[00:00:00] Jeff: There is something special about we have this collective shared memory. We’re doing this thing together. It’s similar to the last one we did. We get to look forward to the next one and talk about it.
[00:00:29] Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina, conversations about friendship. Today’s episode is about creating closer friendships by scheduling time with friends. Yes, something as mundane as scheduling. We also get into something a little more intricate, like organizing workshops or trips, putting standing dates on your calendar with friends, and saying yes sometimes, even when you feel like staying home.
I have two men on the show today to help me have this conversation, because they have both very successfully used things like scheduling or retreats or community organizing to create close friendships and keep those friendships going for many years.
What I’m saying is that close friendships are often the thing that comes after the boring part of the making of the plans, the keeping of the plans, but it could even be an annual type of thing. Spontaneity does have its place. I love when a friend texts me and says, you want to walk some time between 8 and 10 this morning? Sometimes that hour we grabbed unexpectedly could not possibly have been planned weeks earlier, certainly not months earlier.
So scheduling is not the only way to spend time with friends, of course. However, to quote my first guest, Jeff Waldman, who has been incredibly and inspirationally intentional about his friendships, “Ritual matters a lot. It allows people to get excited. It’s a fixture. Anything scheduled is very valuable. Otherwise, things slip through the cracks.”
My second guest is Dan Moore who emailed with me about the term container to describe something that holds the friendship together, like an annual trip, or a weekly call, or a series of classes. Or in his case, Well, you’ll have to wait for Dan’s part of the episode for him to tell you what he has done to keep certain friends on the books.
Coming up first is Jeff Waldman. Jeff is a designer, builder, and an author of a book on tools we met through the world of writing letters on ck. His newsletter is called Elevated Spaces. Mine has the same name as this podcast. Dear Nina, conversations about friendship.
And if you’re confused about what Substack is, you are not alone. It is really just a website that people like me, writers, podcasters use to hold their newsletters. It’s nicely laid out. It has lots of bells and whistles. Many of us have used other programs MailChimp or Tiny Letter. There’s been tons of them Substack is the latest thing. I’ve been on there about a year. And I like it a lot. it’s basically blogging, except instead of on our own websites, we’re doing it on Substack’s website. Anyone who says otherwise is being kind of delusional about it.
We’re blogging. That’s what we’re doing, but I like it for now. And who knows what the future holds, but back to Jeff, Jeff sells building plans in his newsletter. He writes about both construction and community building and where those two practices intersect for him. His communal property in California burned in the wildfires of 2020, but lives on as a canvas for new projects.
[00:03:20] Nina: Welcome Jeff.
Jeff: Thanks for having me, Nina.
Nina: So I really appreciate you bringing your experience to the show. And I love getting a male point of view, which I do not do enough. I’ve had a few men on the show and both have called me out on that. Where are all the men on your show?
But, you know, men don’t openly talk about friendship as much, or maybe even openly listen to a show about friendship as much. And I appreciated you reaching out to me because you care about these topics, and I can see how intentional you are about the time you spend with friends and the community you’ve built. And I’d love to hear how that level of intentionality started.
Jeff: First, I’m very grateful to be bringing a male perspective and you’re right, it’s not talked about as often. It is in my circle of friends, but I get that it’s a little bit of an outlier. One of the impetuses for me kind of looking around to who else was talking about the sort of thing and reaching out was my mother-in-law. She is frequently commenting that I’m the only male in her life that has such a robust community of friends. So yeah, it feels a little bit unique and special, so it feels worth talking about.
So friendships have always been important to me. I was not always great at them. I have a long standing history of just social anxiety and other mental woes that many other people share. And I think something that I’ve talked about a lot in therapy is these would not be problems if I was content to go live on a mountaintop. I desire the love from the people in my community. I want to be accepted. I want to be seen. I want to have relationships. And it’s the fear that I’m not going to get them that gives me that anxiety.
So, on the one hand, I’m deathly afraid of being invited to your dinner party, but on the other hand, I really want to be there because I want the relationships that come with it. I’ve been okay at maintaining relationships over the years, but there’s just been a push and pull of not really feeling like I had a place or not really figuring out how to crack it. It’s just been trying at times and the property that you talked about, that burned down, I think was pretty helpful in a shift that happened about six years ago or when we started it.
I realized that community organization was a sort of hack to maintaining and growing communities and friendships. You know, if you invite me to your hypothetical dinner party, I’m very uncomfortable. What is my place here? What is my role? People are gonna ask me what I do, and I’ve never really had a great answer for that, not one that I liked anyway. I just feel very out of place. But if I organize an event, I’ve done like a bunch of pig butcherings with friends, or we did a watercolor workshop. We did a lot of building parties out on our property. All of a sudden I have a role. I have an identity. I am a community organizer.
I have a purpose for being there. People are coming to me instead of me fearfully reaching out to them.
Nina: I read something you wrote on your newsletter about being the host as opposed to the guest and I loved that. I think that’s a really concrete, helpful thing for people because even though a lot of us— I host a lot and I do have a little anxiety leading up to the event because I worry about the details, you know, is there gonna be enough food?
I’m thinking more dinner party kind of thing. But even other things. I hosted about 18 challah making workshops in my house. Eighteen sessions with different people in each one. Do you know what challah is? It’s the bread that Jewish people eat for Shabbat dinner on the Sabbath, Friday night.
Anyway, people like to make their own, or you can buy it as well, but it’s fun to make your own. You braid it. Exactly the kind of thing you’re talking about, a workshop. There’s a lot of stress leading up to something like that, because is there enough space? Is the room too hot? Are people sweating while they’re doing this thing? But you’re right that you definitely know your place. I loved your point in your piece that you wrote about it, you don’t have to, like you said, ask somebody, what should I bring or what should I do? You’re the one giving the direction. So while there’s stress, there’s also relief.
Jeff: Absolutely. And I do think that it’s, it’s certainly an acquired skill and figuring out how to manage that stress. You want to be responsible for people’s good time as a host, but you don’t want to be too responsible where you’re carrying this emotional burden worrying so much about whether everyone is having a great time. They’re having a great time. They’re very happy to be there. You facilitate in an event.
Most people are happy to say yes, but not so motivated to create a thing. There’s definitely some trials and tribulations that come with that responsibility. But for me personally, it just felt like a sort of hack where it just feels counterintuitive that in order to manage the social anxiety that comes from getting together with friends, I would spearhead and organize things and that that would be much more satisfying for me.
Nina: Another benefit to hosting is, I just did an episode about this, but I didn’t use the word hosting, but that’s true, or organizing, is when you are the one who makes the plans, you have plans. So it’s very powerful to not wait for invitations, but to actually issue invitations.
Jeff: Absolutely. Yeah, puts you in control. I do think that maybe there’s a flip side to that coin where it enables a bit too much of the controlling side of me. So when other people are trying to make plans, you know, it can be a little bit uncomfortable doing it on their terms if I’ve gotten so used to doing it on my terms.
But for the most part, it’s just an immensely powerful thing. I think in coming to terms with mostly through our property and a little bit of event organization that preceded that. Okay, getting things on the books is very helpful. Organizing things is very helpful. Having this thing to look forward to and I’ve put it together and it’s people want to say yes. They’re excited to do interesting things.
I kind of saw the value in that. I’m trying to remember what came next. I started doing some retreats with friends. And this kind of speaks to your thing about ritual. I remember, I for a few years in a row would occasionally rent an Airbnb, get together for a weekend with friends and have some really quality long time together because I felt like when we would meet up for, you know, coffee or lunch, you’d kind of go through the check boxes of conversation.
How’s work? How are the kids? Whatever. And you didn’t really get into that good quality time that came after the lull when you ran out of stuff to talk about. And so we would organize these retreats. Really good vibes with just, you know, half dozen, eight people. And doing it regularly created sort of a camp friends vibe where people are getting together at the next one, and they’re kind of talking about how this is different from the last one.
And I don’t want to harp too much on the value of a “remember when” conversation, but there is something special about we have this collective shared memory. We’re doing this thing together. It’s similar to the last one we did. We get to look forward to the next one and talk about it. My friend, Charlie and I were talking after one of those retreats and saying, this is great, but we really should be, you know, spending more time together or just being more connected. So we decided to start a weekly phone call. That weekly phone call was, I think seven or eight years ago at this point. Four years into it, which was doing great for our relationship. Charlie wrote about it on his blog.
Nina: That’s a lot. Four years of weekly phone calls. That’s incredible.
Jeff: Well, it’s huge. Because I mean, I don’t like talking on the phone. It’s easier to text, it’s easier. I, I kind of view it as snack food. I’d rather eat chips than work on a meaningful meal. I’m better for the meal, but it kind of takes effort. It’s really easy for us to say, we should talk more, we should hang out more. And what Charlie and I found was that that just wasn’t really our experience. It wasn’t enough. So to have something on the books, we miss them, it happens that we just missed our last one this Wednesday. One of us is too busy. It doesn’t quite line up. But it means that you have to cancel it or postpone it or talk about it. My experience has been that if you just have this idea that’s out there, that we should talk sometime you go months, a year, who knows how long. But it’s a weekly check-in to try and make it happen. And that makes a world of difference. Charlie wrote about it and how nice it was. And a number of my friends read it and so they asked if they could get in on the action and now I have, I think it’s seven. I couldn’t do weekly. It was too much. So now I
Nina: Yeah, you’d be on the phone non stop.
[00:09:16] Jeff: Yeah, so I have bi-weekly calls and Charlie’s still on the weekly, but I have seven of those. And then seeing the benefit from having regular communication with friends that was scheduled. It’s just spurred other little things. And these things come and go because people’s schedules change and life moves, but it’s nice to make the effort.
I’ve had weekly games of catch with my friend, Dan. My friend Tom and I, for a good number of years have a daily check-in for just trivial fitness things, you know, challenge you to 20 push ups or whatever. We have a weekly standing sauna thing with friends. I was doing weekly disc golf for a really long time with some other friends. It’s nice to have, it doesn’t have to be sports, but it’s nice to have a thing. I was just talking about this with my friend Jason, who’s a long time friend, but I don’t spend nearly enough time with him, and he lives in San Francisco.
He and I were roommates for, six, seven years and we don’t spend enough time anymore. And I was mentioning that I think we would really benefit from having a thing. Cause it’s easy for us to say we should hang out sometime, but the idea of what we’re doing is kind of nebulous. The idea that, you know, we go on a walk in Golden Gate Park, if that’s our thing, then we can kind of check in about let’s get one of those walks on the books.
You know, I don’t want to be too beholden to the schedule and to the calendar, but I do know the reason that I spend so much quality time with friends and the reason that I have robust relationships with them is because when you look out months ahead. I have things scheduled, and at least in my experience, it slips through the cracks otherwise.
[00:10:41] Nina: I absolutely agree and this is really how I run my life as well and so does my husband. That actually makes me wonder, does, and if you’re not comfortable talking about it, you can tell me, but does your wife also operate this way socially?
[00:10:54] Jeff: Not nearly as strictly. She is just robust socially as I am. We have both our own independent social lives and joint ones. Most of our friends are all shared, but we also have independent relationships with them. She is very active. She will schedule dinner parties and sauna stuff and park hangs, and she’s always had a very strong value around community, and her friend relationships are important to her. She’s been the organizer in her group, and I mean we’ve been together for now 13 years. So we’re, we’re mutually the organizers in our adult groups for a very long time. But she does not do scheduled phone calls.
She doesn’t have standing weekly things other than I guess our sauna, which is at our house. Something that our friends have talked about is the importance of, if they want to grab ahold of something, you know, go camping with us one weekend, they know that they have to get on the calendar with us a couple months in advance because while she’s not exactly as regimented in the same way that I am, her calendar is full.
[00:11:52] Nina: Have there been people who wanted to get in on these retreats that were kind of late to the game? So it’s like too late for them to join? Or how do you handle that? I find that very tricky myself.
[00:12:01] Jeff: I do think that’s come up a little bit. That certainly came up in those phone calls where I had some friends saying, Hey, what the hell? You’ve had a weekly phone call for four years. Why don’t I get one? I don’t know how much they felt sidelined, but it was certainly a topic of the conversation. Same thing with, you know, some retreats and gatherings at our property. It’s just one of those things where I’ve reached out and invited who I’ve invited. Oftentimes, it’s a momentum thing. You get the invite because you said yes to the last three, and I’m not reaching out to you because it’s not a grudge.
You just, turn me down the last two, and it’s what happens. I haven’t felt like there’s been too much drama in the way of people feeling sidelined or left out. I think it’s because both Molly and I do a pretty good job of spreading it around and really making sure that we’re trying to engage as much as possible with all of the people that we want to.
Maybe you weren’t invited to this thing, but we did something else together. I think most of our friends have a good enough head on their shoulders to understand that if you rent an Airbnb that says it only sleeps seven, that’s what it sleeps. And so it’s not super personal. It’s just what it is.
[00:13:03] Nina: It cannot be overstated that if you always say no to somebody, eventually, they will stop asking. And again, I agree not because it’s a big grudge you can still have a phone call with that person. You could still have dinner with that person, but that is just human nature. We’re not built to like constantly chase, especially when you have other people that are saying yes. Not that people should say yes to something they’re not interested in or genuinely can’t afford or can’t attend for any other reason, but there is that consequence that I hope people realize that if you always say no, or you always cancel, that’s a whole other thing, You’re probably not going to be at the top of someone’s list.
[00:13:35] Jeff: That’s a frequent topic of conversation between Molly and I, because, you know, with full calendars, we’ll find ourselves in the position of often saying no to friends who pitch things, but we want to be cognizant of the fact that you can’t say no that many times. For better or worse, I think a lot of family relationships, they’re kind of always there, even if they’re not high in quality, there’s something about the fact that it’s blood that it just still exists.
Your sister is still your sister, but a friend relationship, as permanent as it might feel in the moment, they can absolutely wither on the vine. It goes for any relationship for the most part. If you don’t put in the work, it’s not necessarily going to be there in years to come. Sometimes saying yes to things that I don’t necessarily want to in the moment, is, I don’t want to look back some years from now.
I was really content, when you see wood behind me right now. I’m in a shop that I share with some friends. And I’m in here working on some furniture today. I could probably spend a few months get really getting into some furniture, and I might be very content in that moment. But then at a time when I’m needing more social connectivity, I look around and I go, where’s my community? And it kind of left me behind. That saying yes often enough to keep those relationships afloat is really important, and that’s again why I think the scheduling helps just because it puts you in a position of having to constantly reaffirm instead of, you know, letting things wither.
[00:14:51] Nina: That’s right. I thought that was really thoughtful, but if you have anything else you want to share, please do.
[00:14:56] Jeff: The one thing that came to mind when you were talking about friends getting together for annual stuff, this isn’t actually mine. I’m friends with a group of college friends from Loyola Marymount, and I’m friends with a number of them, but they have a wider social circle. That’s all their college friends and something I’ve really admired is every year for the past 10 years, they’ve gotten together and they pick some small town in the middle of the country you know, place they’ve never been to before. And they all meet up for their fantasy football draft. I think some of them don’t even care about the football. It’s not really the point of it. It’s just a reason to get together. The one guy who I’m probably closest with, Greg, I think he probably draws a lot of inspiration from his dad, who’s been hanging out with his high school group of friends, A couple times a year for, I think, 50 years. And I just I find that Ridiculously inspirational,
[00:15:40] Nina: And we do learn a lot from the people who came before us. Like if your parents didn’t prioritize friendships, you could go either way. You could say like, okay, I don’t want to be like that and therefore I’m going to do it. Or it’s all you know. My parents prioritize friendships a lot. It’s really all I know.
Whether it was trips or bridge games that went on for 50 years and that is how I thought an adult engaged in a social life. I have since learned in writing about friendship for almost a decade that a lot of people don’t and they suffer for it and then they’re kind of lonely and they, like you said, you kind of put your head down, you work and then you look up and you’re like, oh wait, that’s what happens.That, you got to pay attention to it. I think we gave some good ideas here for people to think about.
[00:16:19] Jeff: Very inspiring. Hopefully.
[00:16:20] Nina: Jeff is so nice to meet you. I’m not actually ending the episode because I’m going to be having Dan on next, so listeners, stay tuned for Dan,
Okay, here we go. Our second guest is Dan Moore.
This episode came from an email he sent to me about a really cool tradition that he has with his friends. I will let Dan tell you about it, but let me tell you a little bit about Dan first. Dan Moore is a technologist, outdoor enthusiast, husband, and father, and I should add that he’s the husband of my friend, Pam, who has been a guest twice already on the podcast. )ther than my best friend, Taryn and my mother, Pam is the only guest I’ve had more than once. We talked about how to deal with the fact if you’re always a friend who reaches out first and we talked about diet culture.
And now we have Dan’s husband, Pam, who I met when I went to Boulder this summer. I talked about that in an episode too. Dan has been writing software for over 20 years and was shocked early in his career at how much software project success depends on human relationships. He’s an author and contributor to technical books. And Dan’s also an organizer and member of several interest based groups, including The Odd Fellows, which I’ve never heard of. I can’t wait to hear about that. He will tell us more.
Dan, welcome to Dear Nina.
[00:17:35] Dan: Thank you for having me, Nina.
[00:17:37] Nina: So tell us a little about the email you sent me about this group of friends that gets together. Who are you guys? Explain what the schedule is. I just want to hear everything.
[00:17:46] Dan: I obviously know about your podcast because my wife has been on it, and I just thought that what I have with my friends is relatively unique and it would be interesting to share that.
And what we do is we meet every two to three months, every year for dinner at a particular restaurant and have since 2012. And this is definitely the longest kind of friendship involved thing I’ve been part of. I think a key part of it is because it is scheduled out. Two of them are friends of mine from high school.The third one is friends with those two from college. Jesse and Jeff are friends of mine from high school, and Johnny is a friend of theirs from college. All with kids. )ne divorcee. And we’re all science and technology geeks. They’re rocket scientists and whatnot.
[00:18:36] Nina: I had Mark Oppenheimer on and we talked about men’s poker nights being something that men might do, tend to do as a social thing that is on the calendar that nobody messes with because I think what we’re getting at here is to have a, what I referred to earlier in the episode and you and I spoke about this on email, a container for the friendship, something that holds this friendship together, that no one has to think too much about, sometimes game nights are like an easy low hanging fruit for that because, I don’t know. It’s something people can kind of understand. People’s spouses understand, okay, it’s fun. You catch up. So for you guys, how did you land on dinner as opposed to some other way, a sporting event or a games?
[00:19:24] Dan: Yeah, I think probably part of it was accessibility, right? Like everyone needs to eat. I don’t know that we really discussed it. I used to do poker nights in high school and things like that. Dinner’s a little bit less of a commitment. To me, the joy of this event is really that it is about nothing else, right?
Like I’m a member of other groups and you get together and you hike or you do other activities. You do philanthropic stuff. And there, the goal is the activity. And then the friendships kind of follow along. You chitchat before and after things or whatnot. Here, there’s nothing else, right? Like if I didn’t enjoy these people, I wouldn’t go to this dinner that’s relatively unique in my kind of friendship experience. I actually know people who who will just call people up and talk and I, and I don’t, and I wouldn’t with these folks.
I might call them and ask for advice, but I wouldn’t talk. That’s what that space gives us is a place to talk. It’s also only four people. And so that makes it easier to, right, like some groups like a poker night, sometimes you want eight people there. And so you’re gonna have a different level of conversation with different people over time.
Whereas here, pretty much one person speaks at a time and everybody else is focused on them. There’s not side conversations really the same way that there would be with a group of six or seven.
[00:20:37] Nina: It is so true. Four is about the max for exactly what you said, the side conversations. And even with four, there might be a little bit of side convo, but I feel like there’s an understanding of, okay, we’re going to wrap up this side conversation really quickly so that we can get back to this foursome.
I find that with couples too, you know, second, you add a third couple to an evening, it’s now you really have two separate conversations completely. Cause, just hearing, it’s hard to hear. There’s just only a sheer number of voices that we can take in with all the background noise, too, of a restaurant. So four, you can sit a little closer, you can lean in, you can hear each other. Do you guys get into real life?
[00:21:13] Dan: You mean, do we not just talk about sports and yeah, no, we, yeah, we absolutely like, this has been a solace for me and I think for the other folks. I haven’t talked to them deeply about what they like or dislike about this meal. But I did ask them all if they were okay with me hopping on your podcast and they all said, yeah, go for it.
You can talk about work stuff. And family stuff and because we have this history with these people, they know some of the personalities, but because these are not friends that come over to my house regularly, they live far away.
Their kids are different ages than my kids. I can have kind of a tough conversation or ask for like hard advice about a family situation or again, a job and not worry about it leaking into other parts of my life. It’s one of the reasons why I mentioned the word container right is not that I wouldn’t ask them to come to a big life event of my family.
One of their mothers passed away recently and we all showed up at the funeral because that’s what you do, but we aren’t hanging out they’re not in our neighborhood, hanging out on a daily basis with my family.
[00:22:18] Nina: You know, you’re lucky to have something that is somewhat like a long distance friendship, but close enough in proximity that you can see each other with some regularity and yet, yeah, it’s different than your everyday people. It really is a special thing. How is it different? How is this friendship and these dinners different from The Odd Fellows? I’m curious what this group is like.
[00:22:37] Dan: So The Odd Fellows are similar to the Elks or the Masons. I still am a member, but I was a more active member before kids. It’s a club that meets weekly, except for during the summer. And there’s kind of three major pillars. The first is, like a social pillar. So they have like a pool table and you can hang out. They have a philanthropic pillar because they have some income coming in. So basically you get to give donations and acts of service to other nonprofits and other organizations. And then they have a third one, which is like a secret ritual one, which I can’t really talk that much about, but that is a totally different kind of friendship, much more casual.
The thing I love about the Odd Fellows is they’ve been around for 150 years and there’ll be around for another 150 years. I’ve seen members join and then take five years off and then come back you could view this as a plus or minus but a lot of the same arguments, same discussion, same kind of folks are still there after five years you can kind of dive in and out of that based on your needs and kind of the phases of your life in a way that. You know, I think if I took five years off of this friendship group, it would be blown to smithereens, right? Like they wouldn’t welcome you back in the same way.
[00:23:46] Nina: There’s totally space for that kind of thing, yeah, like a membership organization. I don’t think people do as much stuff like that anymore, outside of religion. Any kind of situation where, like you said, it’s going to be there without you. It doesn’t exist because of you. It’s something bigger than you that you can dip in and out of, but I like that there are things other than religion where you can find this kind of group.
[00:24:04] Dan: I will say real quick about that. These organizations are out there in your communities and they would be thrilled to have you join. And there’s a little bit of like initiation ceremony and some hoops you have to jump through, but I’ve seen this happen across the state that I’m in Colorado, where organizations kind of age. And then there’s a new wave. If you’re in a community, where these exist, they have resources and you can do real good work and make good friends. So Odd Fellows, Masons. They’re, they’re great organizations.
[00:24:32] Nina: I’m glad we’re talking about it because I see so many articles lately, about loneliness, but specifically for men. There’s just an uptick in discussion about men having a harder time connecting. Actually, there was just an op ed in the New York Times. I’ll share it in the show notes, by David French. It’s been passed around a lot. At least three people have sent it to me just in the past 24 hours. And it was just a really good piece, specifically for men about how just being there and showing up is a huge piece of friendship that I think he was implying that men don’t maybe do as well.
Like you said, like, of course we went to the your friend’s mother’s funeral, but I think his point, unfortunately, that isn’t so obvious to everyone that like you do have to show up. Are you seeing that among men?
[00:25:15] Dan: I think that it’s very easy for men to immerse themselves either into their family, because that’s kind of a ready made structure. Or frankly, I think that video games and online communities have made things a lot easier. I actually have a another friend who has a son who went away to college, but he didn’t actually have to interact with anybody in his dorm because he was on his computer playing video games with his friends from high school. If I had been in college and I’d had that option, I could absolutely imagine myself taking that because it’s really scary to put yourself out there, which is why I think that joining a club where you have something to do alongside someone, and regular meetings that you don’t have to schedule and put any effort into is a great recipe to combat that because it lowers the activation energy to go there. You’re just like, okay. You know, when I was active in the Odd Fellows every Monday, my wife or my girlfriend knew—she wasn’t my wife at that time necessarily. She just knew the Monday nights were out, right?
Like don’t schedule anything on Mondays that you want me to be part of because I’m going to be there. Finally, I guess I’d wrap it up by saying just like anything else in life, what you get out of relationships depends on a large part about what you put into them. Your time is your most precious resource. And if you aren’t putting the time in to an organization, a dinner group, et cetera. I mean, maybe this is super obvious to your listeners. I don’t know, you’re not going to get much out of it. Right. Like and that’s where I think some of the other kind of means of organizing today, like online communities, you know, they’re really great at sharing information, but they’re not great about bringing people together and having them spend that most precious resource.
[00:26:49] Nina: You know, that’s why I came out to visit Pam. She and I are so close and we spend so much time, and you must know how much time we spend leaving voice messages and talking on the phone. But 10 years have gone by, we never met each other in person, and I really felt, we need to at least meet in person, and then we can continue on as we are long distance, but the online thing can be deceiving. And it’s a little bit too easy. I’m so glad that we had this conversation because you’re absolutely right. People do not like to hear that you have to put the phone down sometimes and like show up and be in person.
[00:27:20] Dan: I just don’t know how you build deeper relationships other than by doing that and I mean, I’ve definitely had people that I’ve interacted with online that I’ve definitely thought, Oh man, this person is really, simpatico, but meeting them in person just takes it to a different level.
[00:27:33] Nina: It really does. Now I’ve been in your house, I’ve met your kids, I’ve met your dog. I’ve gone paddle boarding with Pam. It’s just, yeah, a whole different thing now.
[00:27:40] Dan: We need to come in to Minnesota is what you’re saying.
[00:27:42] Nina: You guys would love it ’cause you’re so active. You’re so much more active than I am. The two of you being Colorado people like you are.
And there’s so many active things here that I don’t even really partake in, but the two of you would love it and you would get me to do stuff I wouldn’t normally do. So that would be good.
[00:27:56] Dan: Awesome.
[00:27:56] Nina: Okay. Well, Dan, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story with us. I think it will really be great for people to hear and give people ideas.
[00:28:05] Dan: Thank you for having me, Nina. Really appreciate it.
00:29:31] Nina: Grateful to Jeff and Dan for coming on and showing how much depth and satisfaction can come from putting friends on the schedule and creating traditions that people can look forward to. And I do have a favor to ask of listeners. If you got something from this episode or another one, I’d appreciate it so much if you left five stars and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen that lets you leave reviews.
Not all places do. And the reason I say five stars is because if you leave less, then my rating goes down. That is no fun. Someone recently left me a glowing, really wonderful complimentary review, but they attached three stars to it. Maybe it was mistake. I don’t know. It’s a mystery I will never solve.
I know a lot of people don’t know how to leave reviews. I don’t blame you. The process is oddly complicated. I am happy to walk you through it. If you find me on Instagram at dear. Nina B I’m on TikTok. I don’t know why, but I am at Dear Nina podcast. Or just email me at Nina Badin, B A D Z I N, at gmail.com and I will explain it.
It’s not that it takes long. It’s just sometimes. It’s hard to get to on your phone. Once you know how then it’s easy, so thank you for considering that.
Have a wonderful week. Reach out to a friend and make a plan when our friendships are going well. We are happier all around. Bye.
One Response
Scheduling scheduling scheduling…in advance. You are correct that one has to be on it and not wait or put things off. Sometimes that’s too easy. These guys were great in their enthusiasm to join with others in a variety of ways.