Nina: [00:00:00] Welcome to Dear Nina, conversations about Friendship. I’m so glad you’re here. I have a lot of new listeners from that episode I had a couple weeks ago on NPRs Life Kit, so welcome. If you are new, it’s really fun to see a big jump in listeners I value all the listeners that have been here all along too, of course.

Thank you for continuing to come back to be part of these conversations about making friends. Keeping friends, sometimes losing friends. Keeping friends is really the biggest bucket of the three areas I talk about here. Before we get started , I want to read my latest review to you. I have not done that before. I have never read my reviews out loud. This one touched me so much. I have to read it and it will tie into the end of the episode, so just stay with me and it will all come together. Thank you to the person who wrote this. I don’t know who you are, but you know who you are.

And the review says, I just found this podcast after reading an NPR article about Nina. [00:01:00] I’ve already listened to six episodes. I have been reflecting on and reading about friendship for the last two years, and I really wish I had known about this podcast before.

There’s so much in here that is helpful for anyone who wants to improve their friendship life, especially Nina’s repetitive call to not keep record of who has reached out last, as someone who overthinks about who is doing the relationship work, I really needed to hear this. Thank you. Okay. This makes me happy on so many levels.

This person’s right. I do repeat that a lot. It is definitely a huge theme of the show. And when I’m a guest on other podcasts, they pick that up too. And I say that a lot because it is a huge problem in friendships.

when I say it’s a problem, I mean it’s a problem that people think is a problem. That doesn’t have to be a problem. But that’s not what today’s episode’s about. So you’re gonna have to go back and find all the other episodes, which are many, where I talk about why you shouldn’t keep score, especially about who reaches out. So thank you to that person who wrote the review.

Moving on to the June challenge and just the whole idea of the challenges on dear Nina and what they’re for.

The friendship challenges are in that [00:02:00] keeping friends bucket because what they are meant to do is push you towards different ways of changing perhaps some of the things you’re doing that will allow you to keep friends longer, have friendships be deeper, have your friendships feel good.

Doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong right now. It means we can always tweak and improve, and I would guess that you’re not listening to this episode or clicking on anything that says Friendship challenge.

If you weren’t up for the challenge, if you didn’t feel like, yeah, I think things could be a little tighter, a little better, a little deeper, a little more fun. Since this is June, it is our sixth friendship challenge of 2025.

I love coming up with these because they’re really organic. I didn’t think of them all in January. I thought of a few in January. And then as time has gone on and I hear from more people, I get anonymous letters. I see what people who are listeners of this show who are readers of the Substack, which is at dearnina.substack.com.

I read your stuff. I listen to what you’re telling me, and that’s where the challenges come from. We’re in conversation together. It’s my favorite part about doing [00:03:00] what I do, is being able to talk to people and to hear what you’re going through and see patterns and themes.

Most of us are not terribly original, which is actually a relief. It should be a relief to hear that some of the things you’re struggling with in your friendships, you’re not alone at all. If you are part of my Facebook group at Dear Nina, the group, you know that

the comments you leave there are so helpful, so thoughtful. Oftentimes people get there before I do, and I appreciate it.

If you want to see all the other challenges and you haven’t had a chance to listen to them, and you just want a quick read through without listening to them, although they are short episodes, so I do recommend them. But if you just want to read about them, that will be down in the show notes.

I will have the newsletter that goes with each of the episodes about the challenge, easily accessible. You could look down and see in whatever app you are listening in right now, apple, Spotify, anything.

Even YouTube, you can see the different places to click other challenges or other links that I ever mentioned.

Okay, let’s get to today’s challenge already enough preamble.

June’s challenge is to ask a favor [00:04:00] of a friend. It is actually harder for some people than you would think. If you have no problem asking for help, this won’t be hard. But I still want you to do it this month because maybe you haven’t done it in a while. And the reason I want you to do this is that asking for a favor is a great way to feel closer to a friend. It’s a great way for you to feel closer, but even more importantly, it’s actually a great way for your friend to feel closer to you.

And it is for some reasons that you might already have thought of yourself, but just in case you haven’t, it shows a sign of trust. You trust this person enough to ask them to help you. It actually is not that easy to ask for help.

We live in a society that is so heavily pushed towards independence and grit. And I don’t need anybody. for this month, I really want us to be thinking about how we can be functioning better as a society. Not only is it okay to admit that it’s actually really important to admit it because that is how our society works best.

The whole, it takes a village concept. I really believe that. A low hanging fruit way to just get that feeling started to feel it in your [00:05:00] life, is to ask somebody for help. And then hopefully they will ask you for help one day, and you will have that feeling of, oh, this person really trusts me.

It creates intimacy in a friendship. So reason number one, to ask a friend a favor is that it shows your friend, you trust them. Reason number two is that it creates intimacy. It doesn’t have to be a big favor. Okay. I’m talking small things. A friend the other day asked me, because I was going to a graduation party that she wasn’t able to make it to.

Can you bring the gift for me? Okay. This is a tiny favor, but it really saved her time and helped her out. And she wanted to be able to give this graduating senior a gift. She wanted him to have it right away. She knew his party was that day. So she, as a friend to that family, wanted the gift to be there and I, as her friend, was able to help her by bringing it.

No big deal. She actually made it extra easy by dropping it off at my house. That wasn’t necessary though. She lives close to me, I absolutely could have just picked it up at her house, which would’ve been a favor, right? That would’ve been an extra little stop. No big deal. I would’ve been happy to do it.

There are other little favors you can ask of people. They don’t have to [00:06:00] be enormous. It doesn’t have to be something like, will you help me move out of my apartment? Although obviously that’s a huge favor to ask, and it is something you can ask a friend and then you can assume that that friend will ask you for a big favor one day.And that’s how friendship works. We help each other.

I think if you are scared to ask somebody to help you, you have to really investigate in yourself if you don’t really want people to ask your help. That might be part of it, and it’s something to push yourself on. It is part of friendship and community to be inconvenienced. So you might feel that slight concern.

Okay, if I ask this person to help me move, they’re gonna ask me one day. Yes, that is true. Now it doesn’t have to be tit for tat. If you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I am against everything has to be exactly the same. And if I do this one thing for you, you do this exact thing for me.

It shouldn’t be that way, but in reality sometimes that is how it goes. Oh, I asked you to spend the entire day packing up boxes with me. You may ask me to do the same, and hopefully as a good friend, I would be willing [00:07:00] to do it.

Asking a friend for a favor.

It is not something I invented. I couldn’t even tell you where I heard it for the first time. It’s just I’ve known for a long time having written about friendship for over a decade, that it is a known thing that asking a friend to do a favor makes a person who was asked feel closer to the asker.

One person I definitely heard it from was Gretchen Rubin, who studies Happiness, who was also a guest on this show. I will link her episode in the show notes. We didn’t talk about this topic, we talked about a different topic, but I learned from her work on happiness happiness studies show providing support is just as important as getting support.

This is what I’m saying too by asking a friend for a favor, you are providing an opportunity. You are giving them the chance to provide support, which will make them feel good.

You are allowing your friend to feel closer to you, and this will make your friend feel good about your friendship. This is not meant to be manipulative. I could hear how it might sound that way. It’s not meant to trick your friend into feeling closer to you. It’s almost a way of just demonstrating that [00:08:00] you already are close. It’s like a reminder. because you’re not gonna ask someone for a favor who you don’t have some relationship with. So this is just a demonstration of that closeness. Now you don’t have to be very, very tight best friends to ask for a small favor.

What are some favors? Can you grab my mail while I’m out of town?

Can you water my plants? So this might be more appropriate for someone who lives in your neighborhood. I don’t think I would ask someone to drive 45 minutes to water your plants. That’s maybe beyond a favor. It doesn’t even have to be something that is in person. It could be, can you look at this email really fast? I want to make sure the tone is what I really had in mind. That’s a favor. An easy favor, but it’s still a favor. You could ask for a recommendation for something that you need to do, a new hairstylist or something.

Anything that takes someone’s time is a little favor. There’s little favors and big favors. Ask something of each other.

Don’t be scared to ask for help even in the smallest ways, and that’s a good way to practice asking for help in bigger ways.

I want to take this one step further and I want you to consider if there’s ever been a time in your life when you heard that a friend asked a different friend a [00:09:00] favor, and you felt that little feeling of, oh, I wonder why they didn’t ask me.

Then you know that being asked to do something is not a bad thing, that we actually feel a little weird, a little funny, a little something’s off. If we hear that our good friend or decent enough friend asks somebody else, especially if it seemed like they should have asked you like you were together recently, or you live near them or something. You kind of go, oh, why didn’t they ask me for a ride?

And you kind of wonder, have you made it seem like you’re not the kind of person they can ask for a favor? that’s maybe a twinge on the overthinking side, and you have to be careful about that. Episode 1 46, which was not that long ago, I talked to Dr. Jackie Henry about overthinking and ruminating, and I’m not suggesting you go in that direction.

I just bring that to point out that we do want friends to feel comfortable asking us to do things. And the way that we foster that comfort is by asking our friends for help. We have to show that this is a relationship where we can ask each other to do things where we are that level of friendship. Sometimes the asking of the favor [00:10:00] precedes the level of friendship. You get closer because you asked for a favor and you get closer because you made it clear that that person can ask you for a favor. society is improved because of it. relates a little bit to an episode I will be sharing soon with the co-directors of a great Netflix documentary called Join or Die, which is not about favors, it’s about joining clubs and being part of something larger than yourself.

there’s some similar themes here, so I’m going to suggest that Netflix documentary as something that’s related to this challenge, but also you will enjoy the episode even more. You don’t need to watch the documentary to enjoy that episode that is coming up this month, but you’ll definitely enjoy it on a different level.

Hearing from the co-directors who are brother and sister, they’re great. Pete and Rebecca Davis. So that’s something I look forward to this month. So many great episodes coming up.

Really am loving the growth of this community, of this podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you to some of you who have left reviews, like I stated at the beginning. It really makes my [00:11:00] day. I mean, how could it not? So I guess that’s a favor I am asking you. I am asking you as a favor to go on Apple because that seems to be the place that shows up. Write a review and leave me five stars. If you have gotten something out of this show, even one time, if you’ve listened to one or two episodes and you’ve got something out of it, it would

mean a lot to me as a favor to me because it helps other people find the show. Apple makes it kind of a pain. I am not gonna tell you five seconds. Probably will take you two minutes total, but that’s a favor in this busy world.

So thank you for considering it. I will see you next week. I hope you have a great week. When our friendships are going well, we are happy you’re all around and go ahead and ask someone to help you. Thank you. Bye.