Prescription Strength Friendship

Over the last several years I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to people about their experience of friendship and pored over countless related studies that all indicate that we are in the middle of a friendship famine.

Millions of people are starved for the basic human needs of belonging and connection. And they don’t know what to do about it.

Adult friendship has become a meme, a hashtag, and a joke where the punchline is our own lonely #relatable lives.

But this isn’t ok. Laughing might take some of the pain away, but this can’t treat this issue like a joke. Fifty percent of Americans report that they feel lonely. There’s too much loneliness, isolation, and pain to laugh this off and move on to the next distraction.

In the U.K. doctors have started social prescribing, which is when someone gets a prescription to go do social activities like knitting circles, community gardens, dance classes, drumming classes, and cycling groups. I’m convinced that direct prescriptions to “Go spend time with friends” is coming next.

But the problem of course, is that there’s no pill for that. You can’t go pick it up at the pharmacist. Adult friendship is hard, so a lot of people will see this as a prescription that they don’t feel like they can fill by themselves. And they can’t — this is a prescription we can only fill together, with each other’s own dedicated presence.

This is why I started writing We Should Get Together, a book that explores the four main challenges that adults face when trying to form and maintain friendships during adulthood — and tells you how to overcome them.

Our lives are too precious, and our connection too important, to let this one slide.

We are the only ones who can solve this problem for each other.

What we need is us, and we need us now.

❤ Kat

Visit weshouldgettogether.com to stay updated about the upcoming release of We Should Get Together. You can also follow @katvellos_author on Instagram for daily doses of inspiration for having better friendship in your life (and to see illustrations from the book). And reach out to a friend this week.

#weshouldgettogethe r#friendship #adultfriendship #connection #socialprescribing #community #friends