The Friendship Blog Is Back! Welcome!

Welcome back to The Friendship Blog!

For ten years, this blog was a unique space on the web where people of all ages could solicit advice, and talk about the tricky dilemmas entailed in making and keeping friends. After 2200 blog posts that elicited some 30,000 reader comments, I had to close down the site in June 2017, now almost three years ago. I was stretched too thin with other writing commitments, mostly related to travel writing.

However, my world and yours has changed markedly over the course of just the last few months. I live in Westchester County, one of New York State’s COVID-19’s epicenters and like many of you, I’m sheltered in place at home, depending on family and friends for social sustenance. Being grounded has afforded me a bit more time so I’ve decided to use whatever training and experience I’ve acquired about friendship over the years to relaunch this site.

Now, more than ever, most of us realize how vital friends and social connections are to our well-being. Some of the friendship issues we’ve grappled with in the past, before the pandemic, remain the same. But social distancing, soaring unemployment, increased work-at-home, school closures, and other monumental changes in our lives—including experiencing death and illness among friends, family and neighbors—have thrown a curve ball in making and keeping friends.

With the relaunch, I hope to focus on some of the new, emerging friendship issues as well as the ones that are of perennial interest.

Sharing our stories

On a personal level, I’ve missed interacting with you here and hope you feel the same way, too.

Please return to visit us often both to give and receive advice! Some of the crowd-sourced reader comments received in the past are as valuable (or more) than the initial posts. Please join in.

If you have a friendship dilemma that you think may be interesting and relevant to a wider audience, please send it to me for response on this blog (using the CONTACT link is at the very bottom of this page). While I can’t respond to questions privately, I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can on the blog.

A newsletter update  

If you are reading this post online and don’t want to miss future posts, I hope you’ll sign up for the weekly newsletter by entering your email address in the box labeled “advice in your inbox” on the right sidebar of this page.  

If you are receiving this post via my Mailchimp Newsletter, it means that at some point in the past you signed up to receive it. I hope that this topic will continue to be of interest to you but I understand that circumstances change over time. If you are no longer interested, just unsubscribe.

I sincerely hope you and you loved ones are healthy and coping as best you can during this challenging time..

Irene

Irene S. Levine, PhD, Producer of The Friendship Blog

Please note: The searchable archive of past posts is also available again as a resource to readers.  

Tags: featured, newsletter, the friendship blog

Category: How to Use This Site, MAKING FRIENDS