Platonic Quotes

“The study was revolutionary because it illustrated that learning doesn’t just happen when a teacher lectures at the front of a classroom. We take on what we experience. Our classroom is what we witness firsthand.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“We’re not always conscious of the way friendship transforms us, but it still does. And it doesn’t just make us into better versions of ourselves. It helps us figure out who we are.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“The fifth graders with friends were less depressed, more moral, and had higher self-worth as adults.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“There’s also research that looks at empathy and friendship unfolding in the brain. It finds that seeing friends excluded activates the same part of our brains triggered when we are excluded. This is not true for strangers. Empathy, then, is part of friendship. And friendship does not only make us empathic toward our friends. It makes us empathic generally.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“The impact of loneliness on our mortality is akin to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. One study found the most pronounced difference between happy and unhappy people was not how attractive or religious they were or how many good things happened to them. It was their level of social connection.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“or if someone took your clothes and you could easily slip back into another outfit from your wardrobe versus if now you had to go naked. Secure people, because of their history of available and abundant love, internalize the sense that they are connected to others—a sense that stays with them, even when rejected. Anxious people have no such resources. When others reject or leave them, the loneliness feels omnipresent and unbearable. They might feel, as Carolina described, “like a piece of paper burned down to its ash.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Avoidants’ go-to strategy for coping with emotions is repressing feelings. When uncomfortable feelings arise, they withdraw or stonewall. Often others perceive their disengagement as callous, but when avoidants withdraw, they are actually emotionally overwhelmed. Lewis, the love and relationships coach, said he felt “sensations and not feelings” before becoming secure. He described tolerating emotion as a “muscle” avoidants haven’t built up. When he feels avoidant, “Other people’s emotions are really loud, and I can’t hear anything else,” so he inevitably withdraws.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“For our life to feel significant, we crave someone to witness it, to verify its importance. Shirleen was my witness,”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“The other thing the group revealed was that when we feel accepted and loved, it helps us develop certain qualities that lead us to continue to connect better (the rich get richer, as they say).”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“connection affects who we are, and who we are affects how we connect. When we have felt connected, we’ve grown. We’ve become more open, more empathic, bolder. When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“connection affects who we are, and who we are affects how we connect.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Lauren, Melvin, and Marquee each took major steps forward because they were in a space where they felt connected to others, which ultimately allowed them to grow. The group was safe not only because it was a place where they could share their shame and still be loved, but also because it was a place where people could gently and honestly give them feedback to help them evolve. And the strong relationships they developed with the other group members helped them appreciate and accept this feedback, not as putdowns but as acts of love.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“As these students re-created the problems they had in the outside world within the group, they revealed how our mental health issues are fueled by kinks in how we relate to others.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Avoidant attachment. Avoidantly attached people are similarly afraid others will abandon them. But instead of clinging to avoid this outcome, they keep others at a distance. Intimacy signals, to them, that they could be hurt, so they push others away, eschew vulnerability, and leave relationships prematurely.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Anxious attachment. People who are anxiously attached assume others will abandon them. To keep themselves from being abandoned, they act clingily, are overly self-sacrificing to accommodate others, or plunge into intimacy too rapidly.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Secure attachment. Secure people assume they are worthy of love, and others can be trusted to give it to them. This belief becomes an unconscious template that trickles into all their relationships, leading them to give others the benefit of the doubt, open up, ask for what they need, support others, assume others like them, and achieve intimacy.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“The impact of loneliness on our mortality is akin to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Meta-analyses have found, for example, that exercise decreases our risk of death by 23 to 30 percent, diet by up to 24 percent, and a large social network by 45 percent.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Lee was Callee’s Bobo doll experiment. As much as Gilda told Callee to enjoy and live life in Vietnam, what convinced her to do it was seeing Lee live hers. Their friendship demonstrates how friends change us. Our friends advertise the kaleidoscope of ways we can live. They expose us to new ways of being in the world, showing us another life is possible. As Anaïs Nin, the French Cuban writer, puts it, “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“she left feeling a different type of lonely, the type you feel when you’re around people but uncomfortable being yourself.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“We pretend growing up means shedding friendship, like molting dead skin, to focus on relationships that matter, which flouts research that verifies Harriet’s conclusions, finding that as we get older, friends matter even more for our health and well-being. In fact, our friendships have likely already transformed us, molding us into who we are and foretelling who we will become.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Queer and asexual people, who developed terms like “queerplatonic” (friendships that go beyond social norms for platonic relationships) and “zucchini” (your queerplatonic partner), show us that, while typically our friends are not as close to us as our spouse or sibling, they can be.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Friendship, then, is a rediscovery of an ancient truth we’ve long buried: it takes an entire community for us to feel whole.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“One study found the most pronounced difference between happy and unhappy people was not how attractive or religious they were or how many good things happened to them. It was their level of social connection.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Mutuality means that when someone important to us is in crisis, we prioritize them unless we are in crisis ourselves.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection. Our”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends