Elizabeth Day Knows How To Fail

a couple of years earlier. She'd already blown things up a little bit by quitting her job as a journalist at the observer newspaper and kind of randomly she decided to start a podcast called How To Fail, where she interviewed celebrities about their experiences of failure to reassure herself and everyone about our own failures. But this interview isn't about failure, even though Elizabeth's podcast

has become iconic. Today, we're talking about friendship and the fact that Elizabeth is addicted to it, she calls herself a friend aholic. She's written a book about it. And while that may sound like a non problem, you can have too many friends. It very much is a problem and you're about to hear why my friendships underpin every aspect of my life. I don't think I could be married or be a mother or even do my job without my friends.

But friendship comes with challenges. And Elizabeth points out that we have a whole vocabulary to explain and understand the ups and downs of romantic relationships. But friendships can also be really, really complicated, sometimes even more complicated than romantic relationships, especially when they end abruptly or go toxic or become one sided or just fade. There's nothing more draining than

clinging to a friendship with someone. Just because 20 years earlier, you worked together or went to school together. Elizabeth said there's a big difference between being good at friendship and being a good friend. And in 2020 she realized she had a big problem if you stick around. You'll also hear my conversation with Elizabeth about her hugely successful podcast. How to fail and why a recent essay that she wrote about fertility privilege sent me into a rage spiral.

Enjoy this conversation with Elizabeth Day. I did. This story starts with the moment you realized you were a friendship addict. Can you tell me a bit about that?

of people who I often liked but didn't know that. Well, they were people that I'd fallen into a kind of acquaintanceship with who I might have met sitting next to at a work function who I might have exchanged a few words with it, yoga class. And suddenly I found myself in this dynamic where for whatever reason I felt that we should be friends capital f friends. And what that meant was that I was trying to meet so many other demands that I wasn't spending enough

time with the people who were the most nourishing to me. Actually, those people who are in my inner circle who I am incredibly close to, who have known me for many years and who would never place obligations on my time because they know how quote unquote busy I am. And I thought, well, there's something out of sorts there and it felt like the equilibrium needed to be addressed. And that was the, the beginning of thinking about friendship and what it meant to me. And what I realized

was that I was a friend aholic. It's a term that I have coined in order to denote exactly as you say, an addiction to friendship, almost a codependent relationship with friendship.

And what I mean by that is that at some point in my life, it became more important for me to be surrounded by people, to have a lot of what I would term friends rather than to spend the appropriate amount of time building up my own sense of self worth or spending the appropriate amount of time focusing my energies and my love on a core group of people who were always going to have my back. And for me, the roots of that came from secondary school. When I grew up in Northern Ireland, I didn't have

a great time at secondary school in Belfast. I was bullied. I felt very alone, isolated, scared. And when I changed schools, it became the most important thing in my head to make as many friends as possible. It didn't matter who they were. It, I was making no judgment call. I just needed to feel that I was accepted by a tribe of people bigger than myself. I maintained that mindset of thinking. The most important thing is numbers because I can't be left on my own.

And actually it became unsustainable. And I'm sure many of your listeners will relate to this because when we try and spread ourselves so thinly so that we're trying to meet everyone's demands in our busy, personal and professional lives. Actually, what that means is that you're not doing yourself a service and you're not doing those other people a service because you're not giving them your best self. Every time, you're just too exhausted to have the energy to turn up as your full

self in every single scenario. So that is a brief summary of what I believe a friend of holi

And that is the number of connections that Dunbar believes the human brain can cope with where you will know a salient fact about that individual's life where you will be able to place them immediately, you know, their name, you know, something about their context. 100 and 50 is the number of people you would invite to a big wedding for instance. And it's a number that is replicated again and again through history. So it's the average size, for instance, of

a medieval village. It's the average size of a Christmas card list in the days when we all still sent Christmas cards on pieces of paper. And that's Dunbar's number. And that's an interesting number because I think what I was doing when I was at the extremes of my, my friendship addiction was I kept trying to accumulate more

and more people. And I have to say when I say that it sounds rather clinical and it wasn't, these are all people that I liked and that I felt some sort of kindred connection with, but it was ultimately unsustainable because Dunbar's number says in order to have a meaningful connection and context with someone, the human brain can only really go up to 100 and 50. Now, a few years after that, Dunbar evolved this theory into Dunbar's layers, which is the idea that the 100

and 50 numbers still stands. But within that there are different layers of friendship and there are different layers of relationship that will mean something different and that will be able to meet different needs. And the innermost layer he says goes up to five key relationships. So that could be five really meaningful friendships.

They are the ones that you will call at 4 a.m. when something goes wrong, they are the ones who will have your back, who think the best of you who you can pick up with instantly where you left off, even if you haven't seen each other for a while, they are your closest friends and they're the ones that need nurturing and they're the

ones that need. The bulk of your time and time is very important here because there's been lots of other research done that shows it takes 200 hours at least to know someone to be able to call them a friend. And Dunbar says that if you have a meaningful romantic relationship, if you get married, if you have kids, that will generally cost you two of those key five relationships.

in my life. But I misunderstood the fundamental nature of friendship, which is that there are different kinds and actually by spending too much of my time trying to meet the needs of those outer layers in the same way. And then to the same level as I was trying to meet the needs of the inner layer, I was doing a disservice to the people who were closest to me. So those are two Dunbar numbers that really help my own thinking.

And in terms of being a good friend, you know, the way the book works and you interview different friends who have different roles in your life and you speak to one friend who's an older friend called Joan and she talks about the most important thing in friendship is reciprocity. Like maybe not every day it's completely equal. But, you know, sometimes someone needs to lean in or some person isn't

able to give as much. But when you've got that many friends, is it that they all want to be your friend, particularly since you've become successful and high profile and famous in the last few years. Have you found that you haven't evolved from thinking? Oh, if this person wants to be my friend, I have to be their friend too because I got chosen

I am so grateful to it and to my friends and I wanted there to be a language to express how much it meant to me. But you have to give it your time and attention for that to be a reciprocal friendship. It absolutely requires a great deal of importance in your life. You need to create space for it. And so there has to be a difference between being friendly to someone in yoga class and actively pursuing such a meaningful friendship. And I think you have identified definitely an issue for me.

There's a number of things going on for me, which I one of them is I for whatever reason, have a fundamental lack of self esteem. That is part of my life's work is to sort of work out why that is. And I think if I can generalize a bit of a gender, a lot of women possibly feel the same because if like I did, you grew up in the eighties and nine nineties, we were conditioned in many ways to try and think about what other people wanted at the cost of

what our own needs and desires were. And it became very difficult to understand, to name those needs and desires. And so I think I still am in a bit of that head space and I have to really check myself every single day that because there's part of me when I make a connection with someone you're right. I feel the glow of that. I feel approved of. Yeah. Like I've

of where that can lead to. Because friendship as a term is so broad, encompasses so much that it also means it's diffuse and the person that I'm having a connection with might have vastly different expectations of what friendship is and what I'm able to offer. So I think I've got a lot more honest with myself about the capacity I have to pursue any new friendship and hopefully a lot more honest with the other person.

And it doesn't have to be as clinical as saying, by the way, I only have two hours a week to give to this. It can literally just be setting nonverbal boundaries where you're not instantly going to reply to a text that they send you, you might leave it 24 hours that in itself communicates something that is clear and worth communicating at the outset of any sort of platonic relationship.

And that's very kind of you to say that I have grown in profile over the last few years, I have struggled claiming that because I don't want to sound like an egomaniac. No, you're famous now. I don't know if I am. Well, thank you for saying that. I, I don't, why do I struggle with it so much I think because it feels like fame is for other people. Famous for Cate Blanchett Fame. Fame is also something that

in my head is quite two dimensional. So you don't really know the person, you have an image of them. Whereas I feel that if anyone has ever engaged in my work, listened to a podcast, read a book, you do actually know me. That's the

So that must be something to adjust to because people not only would like to be friends with you, but they think

beautiful gift in and of its own right? And although I will try my best to reply to it, it doesn't have to be an ongoing relationship.

And I think increasingly because we're increasingly versed in social media, I'm very lucky that a lot of my listeners and readers and followers are understanding of that and I'm very upfront about it and say, I'm really sorry, I can't reply to everything, but I do read them and it means so much to me and I ensure I think there are a few things worse in this world than feeling unseen or ignored. And part of my role I believe is to try and

make people feel seen. But that doesn't have to be a full blown friendship every single time. And interestingly, if I can name drop for a second because she's a total hero of mine. And I met her recently and I sat next to her at dinner,

Elizabeth Gilbert, who I absolutely love and adore. And we, we were talking about this because can you imagine like the amount of people including me, the amount of people she has wanting her not only to be their life guru, but their best friend and she said she'd been taught this thing by a spiritual teacher about how, when you're having this sort of connected beautiful conversation, this two way exchange of affection and ideas, how she

now says this thing in her head. She says, I appreciate your magic, but I don't need to take it on. I love that. I said to her as she told me that I was like, are you doing it right now? She was like, yes, yes. And I, I've started doing that because actually I think just telling yourself that in your head is really helpful and it's not just for people who have

a profile, it's for anyone who struggles with boundaries. If you, when you find yourself in a situation where you're at risk of blurring a boundary and you're at risk of saying yes to something you don't necessarily feel wholeheartedly is a yes. If you just want to say in your head, I appreciate what you're offering, but I can't take it on right now. I respect it, but it's not part of me. I find that's really helpful because it means that I remind myself not to overpromise and under deliver.

flirting involves when there's a romantic dynamic at play. Whereas with a platonic connection, it is literally that feeling of, I would love to know what you think about the world and in hearing what you think about the world increase my understanding of who we are. And I love that. I have innate curiosity. Some might call it rabid nosiness. II. I really want to know, you know, with you now, I just want to know everything about your son and the fact that you're a grandmother and

that your daughter-in-law gave you mag. But I want to know where you grew up. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. I think it's beautiful and I love it when I find someone who is equally as engaged in that idea. And it's partly why I love reality TV. Some of because it teaches me more about how humans interact. I think it's just that I've got a lot clearer about

where that ends and where a true friendship starts. And the ones that now at the age of 44 I'm willing to invest precious time in

life partners. But she's kind of like you're the person that she does life alongside, which, uh, a lot of women will hear that and think, oh, I would love that because not everybody does have that kind of friend. But I want to ask you about the challenges of being best friends with a therapist because something that I've

noticed can be really damaging in friendships. And a couple of friendships I've had, have nearly run off the road at various times for me where one of us starts playing therapist to the other and giving advice to the other and it turns into, well, here's what you should do. How do you avoid that when your best friend is an actual therapist?

So I, I'm in a dynamic with her where I genuinely like I seek her counsel. She's one of the two people and she's probably the most important. She, it's Emma and my husband that I will go to for advice if I'm really struggling with something. If I'm not sure about what decision to make, if I'm not sure how to communicate it, I'm extremely conflict avoidant. They're really good at

helping me handle that. And I will always go and ask her and then she will tell me what she thinks and it's so unbelievably helpful, but it's always that way around. Emma would never therapize me unless I asked her to. And I feel incredibly blessed by this best friendship because there's such a confluence of her knowing me so well. And also her having this extraordinary professional expertise to help me through life challenges when and if I

need it. And if Emma does ever feel that she needs to step in, if, for instance, she feels I'm unsafe and that has happened in a past romantic relationship. And she did feel that she had to intervene, which was very uncharacteristic for her. She will always do it as a question. So she would always say, have you thought about this or how are you feeling about this? Rather than coming in saying, I think you should leave him because I think it's toxic. And actually, she's taught me so much because

I've gone wrong with that in the past. And actually the one time that Emma and I had a mild falling out that neither of us ever want to speak about ever again. It was in our twenties and she was in a toxic relationship and I did do that intervention where I was trying to therapize her by giving her a statement of you should leave. And I don't think that that's ever really appropriate. I think one of the key facets of meaningful friendship is the ability to listen

judgmentally and Emma utterly exemplifies that. Now, the only thing is, and she won't mind me saying this because we've laughed about it when your best friend or maybe you are in a romantic relationship with someone who is training to be a therapist. Now, when they're training, you have to be

but then there'll be like bigger stretches. So maybe one friend will become a Trump supporter or they'll have a baby or they experience something really difficult. She says that stretching can have a positive impact in terms of the resilience of your friendship. But what happens when something just stretches too far? Can you talk a little bit about

And so you will stretch your muscle. And as you say, it can be positive because just like stretching your physical muscles, you end up having more capacity because you're willing to do that. But you're right that there are certain friendships that ultimately either of you will think. I don't know if it is worth stretching. I feel like I'm stretching to the

point of my muscles snapping. And I feel that I'm doing more of the stretching or they're doing more of the stretching and it's not reciprocal anymore in the way that it should be. And that can be for any number of reasons. As you identify, it can be one person having a baby and the other person struggling in fertility. And I've had that experience too or as was the case with my friend, Ella finding yourself in a vastly different life phase and moving geographically far away from each other.

And Ella is someone that I mentioned in the opening chapter of the book because it was part of the function of my reassessment of friendship during lockdown was that I really evaluated the stretching that I was doing. And whether all of the friendships in my life required or could accommodate continued stretching to that level, and Ella was one that couldn't

and it was for a number of reasons. It was that and I had bonded in our twenties when she was so much fun and we would go out and have lots of fun, capital letters together and we'd drink and we'd get up late and we didn't have jobs that were that important at the time. And it was, it was for a very

specific phase in our lives. And then as we grew older I knew that I wanted to try for a family and I started doing a lot of fertility treatment and Ella had never wanted Children and she couldn't understand that.

And that's absolutely fine. But at the same time as not being able to understand that or I felt to make the kind of cognitive empathetic leap to try or to ask me questions about it and to listen to what I was experiencing, she began to feel, I think quite resentful that I wasn't available for her in exactly the same way that I had in the past as the fun friend who could go out. And, and I've already mentioned the fact that I'm extremely conflict avoidant.

And I think that makes me cowardly. And so for a long time, I wasn't being honest about the friction that I felt and I was trying to do that thing of making communication slightly less frequent and, and during lockdown, clearly, Ella was undergoing her own reevaluation and she to her credit, I mean, there was a Facebook message involved which I go into more detail in the book that really, I thought, oh no, I don't think there's any return from this, but she ended up sending

me a text saying I feel that there's a distance between us. What's that? I'd really like to know. And I honestly, I'm so grateful that she did that and it was very brave of her because it meant that I felt safe being honest. But loving in my response and I replied saying, I think you're right and I think that we're in different life phases and it's nothing negative about who we are as people. It's simply that there's too much stretching involved to meet each other where we once did.

And in the end, we carried on the conversation by text. And in the end, I said, you know, I wish you nothing but love and all the happiness in the world. But I think we're in different places right now and I have my own stuff and I know that you have yours and I send you love and she reciprocated and it's one of the most evolved things that has ever happened to me. And if I'm really honest, I actually, as a result of that, it sounds odd because Ella is no longer an active day to day friend

in my life. But I feel closer to her. I feel that we know each other better because we created the space where we could be honest about that. And our friendship is in no way, a failure. It's like we've protected the beautiful thing that it was and that it might in the fullness of time become

again in a different phase of our life. And I'm a huge advocate of the fact that a friendship ends or moves into a different evolution does not mean that you have failed that it's a negative because my relationship with Ella and my memory of her and the things that she taught me of life will forever shape how I live. And that's my way of

still being an active dialogue with that friendship. And so that was the first time that I've had a friendship breakup where it felt that we were both grown up enough and evolved enough to be honest about it. And it was a really positive experience.

one of my three closest friends. And it was an incredibly shocking thing to happen and it triggered a slow motion grief. The likes of which I have never experienced before or since it's a very specific kind of grief because you're right that when you're ghosted, someone drops out of your life, there is no explanation. And so you are left with your own narrative.

And if you are someone who tends to veer towards self criticism, who has lots of feelings of guilt, you end up thinking you must have been an awful, horrible person. And that's how I felt for a really long time. And what happened with Becca is that it was one of those friendships that I was too quick to fall into. So it's taught me a lot in that respect. I went through a phase in my thirties of going to spin classes and enjoying the pumping music and the adrenaline instructors.

And I would always be skulking in the back row because I never wanted anyone to see me sweat, absolute buckets onto the floor and failed to keep up the tap back rhythm. But Becca came in one day and just, she was one of the people who wore the most incredible sort of leopard print two piece gym sets and she clipped into the bike in the front row and could follow everything that the instructor was telling her to do. And

she was just so impressive and charismatic. From the first moment I laid eyes on her and we bonded after that and we kind of met in the shower queue afterwards and then that turned into a coffee and then that turned into cocktails and then we were having dinners and I was going through a really difficult time in my personal life. So I had been married and my first marriage was in the process of imploding, although I didn't quite know it then. And Becca at that time was also in quite an

unhappy place in her personal life. And so there was an immediate sense of bonding there. And I think that what happened is that we saw ourselves through a really difficult phase where we felt that our sadness was matched in each other's sadness. And so we became very close, very quickly and time moved on. And I got out of my first marriage and I became single and I started dating and I quit a job that hadn't been satisfying me and

things started going a little bit better professionally. And I moved into my own rented flat around the corner by the way from Becca who suggested that she was like, we can hang out all the time and the hangouts never materialized because I now realize that my life was moving on and I still absolutely loved Becker and had loads of space for her. But I don't think that she was ready to move on from

her own sadness or couldn't. And therefore being close with me was like holding a mirror up to something she didn't want to see reflected. And I think that was the start of this distance. So I would suggest meeting up for dinner and she would say, oh, can we make it a coffee instead? And it just became briefer and briefer until I got to the stage of thinking, I don't want to force her into something. Maybe she's going through her own stuff and I should give her space.

book who belongs to my past. So I was walking up the street and I saw Becca on the other side of the road and I saw her seeing me, you know, you know, when someone clocks you and our eyes briefly met and then she just turned away and carried on walking and it was so shocking. I had been caught dead in the street. That was really my final verdict. I was like, oh, ok, I get it now. She does not want to be my friend anymore. And that was a very difficult thing to come to terms with

many, many months after that. I met up with another former friend of hers who the same thing had happened to. And she said that Becca had felt suffocated by my closeness and I could have a lot of sympathy for that looking back because actually, I did think Becca was amazing. Do

for me. And because I was at that time, insecure and flailing in the rest of my life, I think I probably latched on to that. And so I could understand from both perspectives what had happened and that understanding has given me a lot of love and fondness for the friendship that we had again, like Ella and I've had to do that work myself because I haven't had someone to speak with about it and

to work through it with. But I also understand that sometimes friendships can be so difficult and so nuanced and so complex and sometimes you can love someone so much that you just can't communicate what it is because you know that it's gonna hurt them. And sometimes it feels like the path of least resistance is just to drop out of their lives without a word. And so I have great sympathy for what she must have gone through. And I have now moved on with love from what happened

to me. But I'm really glad I wrote that chapter because I knew that if I was going to tell the truth about friendship in this book, I also had to tell the things that were really uncomfortable for me that didn't paint me in a particularly good life. But that were about my being honest about what this thing is that we all value either because we have it in our lives or because we don't and because we're lonely and we want to understand more about it.

And writing that chapter was really difficult. But it was also cathartic ultimately because I was able to put into words how I felt about it. And it gave me more of an insight into what I think was going on in Becca's mind. But the amazing thing about it has been the resonance it seems to have had with readers because so many people have got in touch with me to say the same thing happened to them.

And that's been really reassuring in one way that it wasn't necessarily just me acting like an awful suffocating person that it's happened to lots of people. And it's because we don't have the language.

but so little around friendships. You know, even the idea that a friendship could end is like we expect our romantic relationships to end mostly, or we're certainly not that shocked when they do. We've all experienced that. But the idea that friendship should last forever, that's almost our default. And when they don't, it can be really confronting, can it?

expectation of romantic love with romantic love. There is a belief, an assumption that you might have a high school sweetheart. But it's quite rare for that high school sweetheart to turn into your lifelong monogamous partner that actually we expect ourselves to date to try out relationships, to end them, to see what happens. Even if we get married as we know one in three marriages end in divorce. And there is so much less moralizing unless someone has

behaved terribly badly. But there is generally less moralizing when a romantic relationship ends. We understand that that is part of growing apart is part of life's evolution. The same thing we should also understand about friendships. There are some friendships that will serve an amazing purpose for one part of your life, but it doesn't mean that you need to keep them going forever and ever and ever.

And actually, it's unsustainable because you're not creating space to let new experiences or connections in and you're not creating space to nurture the connections that are the really meaningful ones that are governed by reciprocity and generosity. And I am so passionate about making that clear and also making it clear that with romantic love, there's a whole set of social rituals that you can go through to show what your relationship is to each other, to the

outside world. So you can have a wedding if you want. You can sign a piece of paper that shows your civil partners. You can move in together, buy a place together, have kids together. Even dating the formula of dating, you have a first date, which is like a chemistry check. The second date, you might go for dinner, the third date, you might discuss your shared ambitions and goals. We don't have that for a friendship and we think it's a

bit cringe. And actually, it's so ironic because in a way, we have this misguided romantic principle about friendship, which is that you just connect and that's it then and you're locked in forever and we don't have it when we're looking for sort of actual romantic partners. But I've been doing a number of events around friend aholic here in the UK and at one of them in bath, someone asked a question and as part of the question said, you know, I

totally agree with you about romantic rituals. And the day before I got married to my now husband, I insisted on having a marriage to my best friend where they went into the woods and they performed this, I know this beautiful commitment ceremony, which is not legally binding. But I just thought that that was so wonderful because you talk about what you expect of each other and what you can promise to each other. And I just,

I'm a huge advocate of that. You don't need to go into the woods to do it, but just have the conversation. I love

that are so confusing. You never quite know what you're gonna get. They're the ones guaranteed to tell you a new haircut is interesting rather than giving a straightforward compliment. They're the ones who are secretly threatened by your success rather than rejoicing in it. They're the people who don't want to integrate you into their lives but will enjoy striking up intimate acquaintances with your other friends that exclude you.

They will trigger feelings of uncertainty because they're capable of both love and withdrawal. They offer backhanded compliments and passive aggressive jabs and never seem entirely capable of being happy for you or do you still have this in your life?

can never offer a consistent kind of love. And so it is that sense of any time that you have an interaction with them, you are not quite sure what their reaction is going to be, how they're going to respond, but you still love them because they also have amazing qualities. And Ali, who I mentioned in the book has so many amazing qualities. He can be so generous and you know, he can send me flowers out of the blue and just be so funny and charming to spend time with.

And at his worst, he can also be passive aggressive and undermining. But what I realize about Ali is that it comes from his own insecurity. And actually I found a way of loving him for that too. That's big of you. I mean, I'm making myself sound like the hero here and I'm not by any means. I think I realized that if I didn't have Ali in my life, I would lose more than I'm currently losing. And I had a conversation with my husband about it

and he said, ok, you have three options here. You either stop being friends with Ali or you stay being friends and it's the situation as it is and you'll go out have dinner with him and you'll come back and you'll feel really drained and upset and you'll download to me about it or you treat Ali as a sort of charitable service and what he meant by that was not that I'm some lady bountiful, dispensing my tokens from on top of my moral high horse. What he meant by that was.

Can you concentrate on what your friendship might be bringing to Ali and exclusively try to focus your own energies on the positive things that Allie delivers. And that's a way of having a boundary in place that isn't cut and dried where you've just decided I've made the decision, I'll focus my energies here and not here. And I feel actually Annie is getting a lot out of this and therefore I want to do that for him. So that's really helped in terms of re categorizing where

that friendship lies for me. And it's a bit like Elizabeth Gilbert's magic cloak like because I go in with that sense of I'm not going to give absolutely everything to every single complaint that he's got to tell loads. It makes me feel better about it. However, there are also other people who were more extreme than Ali in terms of their friendship, ambivalence who I no longer have in my life because they really did

sap my energy in an unhealthy way. And if anyone is listening to this and thinking, oh, but it, you know, it's not that bad because sometimes they're nice.

There's been a fascinating piece of research done by the University of Utah about ambivalent friendships ie frenemies where they got a number of participants to wear blood pressure monitors over the course of a few weeks and they measured the blood pressure when those respondents had interactions with people, they loved people, they actively hated and ambivalent friends where they never really knew what they were going to get

from the other person. And they found that the blood pressure was wholly unaffected if you were having an interaction with someone you loved. And sometimes it even went down. If you were having an interaction with someone, you actively loathed. It also had no impact on your blood pressure because you were certain that you weren't going to like that person, they weren't

going to give you what you needed. The ambivalent friends, they were the ones that caused a blood pressure spike because you were constantly having to recalibrate how you were according to what mood they were in any given day. And the same researchers went on to do future studies that showed that actually having too many ambivalent friendships negatively affects the formation of your DNA. It is actively bad for your physical health.

And again, I found that quite liberating, I was like, OK, so that is a good reason for each individual to work out how many of those sorts of relationships they have capacity for in their lives because they are and they can be bad for you.

respond to it. I mean, when someone says you look really tired, what are you meant to say? So it catches you by surprise because you're in that vulnerable state because you love this person and then they just kind of

I don't know if I'd wear silver boots. And I experimented with just doing the same to them in that moment and they were wearing a purple top and I was like, oh, purple. That's very brave of you to wear just to see what would happen. Did it work? Did they? And they didn't know they stopped, but they also didn't know how to deal with it. They were like, well, I like purple and I was like, and I like silver. It. I'm not saying that's not an enlighten way to go

about life. But it was quite interesting to me to see she didn't like it, this particular individual. And we just moved on because I felt like I made my point. I love