are in group-house situations. And Luke had never had a roommate other than a family member before he married me. And so he said, “Absolutely not.”

And then one day he came home after listening to a podcast or a sermon that I had sent to him and said, “I think I might be open to this.” That being said, no one was more surprised than me when Luke popped the question at New Year’s brunch to TJ and Bethany.

Beck: So you were both married at the time of the New Year’s brunch.

TJ: Yeah.

Beck: And did you feel any pressure, as married couples, for your home life to look a certain way?

Luke: I think culturally, you just assume: You get married, you buy a home. You know, have a family and live like an independent, nuclear kind of family unit.

And so I think that had always been my assumption of what our married life would look like. But as Deborah and I were sort of talking about buying a home and what might that look like, and this was definitely not one of the default options. [Chuckles.]

Beck: What would people say when you told them that you were thinking of doing this? What kind of pushback would you get?

Deborah: When we talked about it with other people, everyone thought it was a bad idea, including our real-estate agent. I think most people were worried about the worst-case scenarios. What if it doesn’t work? You’re all on the mortgage. What happens when someone has kids? If it doesn’t work, how are you guys going to be able to split amicably?

Bethany: I got a lot of questions about what discipline looks like. And, do they even like kids? What if they don’t like your kids? But I felt like, you know, it’s Luke and Deborah: They’re going to love our kids. And if I am going to parent for the first time in front of anyone, I would want it to be Luke and Deborah, you know?

Beck: What was it that you wanted from your home life that wouldn’t be met by the traditional single-family-home arrangement? And what did you hope that this would provide instead?

Bethany: You know, all four of us have full-time jobs. And so when you’re living in community, we split groceries; we divide up who’s cooking and when. And, you know, there’s a lot of talk out there about how the domestic labor falls on one partner in a relationship. And so we divide that among four people.

TJ: Neither of us on our own would have purchased this house, financially speaking. We got to buy a larger property in a neighborhood that we were more excited about living in.

Luke: Yeah; I maybe approached it least practically of any of us. [Laughter.] So living even with just a spouse, right, is challenging. But it also encouraged me to grow, to be gentler, to be kinder. To be less self-centered.

And so I was sort of thinking, Wow, if living with just Deborah has done that, imagine adding more people to the mix. I don’t know if that’s panned out quite the way that I thought it would.

Bethany: Doubled in size!

Luke: Tripled in size!

TJ: Luke, you’ve become gentler and softer.

Luke: Thank you.That’s reassuring to hear. I actually think it makes us better people, and encourages us to grow less self-centered to live in community like this.

Deborah: I think that people often assume that we made this decision for financial reasons. I think it was more of a missional kind of—the desire to live in community, and to live with TJ and Bethany.

And I thought I would be a bigger person, like you imagine I’ll be really altruistic. And I think a lot of times I’m not, and I really have appreciated their grace and forgiveness toward me when I’m not a big person, or when my behavior is very poor. And so there’s a lot of opportunities for grace and forgiveness. And I’ve been the recipient of that time and time again.

Bethany: Yeah; I also just think it’s a lot of fun. I really feel like we’re not communicating how much fun we have together. Someone’s always around to talk to or hang out with.

Rashid: You know, Julie, I’m at an age where many of my friends have serious romantic partners and many even have kids. So the time for casual hangouts is understandably limited. But there has been a noticeable shift in the ease of just meeting up and hanging out spontaneously.

Beck: Yeah; that is something that I worry about a little bit—being in a long-term relationship. We’ve also been through a pandemic and just only hanging out with each other for a few years.

I don’t want us to be super-insular in our relationship. And that does happen—married people are a lot less likely than single people to hang out with their friends and neighbors. And research shows that holds true across race, age, and socioeconomic status.

So even though I don’t think we’re going to necessarily invite another couple to move in with us right now, I am trying to be more deliberate about spending more time with my friends regularly. As much as we love each other, I don’t want our love for each other to pull us away from our friendships.

Rashid: Culturally, sometimes it feels like it’s not very adult to want to live with your friends forever. So although that is my ideal scenario—to have a huge, L-shaped IKEA sectional couch where my partner along with 10 friends can all sit together—it doesn’t always feel the most realistic when it comes to a long-term living situation, where I can actually live with those sort of chosen family members of mine and make a home with them.

Beck: I mean, especially once you reach certain milestones—like if you do choose to get married or if you do choose to have kids—the expectation kind of gets even stronger that you’re going to live with just your nuclear family: just your partner and your kids.

Rashid: And the cultural and social pressures are just one part of the equation. In the case of these two families, they had to lay out and untangle their individual expectations—and fears—too.

Beck: So going into this, that’s what you were hoping for from it. What were you afraid of?

Bethany: Oh, that’s a good question. We wrote all those things down. This was a suggestion from our realtor. He was like, “Before you guys start on this process, write down all your fears, fold them up on pieces of paper, put them in a bowl, and just pull them out one by one and talk about it.” And so that’s what we did.

Beck: What else do you all remember about the bowl conversation?

Deborah: Well, we all cried. One of my responses was that they would regret having bought a house with us in a year or two years. And I just thought about how bad that would feel.

Luke: I mean, I think fundamentally, it was about rejection, right? Like, wow: They’re going to live with me, and they’re going to figure out what I’m really like. And they’re going to be like “Wish we had done a hard pass, like six months ago” kind of thing.

TJ: Similar to any relationship where, you know, something is going to change, you worry about, like, Will I lose this friend? Or Will things not be as fine? Or Will they be way different? And you know, that was, I guess, one of my fears.

Luke: One other thing we talked about—I think we talked a lot about—what happens if somebody really goes off the rails? I think several of us have had mental illness in the family, and had family members suddenly go through a mental-health crisis and change.

What if God forbid, one of us gets divorced or whatever? I remember the mental-health one being one that we all cried about.

Beck: What do you remember about move-in day and the sort of weeks and months following that?

Bethany: Oh, my gosh. I was seven months pregnant. But I do remember during that time we would all take family walks late at night. And you know, nothing fit so I looked ridiculous. And Luke and Deborah walk really fast, so they were just really walking very, very slowly. We all walked at my pace so that we could talk. We did it every night.

Luke: We all had something that we were anticipating kind of together. Getting the nursery ready. And talking through: “When is Bethany’s mom coming?” “When is TJ’s mom coming?” “When they go to the hospital, what are we going to do?” Just being a really fun period when we all were kind of looking forward to Mary Hayley’s arrival and waiting with bated breath.

Beck: How did you both decide the role that you wanted Luke and Deborah to play in your children’s lives?

Bethany: Aw, what a really sweet question. I mean, well, Luke and Deborah are the godparents to our children. That felt like a really obvious one. We want our children to experience Luke and Deborah, and just the kindness and the love that they bring to our family. I mean, we’re a family.

Deborah: I mean, we’re just part of their normal life. And they’ve never asked, “Why do you live here?”

Beck: What were the discussions about parenting in this shared environment like?

TJ: I mean, I think we’re all just on the same page. Bethany and I, we’re going to parent our children how we thought was right. I think it’s really hard to do this if you don’t have some kind of shared value system with another couple. I think you need at least some kind of shared faith system or shared non-faith system to do that.

Bethany: I mean, I think it’s helpful for people to know, “Hey, this is a strategy we’re using when this happens.” We decided early on: TJ and I will discipline our kids, and Deborah and Luke are like their aunt and uncle. They uphold the rules. They don’t encourage the kids to break the rules, right? But TJ and I provide the discipline or consequences. I think that has also helped: just that boundary.

Beck: I wanted to ask Luke and Deborah: How did you feel about committing not to live just with another couple, but with someone else’s kids? I think a lot of us who play the sort of aunt or uncle role to our friends’ kids—at least myself—I know I dip in, I dip out. You know: I show up, I show ’em a movie, I pump ’em full of sugar, and I send them on their way to their parents. But you sign on to be there for all of it, all the time.

Luke: TJ and Bethany were upfront that they were planning on having kids, from our very first conversation about this. We always knew going in, you know, that this was what we were signing up for. But it is humbling that we actually do still have the option of dipping out.

Maybe not quite to the same degree. You know, you can still hear the screaming from the bedroom. But we can actually step away and have some privacy or let TJ and Bethany deal with whatever is happening.

Deborah: I think we thought it would be a great adventure. And on the one hand, we did know we were getting ourselves into. We’d been around kids enough. But I don’t think we had an idealized or romanticized view of what it would be like to live with kids. We were not planning to have kids. We knew that. But I think we felt like this would be a good way to participate in the life of kids.

TJ: And our kids love them.

Deborah: We love their kids. We are crazy about them.

Luke: They’re very sweet.

Bethany: I think that has been one of the great joys of living together. Getting to parent with a community that I think we wouldn’t have otherwise. I think a lot of people feel isolated in their house with their kids. And on the one hand, it is hard parenting in front of the audience, you know. And on the other, I’m so glad that we’re doing it together. And so that has made a big difference.

Luke: We have a two-to-one adult-to-child ratio in the house. And I think a lot of people would hear that and be pretty envious, because it does provide more adults. Not just in terms of safety and keeping an eye on things, but just ... kids are attention sponges. And it’s nice to have more people in the house who can help, you know, kind of nurture them.

And it’s also really fun to hear the kids starting to use crazy words that I use and that Deborah uses. It’s a privilege to get to be playing a role in raising children without actually having had them.

Beck: Do you eat together every night?

Deborah: We do. Whoever is here eats together.

Beck: And the kids, too?

Bethany: Yep.

Beck: What are some of the rituals and rhythms that you’ve established in your house? Kind of week to week.

Deborah: Initially, we did a weekly house meeting. And we still do house meetings, not quite weekly. And I think part of that is just we don’t have the need for them as frequently as we did at first.

We got this idea from another group house in D.C. They said that they do a meeting every week, and they ask, first of all, what’s working and what’s not working. Everyone goes around and has to respond to both questions.

Just the little things that really can grate on you, or things that might be upsetting to you that might just fester for a long time. And so I think that’s been a good practice for us: just sort of getting things out in the open. It provides a forum for that.

Beck: What are some conflict-management strategies in your house? Do you have specific ways that you go about it?

Bethany: Having a structure for regular communication is really helpful, because you don’t feel this pressure to bring something up in the moment when you may or may not be ready to talk about it. Like, Oh, I know we’re having a meeting, and so I can just bring it up there.

Luke: Many of the lessons from marriage also apply, things like “You can’t hold someone accountable to it if you didn’t say it out loud.” You also have to say what’s working, right?

Deborah: Honestly, that question—“What’s working? What’s not working?”—is a really hard question to answer, in part because you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. And, you know, it just really forces you to talk about things that you wouldn’t talk about otherwise. So I think that has forced me to be a better communicator.

I think that’s an added benefit of living with people: You see their life so close up and personal, and you see the way that they resolve conflict and the way that they parent their kids, and all of those things. And so I feel like I’ve learned a lot. And I think I’m a better communicator because I’ve lived with TJ and Bethany.

Luke: Yeah; I would second that. Living in a community challenges you to just be emotionally intelligent, right? Is this a me problem, or is this actually, you know, maybe somebody said something that was hurtful, or they were just not thinking about it? How am I feeling and why? And is it something that I need other people to help me deal with, or is it something that I can, you know, process on my own?

Deborah: Yeah. And I think living in a community forces you to work out your own kind of marriage in the community. And there’s this infamous night where we all sat down to dinner. We sat down, and I said, “You know, Luke and I are fighting, and we need some time. And so we’re going to go work this out, and we’ll be back in 15 minutes.”

Deborah: And Bethany said, “TJ and I are fighting, too!” And I think that TJ and Luke were both like, “we’re fighting?” So we split up into separate areas of the house. And we came back after 15 minutes and finished dinner together.

TJ: I have no recollection of that; that’s hilarious.

Luke: We love each other and that love actually is based on a commitment. Right? And I think that commitment predates a mortgage, but a mortgage is a useful symbol of that as well. And so, yeah: Out of that commitment comes a desire to “Well, let’s make this work.” We want to make this work. And so how do we do that in a way that’s best for everybody?

Beck: I think what’s kind of remarkable to me about the commitment is that friendship culture in the U.S. and maybe elsewhere today is very anti-commitment, I think. And not always in a bad way, necessarily—but I think friendship is defined in some ways by its voluntary nature. You don’t have those formal commitments that you have in marriage, that you have in a nuclear family.

And so there can become this sort of sense of, you know, “I love you and you’re my friend.” But the highest truth is everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think it is rare that you would put an obligation onto your friend or accept an obligation from your friend.

Luke: Yeah, definitely. I think I’m setting healthy boundaries. Like “I need to do some self-care”—that kind of language. I think we have a kind of shared moral framework that’s based on our faith.

And, at least to my reading, at the heart of Christianity is actually “other-centered love”—that I’m choosing what’s best for you, not for me. And so I think that informs our shared living and our commitment to one another as well. And there are benefits for me. But I also want to love, and I want to serve you and your kids and Deborah, and I think that really is our starting place as a house.

TJ: Yeah; again there has to be a shared vision outside of yourself. Or why else would you be doing it? There’s many days or weeks where you want to be somewhere else; this happens to me all the time just because of my personality. “I want to move to Florida because it’s cold.” I can’t tell you how many times I say that in the winter.

But without that shared vision of something bigger outside of you, it’s not going to last more than a year or two, because you’re going to find a reason to escape. I think it’s really easy to make “community” a theoretical concept. What I’ve learned about community through living with others, including Luke and Deborah, is that community is a real granular thing in real life.

It’s the people you’re with on a daily basis, how you interact with them. It’s how intentional you are with them, and it doesn’t actually come naturally. Building real community is not an ideology. It’s a practice.

And that goes for our house. But that also goes with my other friendships. I want to have lifelong friendships outside of this house, and I have to spend time with those people, or else we’re not actually close.

Beck: Can you all still imagine any scenarios where one of you would want to move out, or two of you would want to move out?

Luke: I mean, I guess if somebody’s got a job—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—somewhere else. And then, something that we have talked about is that the kids are sharing a room right now. At some point they’ll need to not share a room together. And so, would we buy a different house? Would we maybe need to go our separate ways?

Deborah: Initially when we decided to do this together, we signed a three-year contract. And now we’re past that three-year mark, and we have a retreat every year in May where we talk about the future and sort of what the next year looks like, and what our timeline is. And so I think we just have this opportunity to revisit that every year.

TJ: There’s kind of a running clock on a couple of our careers. And so we’ve talked about that openly. It’s not like an elephant in the room or something.

Beck: Yeah. And how do you think you guys would approach it if somebody did want to move out?

Luke: So this was one of the things that we made sure that we really ironed out before we actually bought the house together. We would have the house independently appraised. If there’s one couple that wants to stay in the house, they would have an opportunity to actually buy the other couple out.

If that’s not possible or the other couple didn’t want to, then we would either sell the house and just split the [proceeds]—I think right now our equity would just be 50-50—or we could also rent the house out and split the proceeds from the rent as well. So one of those options.

Beck: Would you recommend your choice to other people?

Luke: Absolutely.

TJ: Yeah; I think they need to go through the process. [Laughter.]

Deborah: Yeah; I think so too. I think you really want to, you know, count the cost. You need to make sure you’re doing it with the right people. But as long as you can trust them in general and trust them financially, I think that’s a big part of it.

Luke: Yeah. Ninety percent of what goes on, right, is very day-to-day and very mundane, and the big questions only come up so often.

Beck: When someone puts microphones in your house and asks them to you?

Luke: Right. [Laughter.]

Deborah: You know, I married a strong introvert who would like to be in his man cave most of the time. Luke is not the only one bearing the burden of my social needs; there’s like a whole house of people to share that.

Beck: Becca, I agree with Deborah. I do think you need different people to fill different roles in your life. It reminds me of a concept called the All-or-Nothing Marriage, which comes from the psychologist Eli Finkel. And he’s kind of theorizing that people just expect even more from their marriages than they used to.

Way back when, you know, it was basically a financial arrangement. Right? And then we wanted love on top of that. And now we even want self-actualization on top of that, and to become our best selves through this relationship. And it could be very isolating if that one person is your sort of be-all end-all.

Rashid: Yeah, you know, I grew up in a multigenerational house as a kid, and my aunt and uncle would come over every weekend. And there were lots of people meeting my emotional needs as a kid, not just my parents. So whenever I saw just two parents and a kid at the dinner table at my friends’ houses, I was always interested in this sort of stark difference with my family that was sort of a chaotic, buffet-style mess of a dinner every weekend.

Beck: Sounds fun.

Rashid: It was. But I realized it’s just a totally different setup when one person or just two people are expected to fill in the gaps of what an extended family, or an extended network of people, can do. It is interesting to me that in mainstream American culture, the romantic partner is expected to be your everything.

Beck: Yeah. Like, help raise your kids and hear all of your work stories that they don’t understand and help you around the house. And they’re your go-to person for every concert and movie and anything that you do. It’s just a lot for one relationship to hold. It’s a lot of weight to ask for from anybody.

Rashid: And actually it’s been shown that relying on a variety of people to meet different emotional needs can be better for people’s well-being.

TJ: To get back to your earlier question, just on our block on this side, there’s three or four shared intergenerational arrangements, whether it’s family or otherwise. It’s actually not that weird, you know?

Beck: Yeah. If I want to suss out a friend to see if they’d be down for this, how should I broach the conversation?

Luke: I think you want to make it a compliment: “I’ve been thinking about living in community and wanting to do that intentionally. And when I thought about that, you were someone that I thought, Wow, you would be a great person to live in community with.”

I would suggest that people talk to your spouse first. “This is what I’m thinking; what do you think about that? How do you think that would impact our relationship? What would be great about it?” Not just: “What are you afraid of?”

Beck: What have you all learned about each other along the way?

Deborah: When you live together, you learn who is coming down the stairs before you see them. You learn kind of their footfall. You learn that TJ lets out a large sigh every morning as he comes down the stairs first thing. So you have that level of intimacy with people.

Luke: I’ll take the more depressing approach.

TJ: Whoa, right on cue.

Deborah: Are you sure?

Luke: Everybody in the house is shocked. Even when you change your living situation, you’re still the same person, right? All of the same things that I struggled with, living with Deborah—like, Hey, whoa, they’re still true. I’m still me. I think there’s always that temptation, like TJ said—to escape, to move somewhere else, to like, enter a new situation—and then I’ll be a new person. No; you’re going to enter in your situation, and you’re going to be the same you that you always have been. And so is that the right situation to move into or not?

TJ: I think I’ve just learned that Luke and Deborah are better people than I even thought. I can appreciate them at a deeper level than I could before we lived together. And even though yeah, we’ve had arguments or disagreements, I still think they’re some of the best, most generous people that I know. It amplifies the good.

Bethany: I like the idea of “We got to choose our family.” I don’t know; it’s just brought a lot of joy.

Rashid: And Julie, there are signs that other models of living, other than single-family homes are also becoming more normalized in our culture.

Beck: Yeah; because there’s something about the nuclear-family household that encourages people to turn inward away from the possibility of that broader community. But if you want to have those other layers of support in your life, then it takes some really intentional planning to resist the pull of that model of home life that is really held up as the building block of society.

Rashid: And maybe even a hint of rebellion.

Beck: Just a hint.

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The terms of friendship are both voluntary and vague—yet people often find themselves disappointed by unmet expectations. In this episode of How to Talk to People, we explore how to have the difficult conversations that can make our friendships richer and how to set expectations in a relationship defined by choice.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing editor of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez.

Be friends with How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

Click here to listen to additional episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Marisa Franco: “He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last minute on his own bachelor party. And he was talking about these friends and how one of them lived next to him, and I thought in my head, Those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship?

Julie Beck: Is this when I get on my soapbox?

Rebecca Rashid: Yeah, you can get on your soapbox.

Beck: Okay, so flaking … I hate it.

Lizzie Post: I think doing the thing where you just don’t show up is really not cool.

Franco: If you think it’s going to happen organically, you’re not going to have friends.

Beck: Hi. I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

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Beck: Becca, I know it might seem strange to suggest we don’t know how to talk to our friends and need a podcast to tell us how. But actually, there are a lot of common misunderstandings and conflicts in friendship that often go unspoken. The beauty and the challenge of friendship is that it encompasses so many different types of relationships, but that means sometimes friends have clashing expectations of what the friendship should look like. We don’t always talk about that explicitly. Flaking is a prime example of a kind of unspoken friction that can build up in friendships.

Rashid: What is it about flaking in particular that bothers you?

Beck: It’s not just that it annoys me. I don’t think anybody likes being flaked on. It’s this sense that it has become so very normalized in our culture and is just a routine part of social life—that you actually almost have to expect that, like, a good percentage of the time, if you make a plan with somebody that plan is going to change or get canceled.

I think we’re a little too quick to be like, If I am not in optimal, tip-top shape to show up, then I won’t show up. Or that we have to be completely at ease, completely comfortable, completely full of vim and vigor to totally hang out with our friends.

And I’m not upset if you lose your childcare and you have to back out, or if you get sick. Things happen. Life happens. I think we can all be understanding. What bugs me is that it feels just completely fine in a lot of social circles to just cancel with no explanation or the reason is just I’m not feeling up to it today or I’m really tired from work.

I think it’s kind of part and parcel with a big premium that we put on protecting our energy as like the greatest good. But I don’t know if we should protect our energy at the cost of our relationships.

Post: There’s a certain point where it just feels like, okay, do you care about this friendship?

Beck: I think that Lizzie Post could help us. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, who is a famous etiquette expert who wrote a well-known column about 100 years ago. Lizzie is now the co-president of the Emily Post Institute, and she recently published the sort of updated centennial edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette.

There’s definitely no shortage of dating advice columns or parenting advice out there. But I think what we wanted to find was some more etiquette tips, or best practices for managing those tricky conversations in friendships where expectations are less well-defined. And that’s right up Lizzie’s alley.

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Beck: I’m going to start with a big philosophical question. What do you owe your friends?

Post: We are such individuals, and just like in relationships, your love language might be different. In friendships, your friendship language is different. So what one person thinks we owe a friend, another person might think, No, that’s ridiculous; no way. So I think it’s a very, very personal question. And that makes navigating those relationships that are our friendships a little bit more difficult, and something that we want to pay more attention to. To recognize that not everyone sees friendship the exact same way that we do.

Beck: Something that I have noticed is that it feels totally normalized to flake on plans. So, for instance, if you and I make a plan today to get drinks next Friday, I’m going to feel like when Friday comes around, I’m going to feel a need to text you to ask, “Are we still on for drinks today?” And it would not be strange for you to text me the day before, or even day of, to say, “You know, actually something came up” or “I’m just not feeling up to it.” Have you observed this too?

Post: Absolutely. I think to a certain degree, it’s always been the norm that if you don’t feel well or if an emergency happens. If you’ve got a stomach bug, that’s understandable. That’s not flaking out. That’s life happening and getting in the way of fun, social plans.

Beck: Yeah.

Post: But I do think that there is a larger trend of being much more willing to let the emotional “Do I feel like it?” play a factor in whether or not they end up committing to or actually following through on plans.

Beck: Or the sense that the plans that we make are not set in stone, or what takes precedence is, like, just needing to do what’s best for you.

Post: Well, and some people even say that it’s like an insult to the friendship of getting together, that it’s like, “Oh, hanging out with me sounds like a chore for you right now?” And there are times where that’s true. We get it; like, we all have learned that bandwidths have capacities. I get it. I don’t know that we need to be leaning into that, like, every week.

Beck: Yeah. And I mean, I’ve been told that I am too curmudgeonly about this. [Laughter.] I remember planning a party and sort of complaining to someone about how I couldn’t really plan like how much food to buy or anything, because half of the people who responded “Yes” to the invite wouldn’t show up.

Post: Yep!

Beck: And the person told me that I was being unreasonable–

Post: What?!

Beck: That I needed to accept and account for the fact that this is just part of social life.

Post: I would not have been pleased if I had been told by a friend to just expect that 50 percent of my guest list isn’t going to show up for a party that they said they would come to. I would let friends know, like, as we talk about entertaining styles and preferences. I mean, these are things friends can talk about.

And you also get to be you. You’re creating your own entertaining style. You’re creating your own adult life in this world. And it might be something that you find you really value in friendship is cultivating a group of friends who really stick to their plans.

Beck: Yeah. Some of it has to be just sort of the deep-seated, like, childhood fear of throwing a party and nobody comes. Right?

Post: I have that too, yes.

Beck: I mean, if something happens often enough, is it just not rude? But just the way that things are … and we need to just deal with it?

Post: That’s a great question. The place where this one doesn’t check that box for me is that there’s enough people like you and me out in the world who don’t appreciate this, who don’t see this as a good trend. You know what I mean? This idea of committing to things and canceling very last-minute for effectively no reason other than just not totally feeling up to it, even though there’s nothing wrong with you.

Beck: Mmm.

Post: I think that this is something that’s frustrating a lot of people the same way for a good 20, 30, 40, 50 ... I think even my great-great-grandmother was writing about it. So we’re going to go ahead and say 70 years. People have been annoyed at the fact that people don’t RSVP well.

Like, there’s always going to be a couple of friends who, no matter what, show up really late. There’s always going to be someone who’s your most likely to cancel.

Beck: Yeah.

Post: There’s also always going to be the person most likely to always show up. You know, the person most likely to offer to bring something or to surprise you. You know, like, there’s the good stuff, too.

Beck: Yeah. We should give those people a medal.

Post: They deserve—yes, gold stars. [Laughter.]

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Beck: Becca, there is a really interesting study that I saw a while back where the researchers asked people how they would approach different conflicts with friends versus with a romantic partner. And generally, people expected that you would actively address a problem with a romantic partner. You would talk about it. You know, they say, like, “Never go to bed angry.” But they found that there was more of a culture of passivity in friendships, that people were more likely to say nothing and just kind of hope the issue went away on its own, or kind of quietly put some distance in the friendship rather than talking about a problem.

Rashid: Passivity in my own approach to friendships comes from a fear that being too direct may come across as aggressive, or asking for too much. It makes my desire for a deeper connection with friends, especially in adulthood, feel needy or childish. Or sometimes even inappropriate or, like, overstepping.

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Beck: Okay, so can we talk about how to practically handle these situations? If a friend flakes on me, how should I respond? Right now I feel like my only option is to just say, “Okay, I understand.”

Post: I often feel resigned to polite acceptance as well. I think that this is one of those things where, in the moment, that really is the best thing you can do. Because if they’re canceling really last-minute—like, within the day of the party—you’ve got things you’re busy doing, and you’ve got other guests that you have to focus on.

So in some ways it makes your own life easier to take that kind of etiquette high-road route. And say, “Oh, you know, I’m really sorry to hear that. If you change your mind, feel free to come.” You know, especially if it’s that I just don’t feel like it, you know? “Hey, if you find after an hour, you’ve rebounded and you’re ready to come on over.”

Beck: I mean, is there a way to respectfully say that it bothers you? Or would you even recommend doing that?

Post: This is something that I might do at a different time. It might be one of those things where you find a good moment, where you’re talking about your friendship. A moment will present itself and you can say: “Hey, you know, I got to be honest. That’s actually something that, you know, I will cop to. I feel hurt when that happens.”

Beck: This sort of “no worries if not” culture. This is a phrase that I hear a lot, and find myself using and then hate myself for using a lot. [Laughter.] Which is, you know—it feels hard or burdensome to ask friends for help, or ask them to show up for us in some type of way. So: “Lizzie, would you mind, like, pet-sitting my cat while I’m out of town? But no worries if not.” So just immediately giving you an out.

Post: Yeah, yeah.

Beck: It feels like an etiquette thing, because it feels like I’m being polite and deferential. But is being polite really equal to not asking each other for anything?

Post: It’s more so acknowledging that this person might really want to do you a favor and be there for you, and you want to let them know it’s truly okay if they can’t. I think a lot of that is about removing pressure for people. And that, I think, is polite. Like, I can find politeness in that.

Beck: Yeah; it’s very situational, I mean, maybe I just got broken up with. I’m so upset, and I’m like, “Lizzie, can you please talk? But no worries. But then there are some worries, if not.” You know? I also just feel like I don’t understand why you would think of showing up for a friend as a burden.

Post: I think a lot of it is that it can be. If you have a lot going on, if you’re going through a lot, sometimes adding that moment of someone else’s need that isn’t a partner, that isn’t a child, that isn’t a parent—you know, they don’t live with you—that it can feel like something you don’t have the capacity to do.

At the same time, it’s amazing to see what you actually still have in your reserves when you attempt a moment of giving and generosity, when you feel like you don’t have anything.

I think what I really like about modern friendships is the willingness to ask if it would be okay to lean on someone. That’s something I don’t always think has been a part of things. I don’t know that in Emily’s day, when things were really hard, just how much you got to lean into a friend, the way we lean into them now.

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Rashid: I think what stuck out to me, Julie, about our conversation with Lizzie is how this balance of sort of the American mainstream culture of individualism and the voluntary nature of friendship is a tough thing to balance. And it’s hard to know what to ask of our friends.

Beck: Totally. I mean, the thing about friendship, right, is that it is purely and entirely defined by choice, and the things we put on each other we have to decide within every single friendship. Etiquette is a really helpful framework for thinking through what to say in specific situations. But a lot of people could benefit from broader, bigger conversations about the foundational issues of their friendships: “How intimate is this friendship? What is our role in each other’s lives? What do we expect from each other?”

Rashid: Mhmm.

Beck: Like, friends are friends because they choose to be. Not because they got a marriage license, not because somebody gave birth to somebody. You choose to be friends, and so you choose to show up for each other. And when we live in a culture that is so individualistic, we can default to that kind of “you do you,” and we’ll just give to each other what we can when we can. Having any sort of understood obligation to one another can be hard. If you are expecting something different than your friend is expecting, or just getting on the same page about what this friendship is and the level of expectation that we have of each other, it can be tricky.

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Franco: I had a friend who was coming back from Mexico, and she was arriving at the airport at like midnight.

Beck: Marisa Franco is a psychologist and the author of the book Platonic.

Franco: And this is a friend I really wanted to get closer to. And I know that, you know, going out of your way to help someone in a time of need. Great way to get closer to someone.

Beck: Hot, too-hot tip.

Franco: But I’m like: Oh, my gosh, I hate staying up late. I’m a morning person. I go to sleep at, like, 10:32. Should I pick her up?

Beck: I gotta pause this conversation I was having with Marisa Franco for a second, because while we were talking I found myself thinking about Lizzie Post’s etiquette advice. And I actually think that sometimes we can be too polite to our friends. Like, maybe we’re hesitant to even ask in the first place whether they can pick us up at the airport. And that sort of over-politeness, I think, can hold us back from having deeper friendships. And with her airport example, Marisa offered a straightforward example for figuring that out for yourself.

Franco: And Julie, I literally had to ask myself, Would I do this for a romantic partner? Because of the ways romantic partners have monopolized what my brain associated with, like, deep love. So I had to ask myself that question. And when I did, I said, Yeah, I would pick her up. I would pick up a romantic partner at the airport.

Beck: Marisa is someone who’s thought really deeply about how our culture encourages us to put friendships last on the priority list. And that can lead to us being weirdly, overly polite to our friends, like we’re putting ourselves last before even talking about whether that’s what we both really want. She and I talked a lot about the communication challenges that can happen if you want friendships to be more central in your life.

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Franco: The model of friendship that we have is just so threadbare, more threadbare than it feels like it’s ever been—that this is just someone who we go to once-a-month happy hours with.

Beck: Yeah. It’s so interesting to me to see the way that friendship is defined by flexibility, in a way that no other relationship is. There’s no specific role a friend has to play in your life.

If I introduce you to somebody, and I say, “This is my friend Marisa,” that could mean anything from “We’ve known each other since the day we were born and have never been apart” to “We get coffee at work sometimes.”

Every friendship is different, and it has to be designed by the friends themselves. And of course, the endless possibility is a strength of it. But do you think it can also be overwhelming to people?

Franco: Yeah; definitely both things. It’s something that I love about friendship, because it’s like whatever need I have, I can get met through friendship. Like, we could be platonic life partners or we could hang out twice a year.

But the slipperiness of that is that, I think, a lot of the times there is conflict in friendship—because this is my understanding of friendship versus yours. You’re like, “Friendship is trivial and not something to put a lot of effort in,” and “Good vibes only.” And I’m like, “Friendships are deep and sustaining and profound relationships for me.”

And if we have that different view of friendship, you’re not going to show up at times when I really need you. And you’re not going to expect me to get upset, because if I had your expectation, I might not have gotten upset.

I was talking to a friend’s husband. He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last-minute on his own bachelor party. Everyone had to pay a thousand dollars to go to his bachelor party for like two nights.

Beck: Nooo!

Franco: A thousand dollars to go to his bachelor party for two nights. And he was talking about these friends, and how one of them lived next to him. And I thought in my head, Those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship? Like, that is not how I define friendship.

And so that made me think of the difference between “good friend” versus “good company.” Good company: I like you as a person. We enjoy our time together. We have good conversations. Good friendship: A friend is someone you invest in. It is a commitment. It is: I’m showing up in your times of need. It is: I’m doing things that sometimes might inconvenience me, because I’m thinking about how much they’ll mean to you. It is: I’m going to celebrate your successes. It’s: I’m going to follow through with what I say that I will do to the extent possible. It’s, basically: I’m considering you, and I’m considering your needs. In a lot of our culture, we’re stuck on “good company” and we haven’t gotten to “good friendship.”

Beck: How do you set those expectations in a friendship when it is a voluntary relationship?

Franco: With communication. Like, I’ve had to tell friends, for example, “I would love to hear from you more. I notice I’m often the one here reaching out. Would you be open to that?” And it’s taking that risk, right? Because it is a risk.

Because that could lead them to say, “This person expects too much. I’m gonna back away.” But it could also lead them to say, “Yeah; I’m going to show up, and I’m going to reinvest, and I’m going to make sure Marisa feels like she’s in a reciprocal friendship.”

It’s also okay to just talk about it in a more upfront way. Like, I went on a retreat with some friends. I guess it was like a series of questions that went around in regards to like, how do we support each other as friends? And one of the questions was like, “Do you like when friends show up at the last minute at your house?” Oh, it’s a helpful question to ask. You know, like sometimes I’m in your neighborhood; I’m like, Should I reach out? Should I not? If I don’t ask, I might assume, No. And then there’s a missed opportunity to connect. So, yeah.

Beck: The showing up last-minute—well, first of all, I feel like that’s something that always happens on TV shows, right? Like on The O.C., they were always just walking over to each other’s house to have a serious conversation without ever, like, calling to say, “I’m coming over.” And it feels very unrealistic.

And at the same time, I do have a friend who lives around the corner who will sometimes text me like, “I’m walking by your place. Do you want to come down?”

I think something that I’ve observed is a sort of strange politeness or formality in the way that people sometimes interact with their friends. For example, you know, we text to set up a time to call instead of just calling. Are we just avoiding inconveniencing each other? Why would that be such a worry?

Franco: Yeah. I think a lot of the times we fear imposing; we fear burdening people. But like, the biggest burden we place can sometimes be our silence, because we want to be polite. And yeah—I think people think This is me not imposing. This is me trying to respect or understand a friend’s boundaries. But the thing is, we don’t actually ask what they are. What I tend to see is it’s more from a place that This friend doesn’t want to hear from me or This friend will be burdened by me.

So thus, It’s the kind act for me to do less. Let me not reach out when they’re going through all this grief, because they probably want their time alone. You know? So one thing that I always talk about with making friends is assume people like you, because it’s going to trigger a set of behaviors—warmth, openness—that is going to make that more likely to be true.

But I also think the more we assume people like us, the more intimacy that we have with them. So the more we assume They’re just going to want to hear from me on the phone. I don’t have to set up this time to call. I’m assuming that you love me.

Franco: I teach a class on loneliness. And one of my students is like, “I just think if I had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night, like, who could I call?” And I’m like, “How would you feel if one of the friends that you made reached out to you in the middle of the night because they needed help with going to the hospital?” He says, “I would feel totally honored that they picked me.”

Beck: Yes.

Franco: And the problem is, when it comes to our glitchy brains, when we’re predicting how we come off, we tend to be a lot more cynical and negative than what is the truth.

Especially with asking for help from friends, I get really nervous about it, and I take myself through that exercise where I’m like, Well, what if this friend asked me for the same thing? How would I feel? That’s probably the more accurate outcome.

Beck: Is there a sense that we feel like we need to be deferential to everything else that our friends have going on in their lives to the degree that we deprioritize ourselves before they have a chance to deprioritize us?

Franco: Yes; I think that’s right. You know, there is this theory basically arguing that we need to operate along two poles: of protecting ourselves and protecting the relationship. And there’s a lot of people who are often in this place of protecting themselves by not reaching out and being overly deferential. Not being vulnerable, not initiating. But they don’t often realize that there is a cost to all that self-protection, which is your relationships.

Beck: I feel like to some degree, there’s a feeling that we’re supposed to just accept whatever it is that our friends are able to offer, Or that the only acceptable response is—“It’s okay; I understand.” That the highest value, or the truest truth, is that everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think that’s so stars-and-stripes American. I don’t know if it’s that way everywhere. I think maybe it would be helpful if you can explain what individualistic boundaries are, and what the boundaries you’re seeing that you think are overly self-focused look like.

Franco: Yeah. I think the self-focused boundaries look like, in a sort of overarching way: I’m going to fulfill my needs no matter what your needs are. Which looks like, “Hey, you know, if you call me really upset at 10 p.m., I’m not going to answer” or “Hey, like, I don’t need to make time for you, because at this time in my life I’m very, very busy.”

To me, setting a boundary is a communal act. It’s like: “I set this boundary for myself so I can invest in our friendship in the long term and not get burned out.” And it’s: “I’m going to consider your needs when I set this boundary.” And it’s almost like: “I’m going to set this boundary and also offer an offering like, ‘Oh, I’m not free to talk at that time. What about another time?’” Or even like, you know, “I’m not free to come to that, but I’m rooting for you, and I’m supporting you.” Sometimes it’s just for affirmation. That’s the offering.

Beck: Do you have a sense of why you think that is a genre of boundaries that’s become popular? Is it sort of self-care, and “I need to put my own oxygen mask on before I can put on yours?”

Franco: Yeah. I think about a lot of friendship behaviors there’s an emotional incongruity. What I mean is that your experience of this act is very different from your friends’ in a way that you’re not always privy to.

So you might set this boundary, thinking about: Oh, I’m really busy, and this is going to benefit me. But when your friend receives that boundary, they’re feeling like: I’m so alone, and I have no one in this moment when we really, really need someone. And so there’s just this, I guess, this disconnect between our two emotional worlds in that moment.

Because if we’re only thinking about our reality, it makes a lot of sense. But when we think about our co-realities—our reality and the other person’s reality—then we might realize that even if this act benefits us, the costs for our friend are far greater.

You know, when you have a healthy relationship, what happens is you begin to include them in your sense of self. So there’s a disconnect happening when you’re willing to completely upset and let down your friend to meet your own needs.

Beck: Yeah.

Franco: And that’s kind of what I’m referring to with these individualistic boundaries, which is like: I’m going to get 100 percent of my needs met. Even if zero percent of your needs are going to be met.

The communal boundary is to protect the relationship. The individualistic boundary is to protect yourself.

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Beck: So, Marisa, I’ve been reporting on friendship for a long time. And when we’re discussing kind of how we make friends, and how do we maintain those friendships, I feel like the conversation often stops at this very simplistic platitude of “friendship takes work,” and that’s very vague and general. But I’m also wondering with your perspective as a psychologist, whether you see anything kind of dicey about suggesting that friendship is labor.

Franco: I think so. [Chuckles.] I mean, what are all our associations with “work”? Like, negative. Something that we have to do, Something that we need to get compensated for to be able to do. And I think when we use those capitalistic terms for friendship, we not only are applying that term, but the web of associations that we add to that term—the baggage of all of those associations.

So I like the idea of friendship taking effort rather than friendship taking work. I want to convey that in friendship, we’re going to be inconvenienced. In friendship, we’re going to do things that we don’t want to do. In friendship, we are going to have to go out of our way and take initiative and be proactive and all of those things. And I think those all fit into the realm of “effort.” But when we say “work,” it’s almost like it’s something that we don’t want.

Beck: I mean, I don’t think most people’s intentions are usually bad. It just seems like some of the norms in our culture are steering us toward undermining our friendships without maybe realizing it. Where if it is something that you really want to prioritize in your life, it feels a little bit like swimming against the current.

Franco: It does. It can feel like unrequited love a lot. But I will say, there’s also subcommunities, like queer communities. [Chuckles.] Where it’s a lot more common for people to put a lot more value on friendship. And there’s talks about asexual communities; there’s talks about platonic life partners. I think queer communities are the pioneers of friendship and could teach hetero people a lot. I don’t know if you’ve heard the term “relationship anarchy,” but it’s, um…

Beck: No; can you explain it?

Franco: It’s one of my faves. It’s this idea that we don’t need to use what society has told us as our guideposts for the value that we place on different types of relationships. We can choose what resonates most with us. And my choice is: I want to value, again, friends as much as a potential spouse. Like, that’s the hierarchy that I would want in my life in the larger anarchy framework. If you start from a place of anarchy, where would you want friends to be in your personal valuing system?

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Rashid: So when I was out of town for a week last week, Julie, one of my best friends texted me saying, “Okay, I’m going to be ‘full, needy boyfriend’ when you’re back.” [Chuckles.] And we hadn’t been talking for a week or so, because we were both too busy. And I just thought it was so nice that she sent that little note.

And the first thing I thought was: A lot of times when we’re trying to express to friends how much we miss each other or love each other or need each other, it’s kind of as if we only have the language of romance to express that. And sometimes we use the language of love that we understand through romantic partnerships; [it] expresses that we have that need for our friends at all.

Beck: Right. Like, it was very cute and sweet that she said that. But also, like—you don’t have to minimize wanting to hang out with your friend by, like, pretending you’re acting like a needy boyfriend. Like, you are allowed to miss your friend.

Rashid: Right. Totally.

Beck: That study I referenced earlier that was talking about a culture of passivity—it was sort of focusing on conflict. But I would venture to say that there’s kind of a culture of passivity in the good times as well.

You know, where friendship is too often like a relationship of convenience, or will go with the flow. And “I’ll see you when I see you.” And it’s hard to actually keep up a friendship if you’re being passive in that way and you just expect it to come effortlessly.

Rashid: Right. And I genuinely don’t know how a lot of my friendships would function if we didn’t put in that quote unquote “work.” Because, you know, two of my best friends live outside of the U.S., and we are in different time zones and don’t catch each other easily. And usually one of them tries to call me super early in the morning, my time—which half the time I can’t even pick up the phone.

It’s just emblematic of that sort of small gesture you can make for a friend. And it shows me that, you know—they tried to catch me, and if they could, they would be on the phone with me right now.

Beck: And do you feel like that, quote unquote, “work” and effort that you put in to try to catch each other in different time zones is a burden to you?

Rashid: No, not at all. It’s the smallest, you know, gesture of love that we could sort of show each other, and takes almost no effort.

Beck: Yeah. But that’s why I think it’s so strange that it’s like, “Oh, the work of friendship is some hard or negative or burdensome thing.” Like, you’re so happy to see that missed call. And I’m sure she was so happy to call you.

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That’s all for this episode of How to Talk to People. This episode was produced by Becca Rashid, and hosted by me, Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing producer of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez.