The Best Friend Project

Grieving a Friendship Breakup | I Miss Her, But I Miss Myself More Some friends feel like pillars. They hold your history. They know a version of you nobody else met. So what happens when one of them falls away? Carrie Shea is the creator behind @ThePreppyMess on Instagram. On October 8, 2026 she made a post about the friendships she thought would be there forever. Women flooded her comments with...

No phone call this week. Just me. And Scarlett O'Hara.  On this week’s episode, Kari Moran talked how the shift she felt as her friendship heading into the "empty nest" phase of their lives. Kari has an adult child with special needs. Her nest will never be empty. And she talked about detecting pity in her friends and how that felt.  The word "pity" sent me straight to my...

I DON'T WANT YOUR PITY. For mothers raising children with disabilities, friendship can be an unexpectedly lonely place. Friends stop calling, invitations disappear, and even well-meaning gestures can leave you feeling more isolated than included. Kari Morin is the mother of three sons, including Griffin, who lives with a rare genetic disorder that causes severe epilepsy and intellectual disab...

What happens when you step out of social media and into real life, or IRL as the kids call it? Well, you will just have to try it and find out.  When I ran the other direction from social media, I found myself, just one year ago, taping postcards up in women's bathroom stalls across the country. Asking them to share friendship experiences by taking my survey. This led me to learning from hund...

Protect your peace. Cut off toxic friends. Match their energy. You’ve seen these all over Instagram. So have I. And they make my skin crawl. I’m not a Pollyanna about it. I’ve just read your surveys. Hundreds of them. And your answers tell a different story. This is a solo episode. Just me, a stack of printouts, and the data you’ve given me through The Best Friend Project. I walk through the three...

Rachel and Cami revisit a conversation about adult friendship, vulnerability, and the unexpected ways meaningful connections enter our lives. They talk about the courage it takes to approach someone new, why meeting in real life still matters, and how letting go of jealousy and comparison can help us appreciate the beauty in ourselves and others. Connect with Cami:  Website (https://www.camianntal...

Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult—aren’t we supposed to know who we are by now? When professional makeup artist Cami Talbot left the Mormon church at 14, she lost more than her religion—she lost her childhood tribe. Years later, an unexpected encounter with a stranger would challenge everything we assume about how adults make new friends. But this conversation starts somewhere even mor...

Getting ghosted by a friend makes you the victim. Until you hear yourself tell the story out loud. After Beth’s episode aired, I called her back. I wanted to know what it was like to hear her friendship breakup played back. Her answer surprised both of us. We get into in this bonus content to explore why trying not to be a bother can push people away. Why receiving love can feel harder than giving...

After 25 years of friendship, Beth never imagined her best friend might break up with her. “I thought she wasn’t calling back because she was sick.” For a year, Beth kept trying to reach her. When they finally spoke, the conversation ended their friendship. More than 20 years later, telling the story still moves Beth to tears. In this episode, Beth shares what she’s come to understand about that b...

The story of Laura and Lisa is living proof that love doesn't die. Special thanks to Laura for sharing her story with us, and for the reminder to donate and apply to be a match.  Hear our sweet, quick catch up on this episode of On The Phone with Laura Goodburn.  Thank you as always for listening to The Best Friend Project podcast.  Support the show

When your spouse dies, you're a widow. But when your best friend dies, there isn't even a word for it. Laura and Lisa met when they were three years old. They were best friends for over 30 years, until a fast and brutal fight with leukemia took Lisa's life. Laura hardly knew who she was without her. Years later, Laura's life began to unravel. Her marriage ended. She lost her jo...

It's a funny thing when you know your own life story. Because it is your life, it's the only thing you know. So it doesn't seem unusual or possibly even interesting to you. But when you say it out loud on a podcast and other people hear it, well, it can make you see your whole world differently.  I hop on the phone with Kimberly to find out how she feels after a doozie of a trifecta...

It’s 1982. You’re the new girl in eight grade, and you accidentally bump into Brenda, the school bully. She tells you she’s going to fight you after school. You’ve never been in a fight. You barely know anyone. You’re terrified and alone, armed with the one thing you know how to use: your words. Last week, Brenda told me what happened next. In this episode of The Best Friend Project , Kimberly Pom...

After speaking with Brenda this week, I couldn't stop wondering "What was Kimberly's mom thinking." Here she was in the back of a cop car, with her daughter and Brenda - after the knife had been taken away. I had to talk to her. So I hopped On The Phone with Diane Trisko, Kimberly's mom to hear about the friendship between Brenda and Kimberly from the mothers perspective. ...

Have you ever wondered if the voice on the other end of the line was actually human? I have, which may be one reason this episode with Brenda Scott on The Best Friend Project stands out to me. Brenda is one of the rawest, realest, most unmistakably human humans I have encountered in a very long time. This interview is audio-only. Brenda lives way up north in Minnesota without Wi-Fi and with barely...

I can’t help feeling like Kristy brought Anne to life. I’ll never have the opportunity to meet her, but through the love that lives on in Kristy, and in the stories she shared, I feel like I know Anne. But what was it like for Kristy to hear their friendship told back to her? I hop On The Phone with Kristy to talk about the episode, the response from her community and an unexpected comment from on...

When Kristy met Anne, she knew her new friend had a failing heart. She would most likely die without a heart transplant. Not a lot of people would rush into a friendship with someone who might not be around long, but those would be people who didn't know Anne. Kristy says she was almost impossible not to be her friend . Which only made it harder as Anne grew sicker. She desperately needed a h...

So, what happened? Did Barb call the old friend she hadn't talked to in years? Has her neighbor FKABF (formerly known as Best Friend) heard the episode? And what was it like for Barb to hear that incredibly real, still raw conversation between us.  Find out all of this on this episode of On The Phone where we call the guest from this week to see what they thought about their episode of The Be...

By age 68, you’d think friendship drama would be behind you. For Barb, it wasn’t. And what she learned from a painful friendship breakup could help all of us think differently about friendship and loneliness as we age. After years of close friendship, a seemingly simple misunderstanding created a divide between Barb and her best friend. She was devastated and confused. And to make matters worse, t...

What happened after the episode? The one where Ali talks openly about her biggest hater being the one who birthed her. Where I disclose a disconnect between me and my own mother that just might explain the gap that prevents me from trusting? Find out on this episode of On The Phone with Ali Lohman. This is the bonus content from The Best Friend Project, where I call the guest from this week to ask...

“My biggest hater gave birth to me.” When I came across Ali Lohman's Instagram posts about the years she spent trying not to go no contact with her mother, I knew I wanted to have this conversation. Research from The Best Friend Project suggests a strong connection between trust in our mothers and our ability to build healthy adult friendships. In this episode, Ali and I talk about mother wou...

What did Jackie's former coach think of Jackie's comments? Find out as we hop On The Phone with our guest to hear her reaction, her experience with Jackie, spotting friendships as a coach, and much more. Stay in touch with Jackie Kashian by following the links below: YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jackie_kashian Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/jackiekashian Facebook : https://www.fa...

"In the end, I don't know that we were friends at all." Jackie Kashian is known for being funny. Really funny. But in this conversation, we get to know the woman behind the comedy as she shares her experiences with friendship, and how her own family influenced her social life, or lack thereof. Jackie opens up about her journey to making friends and the people who helped her understa...

As I dig into my recent friendship break-up, I realized in order to understand "how I got here," I have had to go back and look at where I came from.  On this episode of "On The Phone," I call up Paige Parranto, one of my oldest childhood friends, to ask her what she remembers of my house growing up. It sparked a memory for both of us. Paige describes sleeping on the floor of m...

One text message ended my longest, closest friendship of 12 years. No fight. No warning. Just "Friendship with you is like death by 1,000 cuts." Then ghosted. Before I started the Best Friend Project, I was a private investigator and TV journalist, so when my closest friendship blew up I went into full decode mode. I had to figure out what I had done wrong throughout my life in my friend...