Transcript - Becoming a Better Friend With Barnet Bain

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Becoming a Better Friend With Barnet Bain

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 556 of Live Happy Now. February is Friendship Month, so this is the perfect time to figure out how we can make the most of our friendships. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and today, I’m joined by award-winning filmmaker Barnet Bain, whose interest in exploring friendships led him to create a master’s course for psychologists at Columbia University and then write the book, How to Be a Friend in an Unfriendly World. He’s here to share what made him so fascinated with friendships, and what he’s learned about being a better friend. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:39] PF: Barnet, thank you for coming on Live Happy Now. It is such an honor to have you on the show.

[0:00:45] BB: It’s really a pleasure to be here.

[0:00:47] PF: Now, we’re kicking off Friendship Month right now, and it is the perfect time to talk to you about your book, How to Be a Friend in an Unfriendly World. Let’s start with your why. What made you so interested in studying friendship?

[0:01:02] BB: It’s not like I had it all figured out. I realized that I wasn’t very good at it. My daughter brought that to my attention. She went away to school, to college, first time away from home, and she came back, and we went out to dinner, just the two of us, and she was sharing excitedly all about her new life, what she was doing, where she was going, who she was with. I kept coming at her with these questions. I would like to say that these were curious questions, but the truth is they were weighted with judgment and my own ideas, fixed ideas about the courses she should be taking, the people she should be hanging. It was all about me.

She pumped the brakes on this. She said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is going on with you? This is not how you showed up for the first 16, 17 years of my life.” It was true. I stopped, and I had to take in that something unexamined about the way I behave is hurtful to people, and in this case, hurtful to one of the persons that I love most in my life was hurtful and hostile. That was part one. That’s an unsettling thing to sit with.

[0:02:24] PF: Absolutely.

[0:02:25] BB: I did sit with it. Not long after, I was walking near a park by my house, and I came across this street performer, and he was magical. He had this wonderful costume on with little stars and mirrors sewn into it. I mean, it’s just wonderful. He had two sticks and a length of yarn tied between the sticks and a bucket of soapy water, and he would dip in the sticks, and he would fling these bubbles into the air, and he’d make them into all kinds of incredible shapes, and I was captivated. Then his piece de resistance came up. He created this enormous, enormous bubble and wrapped it around himself, stepped into it, and he was suddenly fully, fully encased in this shimmering, shimmering soap bubble.

I realized, “Oh, my goodness. This is what we all do. This is what I do. I live inside a bubble.” It’s a bubble of my history, and my belief systems, and my ideas about life, and all my fixed ideas, and all my shoulda, coulda, wouldas, and most of which are not even original with me.

[0:03:44] PF: I borrowed these.

[0:03:46] BB: They’re all hand-me-downs that I just take as gospel. I realized that is what I do. This idea, I’ll thread it back to my daughter again, which is what happened in the moment. I immediately thought of my daughter, Sophie, and what happened between us, and I realized, as long as I’m in my bubble, and other people are reflecting my bubble back at me, it’s cool. But the moment that she went away and began to invent her own life, and become her own person, small baby steps to becoming her own person, it rubbed me the wrong way. I no longer saw myself. It’s like that story of Narcissus, the Greek mythologist. Narcissus is the young man who caught his reflection in a pond and didn’t know it was his own reflection, and fell in love with himself. I thought, well, this is what is going on with me and my bubble, and perhaps everybody, and their bubbles.

We live in these bubbles of our education, our background, and our religious beliefs, and our racial beliefs, and our sexuality, and our politics, and on and on and on and on. As long as other people reflect our bubbles, we’re cool. But the moment others do not reflect my own bubble, I push back. In the case of Sophie, I push back in a way that was hurtful in the heart. Because suddenly, she was no longer reflecting me. She was becoming her own person. When that happens, we resist, or we challenge, or we disagree, or we get bent out of shape, and maybe worst of all, if people are too different in their bubbles from mine, I’ll make them invisible, which is maybe the most hostile thing it could do.

I thought, well, I don’t know anything about friendship, and no one ever taught me how to do it. It’s a bit like this, sort of like, you live in Nashville. I love country and western songs, but I remember years ago, the themes of so many of these songs wasn’t about how you – you just fall in love. You just fall in love.

[0:06:05] PF: It’s so easy, isn’t it?

[0:06:06] BB: It’s a snap. If it’s not easy, it’s not the right guy, or it’s not the right gal. The only thing you can count on is your truck and your dog.

[0:06:16] PF: There will be a train in there somewhere, too.

[0:06:18] BB: Exactly. I thought, I think it’s harder than that, because I clearly don’t know how to do it. We just fall into it like a pothole, and occasionally it’s smooth sailing, at least for a while. Then eventually, you lose a tire. I thought, I really need to, for myself, I don’t want to hurt people I love. I don’t want to have this quiet little ache in my heart that if I slow down long enough, it shows up, and it just says, I just feel a little separate from people. Sometimes I feel a little lonely. If I’m not being overactive, I feel a little lonely. When I look out, other people seem to know how to do it. Did I miss that class? I thought, I’m going to start to investigate. That’s how it started.

[0:07:10] PF: Well, how did you go about studying it? Because you ended up teaching a course on it for psychologists. How did you study it? How did you develop that information?

[0:07:20] BB: 2,000 years ago, I began with a book called How to Be a Friend. I borrowed the title because 2,000-plus years have passed. I wanted to pay respect to Marcus Tullius Cicero, who’s not just a pizza place, but also a ancient philosopher and statesman. He wrote, How to Be a Friend. I began there, and I was shocked at how little has changed in 2,000 years. It began there. It was a really wonderful entry point.

Then after that, it was a really question of slowing down and testing myself, examining myself, looking more closely into what goes on when I’m with somebody, and they seem to disappear, or I start to ghost them. What is really going on there? I just wanted to take a good look of what happens that leads to my decision to push somebody away, or to lash out, or to be unpleasant, or to be passive-aggressive, or to be sarcastic, all these behaviors. Where are they coming from and why? What does that have to do with being a friend?

Well, from Cicero, I learned that friends help us become better. Well, then I thought, well, how do friends help us become better? Again, from my own experience, I thought I make a distinction between my friends. I go on social media, I have 5,000, 6,000 friends. I’ve never met any of them, but there’s friends and capital Friends. Those capital Friends, they’re curated the way – I have a garden inside my office here, a little garden. If I don’t tend to that garden, there’s no flowers, there’s no vegetables. The same goes for a friend circle. If that garden was two acres, I could not by myself tend to it. I couldn’t give it the attention. There is a size limitation to my ability to respond to what it takes to be a friend.

If friends help us become better, the way Cicero said, then it means that friending offers the possibility of a container in which we get to practice honesty and the acts of kindness that are the, ideally, the fabric of a relationship and a society. It’s a practice place. Now, my wife, when I first said, “Eureka, listen to this. Here’s how this is thought.” She said, “Well, don’t we do that? We’ve been married for 40 years. Don’t we do that?” I thought about that. Of course, we do do that. But there is a slight difference. Capital F, Friends, they stand on equal footing. There’s any kind of power imbalances, or flattery, or fear that distort the relationship.

The spouses, children, those are close and tender relationships that allow us to grow. It’s even in the marriage vows. I’m with you in sickness and health and richer and poorer and all of that stuff, which is strangely similar to the post office vows, but it is a contract that says, I’m going to be there, and we’re going to work it out. We’re going to want the best for each other. When one or the other says something that is messy, if I find myself flinching or fixing, it’s a growth edge. In a healthy, mature marriage or friendship relationship, we have the space and the safety in there to explore it.

In a friendship, the friends have an equal footing, and there are no contracts. The friendship is given from the heart. It’s freely given. There is no indebtedness. There’s obligation just as I have an obligation to the roses outside my window. If I don’t feed them, there’s no roses. But there’s no indebtedness. I don’t owe the roses. The roses don’t owe me. Even in close relationships, like marriage relationships, most of the time, there are some obligations, there are many obligations, and there are some indebtedness. Friendship is a unique, unique lab to discover how we learn loyalty, how we learn courage, how we learn honesty about ourselves and each other.

[0:12:04] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:12:13] PF: Now, let’s hear more from Barnet Bain.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:12:17] PF: One thing that’s so interesting is we are not, as you’ve noted, we’re not taught to be friends. We send our kids to school, just like we went to school, go make friends, go do that. Why haven’t we put the effort into learning what friendships need and how to create them that we put into other relationships?

[0:12:39] BB: I think it goes back to, well, first of all, I just want to unpack that a little bit. What other relationships?

[0:12:45] PF: Say, like a marriage relationships, dating, things like that.

[0:12:48] BB: We don’t learn anything about that either.

[0:12:49] PF: But there’s a lot of books out there. If we want to learn, we can certainly pick them up. Friendship, it’s a different realm.

[0:12:57] BB: People take it for granted. They just take it for granted. For example, going back to this idea of the bubble. We take for granted that our bubble is reality, is that that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it should be. If other people don’t agree with our bubble, they’re wrong. There’s a little sidebar. The number of years ago is when I first started, even before I began this project, it always gnawed away at me about. I have a weird relationship with friending. Not that good at it. I would tend to blame politics, or technology and algorithms, whatever it was. The real trouble usually starts much closer to home, inside that bubble of these fixed ideas, that for the most part, we don’t even know we’re living in it. It changes my worldview.

Why do we have many models to show us what friending looks like? Because people live inside their bubbles. They either don’t haven’t come to the understanding that maybe they like to change something, or maybe that changes can be made, or maybe they haven’t realized friending is a skill and it can be learned, just like loving is a skill. It can be learned. What is involved in loving? What is involved in friending? You have to learn how to see somebody without trying to fix them? Be with somebody without trying to change them.

In my world, my day job, I’m a filmmaker. We have these improv schools and improv techniques. One rule of improv, Saturday Night Live skits is whatever somebody says to you, you don’t push back on it. You go, yes, and you expand it. The beauty of that is that it keeps a relationship going, and it’s not about agreeing. I don’t have to agree with somebody’s where they’re coming from in their bubble, but I acknowledge it. I hear you. I can build on what you’re saying, even if it means offering a different angle. We stop treating every disagreement as a zero-sum contest. This is something that has to be modeled. We learn by seeing it in the culture. It has to be modeled. It’s not modeled in our media, or in our films and in our television. It’s not modeled in the school system.

[0:15:32] PF: What is the main thing that we need to know to become better friends?

[0:15:37] BB: Well, I think number one, you provide safety. If your friend doesn’t feel safe with you, that’s the ball game. It doesn’t mean bubble wrap. It means that if somebody can’t be frank with you without you going hostile, then it’s something to look at. It means that you’re not weaponizing, for example, their vulnerability. Somebody says something to me that is poses themselves deeply. I can remember times, many, when I responded with a snarky response, or sarcastic, or demeaning, or judgmental, that’s not helpful. Another one is we all are a little afraid that people will disappear. Consistency in friendships matters more than intensity.

[0:16:30] PF: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. Just showing up for them.

[0:16:31] BB: We need to show up. We show up. Try this today. You text one friend that you’ve drifted from a little bit, and you say something like, thinking of you, no reply necessary. Another one, and these are really practical. You make an effort to be aware of reducing the fear of shame or humiliation in another person. Nothing shuts a person down faster than embarrassment. When somebody risks honesty or vulnerability, you cherish the moment. You don’t come at them. You cherish the moment. I’ve done that, too. Or you honor where they’re coming from and where they’re going. Everybody is carrying an invisible backpack: family, culture, history, hopes, fears. You don’t have to like what’s in it, but we can respect the weight.

You could try this before you leap in with an opinion or advice. You can ask the person, or just yourself, do I jump in here to fix something, or to listen? This fixing thing, this is a big one. Maybe a little bigger for men, because we are really uncomfortable with feelings.

[0:17:46] PF: Right.

[0:17:46] BB: We have a very short menu of appropriate feelings. Particularly, my wife has been telling me this for 40 years, too. She’ll tell me something. She’s telling me something. Then first, I get impatient, cut to the chase, and then I try to fix it. She says, “I’m not asking you to fix it. I don’t want you to fix it. I just want you to listen to me. I don’t need you to fix it. I’m not a child. I’m not broken. I just want to share my feelings.” In the sharing of my feelings, I empty the container, as opposed to me who for the most part does not share any feelings. My container is full and stressed. Holding that stuff. You’re with a friend, and they say something, and we immediately deploy our own – all the stuff in our backpack. We suddenly throw it at them in a hostile way. Those are a few –

[0:18:49] PF: You say that friendship is the antidote to an increasingly uncivil world. Can you talk about the 24-hour intent test and explain how that can help us rekindle connections?

[0:19:02] BB: I set this out for myself. I said, for one day, I’m going to assume good intentions and everything that my friend does, even the incredibly annoying stuff. I’m just going to assume it. I’m going to be aware. Oh, here’s my bubble talking. That’s annoying. My bubble only has two voices. On one side, this is good, this is bad, I like it, I agree with it, I don’t agree with it. The other side is like a color commentary. He’s got the ball. He’s running down the field. There’s only two voices. I’m not trying to put the lid on those voices. Maybe I’ll succeed someday, but I don’t see it happening. I just want to hear it like it’s the radio and override it. I’m just going to say, whatever this is that this part of me says, “That’s really good.” I’m going to say, I can hear myself, and I’m going to assume they’re coming from a good place.

[0:20:09] PF: I love that, because that can really change, especially in this time of so much division going on, that could really change the way that we respond to some of the conversations that are happening.

[0:20:21] BB: Yeah. Again, as a filmmaker, I learned a long time ago that every story is a love story. We honor the other in a friendship and let you have impact on me. I am willing to give up my position or modify my position. That doesn’t mean every time I’m not going to abandon my values, but I am going to look at it.

[0:20:49] PF: As we are entering friendship month, what is the one thing that you would like all our listeners to keep in mind about nurturing our existing friendships and building new ones?

[0:21:00] BB: Oh, it’s a really great question. There’s so many things.

[0:21:03] PF: I know. You got to pick your favorite one.

[0:21:05] BB: No, here’s what you do. You put down the phone, you look at a friend. You look him in the eye. You’re aware of all the thoughts, all the narration, all the judgments that are galloping through. You don’t climb on any of those horses. You look him in the eye, and you just be with him. Your presence is the greatest gift you can give to another person, without trying to fix them, without trying to say, “I have an idea. Let me solve this for you.” You preempt somebody’s process. Plus, it violates, at least, the Cicero idea of what a friendship is. Suddenly, you have a hierarchy. This one’s the knower and this one’s –

[0:21:49] PF: Right.

[0:21:50] BB: Unless somebody asks for help, they want your presence. I am with you. I will be here with you. Whatever you’re going through, I’m here to be with you through it. Good stuff, difficult stuff, I will be with you. This is my personal challenge. Before I jump in, I said, “Do you want me to listen, or help? “

[0:22:19] PF: What’s the objective here of this conversation?

[0:22:22] BB: Exactly.

[0:22:22] PF: That is a great way. Well, Barnet, this is a great time to talk to you. We’re going to give our listeners information on how they can find you. We’re going to tell them where they can get a friendship field guide download and where they can discover your entire book. Thank you so much for sharing this with us, and I’m excited to have our listeners learn more about you.

[0:22:45] BB: I’m thrilled to make a new friend.

[0:22:47] PF: Oh, so am I. Thank you so much.

[0:22:49] BB: Thank you for having me.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:22:54] PF: That was Barnet Bain, talking about how we can become better friends. If you’d like to learn more about Barnet, follow him on social media, check out his book, How to Be a Friend in an Unfriendly World, or download his free friendship field guide. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why friendship is a skill — not something we simply “fall into.”
How to create safety, consistency, and presence in your closest relationships.
A simple 24‑hour practice that can transform how you see and respond to others.

Visit Barnet’s website.

Download his free Friendship Field Guide.

Discover his book, How to Be a Friend (in an Unfriendly World).

Follow Barnet on Social Media:

- Facebook: @Barnet.Bain
- X: @BarnetBain
- LinkedIn: @barnet-bain
- Instagram: @barnetbain

Don’t Miss a Minute of Happiness!

If you’re not subscribed to the weekly Live Happy newsletter, you’re missing out! Sign up to discover new articles and research on happiness, the latest podcast, special offers from sponsors, and even a happy song of the week. Subscribe for free today!

Interested in advertising or partnering with us? Complete this quick form.