Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: Welcome to Childfree Life By Design. I’m Melissa Holcombe, here with Maddy Roche, Bri Conn, and Alli Gage. I wanted to start today with a statistic that shocked me. Did you know that loneliness has the same health effects as smoking 15 cigarettes a day? And when you’re living a Childfree life, nobody is handing you a built-in community. There’s no carpool lane to friendship, and you have to build it yourself. That’s what our conversation today is all about. How to find your people, why intergenerational friendships might be the secret weapon nobody’s talking about, and what it actually looks like to build a crew that fits the life you design. If you’ve ever looked around and thought, “Where do I even start?” This one’s for you.

Intro: From Childfree Insights, this is Childfree Life By Design, the go-to resource for building the Childfree life you want. Every episode gives you practical guidance, clear direction, and meaningful conversations to help you live intentionally and design a future on your terms. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: Today we’re talking about building your crew. The four of us have over 20 years between the youngest and the oldest at the table. And we can tell you that finding your people goes beyond filling up a social calendar. It’s a health requirement. Before we get into our stories of how we actually built our circles, let’s talk about why this matters so much.

Maddy Roche: Thanks, Melissa. I’m always so amazed as I go to aging conferences how much the conversation around loneliness is elevated to the main stages and to the sessions. It really is an epidemic, and I think all of us here just wanna give everyone in our audience just a big hug and an acknowledgement that even those of us with a lot of friends can still feel lonely at times. And that’s all just so normal. Couple stats, and Melissa shared that one about smoking 15 cigarettes a day is being equal to being socially disconnected. And we hear that stat a lot, but there’s some others that I think are worth highlighting. Pew Research said recently that 61% of adults said that having close friends is actually more important to a fulfilling life than being married or having children. Yet despite this, we are still in a friendship recession, and I think that just speaks volumes of the importance of what a unique relationship to a friend is versus that of a nuclear family or even a spouse. The American Psychological Association in 2025 said that 69% of adults say they needed more emotional support this past year than they actually received, which means we’re in a deficit. And some of those stats are just good things to think about because as we walk and meander the world, it’s important to realize that everyone’s on their own lived experience and probably more likely than not are a little bit more lonely than we anticipate. And it’s just a good reminder to treat everyone with a little bit more grace and friendliness.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: Thanks, Maddy, So to start off, let’s talk about when you either realized that you needed a crew or you came to a point in your life where you realized that your crew needed to change. Maybe you moved to a different city, or you started another job, or some other life circumstance.

Maddy Roche: I have two personal examples I’m willing to share on the podcast, and because we are all about being vulnerable. The first one was when I decided to stop drinking at 25. I had spent a whole part of my college career and early 20s developing a group of friends where our social life revolved around going out, and that’s really normal. There wasn’t anything wrong with it. But for my own personal journey, I decided alcohol could not be part of my life anymore, and it required me to really do some soul-searching around how I wanted to spend my time and who the people are around me that I wanted to be around. I think one of the biggest concerns people have or hesitancies around stopping drinking is this idea of they won’t have anything social to do. A quick tip, you will get a lot of time back and you will realize that you actually don’t like all the people you are surrounding yourself around. I actually don’t spend any time in bars anymore. I do go out but I don’t surround myself around the same people. And it wasn’t a statement against them, more of an invitation for myself to surround myself around people who were softer and more in touch with their spiritual views and their health. And I feel like the friendships I’ve made after that decision were some of the best friendships I had, and it required me to sign up for classes. It required me to go volunteer. It required me to change the spaces that I was in. But because I had so much time and I was clear-eyed, I had all sorts of energy to go do that. It was hard because making new friends is difficult, even for a social person like myself. But it requires some proactive engagement. But what you find out is when you go to these other spaces, different classes or volunteer groups, people are there interested in meeting other people and it became really easy and natural. The other example throughout my life is just after breaking up with other partners and having to change social circles, and I always found that one of the hardest parts of a breakup is, is needing to reestablish yourself socially. But again, I followed those same steps of thinking about how I wanted to spend my time and who were the people I wanted to get to know more, and I was able to move into those spaces with ease.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: That’s amazing, Maddy. Thank you for sharing that and being vulnerable. For myself, I had that same issue with having a end to a 30-year marriage. Number one, I had to figure out who I am? What did I want to be going forward? Who did I want to present myself as? And then I had to look at our friend group. We had couple friends, and some of those stayed around but then others just needed to fade away. Realizing at that time that I needed to build my own crew of the people that best reflected of what I wanted my life to look like moving forward. I really get that and appreciate that. So Alli, what about you?

Alli Gage: Similar to you guys, I definitely have had an experience where you’re in a long-term relationship, and for me, that involved also moving to the location where that person lived. So my life really revolved around their friends, their family, and it was wonderful. But when that relationship dissolved, then you look around and you realize none of these are my friends, none of these are my family, and my family lived really far away. And I’ve always been lucky. I have two or three core friends throughout my life that are at long distance, but that doesn’t replace what we’re talking about today and that crew and that the people you do life with. Who can you call for a ride to the airport, or, “Hey, do you wanna go grab a coffee or brunch?” Or it’s those day-to-day things, too, that I think being an introvert I have to be very mindful of. When I was thinking about this episode, I realized that I’ve been super naive on the word friendship in my life. And I kinda just hand it out to whoever without thinking, now that I’m in my early 40s, I’m learning to be more intentional, where are we meeting people and who are we meeting and what types of friendships are we looking to have? But a big one for me, my life has always been very career-focused, and I tend to have a lot of my friends at my work environment, and I had a really eye-opening, experience when I ended up pretty sick and I had to leave a job, and I only had one person that reached out. And at my birthday party the year before, it was all work colleagues, and there was only two external friends. You look around and you realize, once my idea of friendship may not be what everybody thinks. At least for myself, I looked around and I realized that in certain influxes in my life, there were people around me that really didn’t meet my day-to-day values. When you change values or change that moral compass or the base of certain things, then I think a lot has to change around us. Not necessarily everybody, but a lot does. So those are two things that stood out for me over the years, just really having to realizing you need a new crew or realizing that you need to change or make a shift.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: We keep hearing that word that comes up, the intentionality. We want to be intentional about the people that we surround ourselves with. And that can look different from different stages in your life. But to have that intentionality of seeking the people that pull you up, the people that make you feel that you are the person that you want to be. So Bri, I know that you’ve recently moved into a new city. Talk to us about how that looked for you and how you had to change some things with your friend group and your career.

Bri Conn, CFP®: My wife and I have this habit of Tuesday nights deciding that we’re gonna move 1,000 miles across country, Thursdays getting on a plane, Fridays having a new home picked out, and then going back, having to pack up our life within two or three months and then move. We just did that again, and it’s hard. It can be fun and exciting in it, but it also can be really tricky. And this time with our move, it was leaving a lot of the people that we really came to know and love and just build such good friendships with. I have a really close friend who we had met, and at the point in times, both of our wives were just busy a lot with things. Mine travels a lot for work. Hers was in the middle of grad school and finishing all of that up. And so it was just a very easy, “I know I can call her,” and we can go, whether it be go swim laps or work out or go for a hike or just hang out and read, to then now moving and having to restart that again. What I did was before we moved, I looked up, I knew there were different things that I wanted to try, and I found an improv class that started the week after I got here. So I immediately got into the improv class, signed up before I even touched down in my new home, signed up for the second class of that, just finished up this wilderness trekking school. I go out and I try to do a lot of things where I can meet people and surround myself with people. I’m in a book club. And so it’s putting myself out there and also going out there with the attitude of, “I can go to this once, and I can hate it and never go back, but I at least have to try.” Sometimes it can be easy, too, when you move so far to stay home and say, “I’m not gonna do that. I’m too tired.” But if you have those commitments, then it can be a little bit easier to get your foot out the door and meet those people.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: Absolutely. And I love what you said about getting together with your friend and reading I think in psychology with kids, they call that parallel play. But it’s one of those things that you don’t really think about when you have a spouse around or when you have a partner around, that you do those things together in the same room. You may not think to do it with friends. Let’s talk about how you build a group when you’re not out there meeting people in the Mommy and Me classes at the school gates. What are the things you do? And Bri, you hit on several of them. But what are the things you do, and how has social media changed the way you approach finding friend groups? Alli, what do you think?

Alli Gage: I’ve always leaned into hobbies, what are those things that you enjoy? What do you wanna learn about? You gotta put yourself out there. I’m a big homebody and an introvert, I love people, but I also don’t mind being alone. So, I also find that being online, working online, it gives you this illusion that you’ve been around people all day when you really haven’t. To a little bit elaborate on what Maddy was saying is that take it a step further, not just what do you enjoy and what do you wanna learn about, but what types of people are you looking to meet, and then where would they be? And it can all be in the groups of things that you enjoy, but I just think it’s try those things out. For example, after that relationship ended, and I didn’t know anybody in the area, I ended up joining two baseball teams randomly, and I was like, “Okay, this is good ’cause I’ll meet people, they’re all local and all different walks of life.” And I ended up only staying on one of the teams because once again, you try it out and you realize, this one’s a fit for me and this one’s not. But now I’ve have a different, it’s not necessarily a crew that I would hang out with outside of baseball, but it’s an activity and it’s somewhere that I go, and people that I’ve known for a couple years now, which is fantastic. I would say hands down the best place that I’ve made really the highest quality friendships as an adult, has been through my church and being involved in the church. So not just going on Sundays but I joined a biweekly Bible study. So it’s really spending that time to build the friendships, and it’s, that’s been such a blessing, and really based on that aligned value set. I thought about it more so when it came to romantic relationships and making sure that you have aligned values and core moral beliefs. But I never really thought about it when it comes to friendships so much. And I think that really makes a difference at how deep your friendships can be, right?

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: It’s such a great opportunity to build friendships within the faith that you have. And with me I tend to have groups of friends. I have a group of hiking friends, and we hike and kayak together. We call ourselves the Badass Broads in Nature. We have a great time. There are people in the group that are as young as 25 and as old as 75. So you’ve got that intergenerational play. Maddy, what about you?

Maddy Roche: The first thing that comes to mind is you do have to leave the house. You have to get out to meet people. In terms of social media, get off of social media. Do not look at how many friends people say they have by scrolling through their feeds and seeing all their pictures. Go out and make your own memories and friends. I have not used social media to find friends, although I have used it to identify maybe some events I want to go to. But the bigger thing is that for those that are introverted, when you go to events and you go to clubs or classes, you raise your hand to volunteer, there’s almost always someone at that organization whose job it is to be the social one that helps connect people. And I really encourage you, if it’s a weekly or monthly thing, go back the second time because it’s amazing what happens when you see someone again that you don’t even know but you had seen last month or last week. It just naturally makes you feel more comfortable asking how things are going and whether they liked last class and things like that. I’ve built a number of groups around hobbies, I’m in book clubs. I love my gym friends. And you know what’s so fun is that all these different groups I have, I’m not looking for best friends in any of them. Some of them have become very, very dear friends, but I also find it really satisfying to have friends that I’m connecting with just on one level. And I think it’s really important for us in terms of engaging in diversity to understand that I don’t have to like every single part of you. I don’t even have to know what your life is outside of the gym. I just know that we lift weights together, and we’re really good together on Tuesday nights at 5:30. Compartmentalizing that not every friend has to be a best friend. With time, over years, you can look back and be like, “Wow, we’ve known each other for five years through this book club.” And that’s great, and that’s a different level of friendship that can be so satisfying. So take some of the pressure off as you go into these other places and recognize it’s so much more fun to connect over one thing versus trying to make sure that there’s like alignment on everything. And you weed people out long term through that. For example a dear friend of mine, we knew each other through work, but we’ve really bonded over the years. She’s 68 years old. We walk our dogs together every Sunday. We go into the mountains, and we just have these really deep conversations. And she’s moving, and she’s become family to me, and I am so sad, and I cried the whole hike last time. But our dogs are best friends, and we’re nearly best friends. That’s a relationship that we really have a specific thing we do together, and it’s Sunday mornings. And that’s just a friendship that grew because we just really love seeing our dogs be together. Just think about how you like to spend your time, and you can almost always find other people that wanna spend it that way too.

Midroll: As a Childfree individual, who is going to manage your affairs if you can’t? Traditional estate planning often falls short for our community. That’s why we created Childfree Trust®. This isn’t just about a will. It’s about providing a fiduciary solution to protecting your assets, your legacy, and your wishes with people who understand the Childfree path. Don’t leave your future up to chance. Learn more and get started on securing your peace of mind at Childfreetrust.com.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: I love what you said about when you go out into a social group that maybe has been planned that there’s always someone there that’s that connector. Just having that opportunity to meet people, but knowing that there’s someone there that maybe can take you under their wing and introduce you to others if you’re a little on the shy side or you’re an introvert like Alli and me. What about you, Bri?

Bri Conn, CFP®: I’m gonna take a little opposite of approach of Maddy, and I say social media, I think, is great for making friends. I’ve met a lot of people through Facebook groups. I have a great hiking crew in my old place where we would go hike together every Tuesday, and then we would also do different, like, backpacking or camping trips on the weekends together. One of them’s gonna be visiting here in two weeks, and then we’re all gonna meet up, and I’m very excited. Another one was out here recently, and I saw them last month too. So it’s been good lifelong friendships. There is nothing better than getting to know somebody after you’ve spent a few days in the wilderness and haven’t showered and ’cause you just really get to know one another and you’re like, “We’re all a little bit gross together.” But it’s a lot of fun. I’ve used apps before. You’re gonna be swiping a lot to find people, but you can find a couple people in there who will become really good friends. I think Bumble BFF is great if you’re going to a new place, ’cause you can just see what are different things. Some people will list what they like to do as well, and even if you don’t necessarily connect with that person, you might find whatever group they introduce you to can be super helpful. But I like to go online and find what are the different things that I’m interested in that are nearby to me, and also being vulnerable to say, “Hey, I am doing this to look for friends.”

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: I also used meetup.com to get into hiking. I didn’t know the first thing about hiking and the trails around here when I first started to be interested, and it was a great group. While I didn’t stay with that group, it ended up several of the people introduced me to this other group, and it naturally morphed into my broads group now. Also, I have heard that Bumble BFF is one of those really great apps to find someone and to show that vulnerability. I think that we’ve said this over and over in different ways. It’s intentionality, but it’s also being vulnerable and being willing to be vulnerable. After I divorced I became much more willing to be vulnerable, is the biggest thing. Before I was very closed off and was protective of everything. When everything just hit the fan, I was more willing to be open. I wanted to be that person that could be authentic, as Brené Brown says. Connecting with what we had talked about what we’ve touched on a little bit here and there, AARP in 2025 found that 54% of us have close friends with a 15-year age gap. If you have those kinds of friendships, I know, Maddy, you talked about your close friend that you go walking your dog with every Sunday. But if you have those kinds of friendships, how did they come about, and how are they different from the friends that are maybe in your own age group? Alli?

Alli Gage: I thought this was an interesting question, ’cause I had never thought about it actually until this came up. I think we hear about age gaps in relationships, but I had never considered this concept in friendships. And I was just always like, “I just like them.” It’s usually somebody from a work or something that you meet that you may not otherwise run into, but you realize, we’re connected somehow as friends. What it came back to for me when I dove into it was more about life stages. Now that I’m in my early 40s, there’s a lot of that age group higher that if they had kids, they’ve raised them maybe, or their kids are older, so you’re back in that same life stage. I just thought it was always a natural thing of being out in the world and having different hobbies, even through baseball, that not all of us are the same age, right? We have people that are in their 20s, people that are in their probably 60s. The only place you really see us grouping in age is in school. But I thought that was so interesting ’cause when Maddy, when you were talking about how your friendship grew, I thought that that sounded beautiful. So I think it’s one of those things that is a secret sauce that I had taken for granted of, and I’m gonna pay more attention to it.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: You talk about having friend groups when you’re in high school. They’re the same age. You were grouped by ages and grades. And I think that it’s different for us who are Childfree because after graduation, many of our friends had kids. And so then they meet and do the things that their kids do. They meet in playgroups or they do T-ball together. Their friend groups revolve around the children. Whereas us who are Childfree may not have those same connections that tether us to one age group and gives us a broader range of people to be exposed to. What do you think about that, Maddy?

Maddy Roche: I was just starting to think about that, Melissa, that because I don’t have kids, the people I’m engaging with at the hours I’m engaging with them are usually older or they’re folks without kids. Anyone that knows me knows I work out at 5:30, and not all moms can work out at 5:30, except one of my gym friends did just bring her newborn baby to the gym, and it was awesome. But it got me thinking that we have more of a privilege of being able to engage with diversity of age because we’re not raising children. The gym I used to go to, my CrossFit coach was 72 years old, and the average age of the people at the gym was 55. And some of my closest workout friends were much older than me, and I found it so important. I think they liked it because I was young and energetic, but I loved it because it gave me people to look up to, and a script of wow, I can be like that at 72, no doubt I will be like that at 72. And to just start seeing how people are in life. We have a teammate, Sarah Zafgeber, on Childfree Trust®, and she and I talk all the time about the book clubs we’re in. And she’s always giving me advice around the books to read and the engagement that she has on her book clubs. And it got me thinking that I would really appreciate some diversity in our book club because we’re all the same age. And when I was at USAging, a conference just a couple months ago, we were playing trivia, and the host said, “The more diverse in age the team is, the better they’ll do.” And I thought, oh, that is so right, because you do need that cross-section of different types of people to really get a full understanding of the trivia questions. But really, I think that’s a good analogy to life, that you want people at different ages to be part of your life and to have relationships with them ’cause they have so much to teach, and then you have so much to bring them. It’s not just a one-way street. Sometimes I’m age blind, but other times I’m very cognizant of the fact that I’m spending time with someone older than me, and it feels so good.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: I really love that you’ve recognized the positive sides of the intergenerational mix. What about you, Bri? What are your friendships with different age groups? What do those look like?

Bri Conn, CFP®: They are very expansive across age ranges. That hiking group that I was a part of, there were people anywhere early 20s to late 70s in there, and it didn’t really matter to us the age. It was just everybody show up. The group that I was a part of, it was a broader statewide group. Our Tuesday nights became known throughout the entire group. I don’t know how many thousands of people were in there, but they’re like, “Oh, I always wanna come up there and hike with you guys on Tuesday because you all seem to have so much fun.” The other day, I had my first rattlesnake encounter, and I immediately was like, “I need to text all of them. I need to put this in the group chat,” because that was one of the things that we talked about before I moved, was they were all worried of, “You’re gonna get rattlesnakes. Be careful.” And my rattlesnake encounter was not even hiking. It was standing in line to go into a concert. So it was just really funny how my first thought was to text that group chat of people who the age range is so broad in there. And I’m in a church group where we meet once a month, typically for dinner. There are some people there who are experiencing cognitive decline, I meet them again every single month when we go out to dinner. It’s sad for that, and it’s always a good reminder of this is what life looks like at different stages, and it can be really beautiful regardless of where you’re at. And I thought that was very eye-opening for me of, oh, life does look different, and who you surround yourself with and are able to connect with is very different depending on the life stage as well. And I tend to trend with friends who are older simply because I got married at what the US would consider a rather young age. I’ve been with my wife since college. So for us, it’s not people who are going out and going to speed dating, I have some friends who do that, that’s just not my phase of life anymore. I haven’t been there for a decade. I think it varies more by what you have the ability to do versus the age itself. I don’t think that matters as much.

Melissa Holcombe, DSW, LCSW: I have found just throughout the years that I do tend to have friends that are older. It’s interesting because, when I first started forming some friend groups or friendships, then I tended to be the young one of the group. And then now as I’ve aged I’m starting to get people who are younger than I am, so I’m no longer the baby in the group. It definitely feels and looks a little different. But I love to be able to impart my knowledge, all of this wonderful knowledge I’ve gained in my 50 years. It’s been really fun to not only nurture the friendships that I have that are older but also to nurture the friendships with people who are younger than I am, who are coming up in a time that’s so different from what I experienced. One of the biggest things that I’ve heard and I believe is that it’s okay to need support. It’s okay to need friends, and it’s okay to say it. 70% of the country feels the same way, that they don’t only want more friends, but they need more friends. And then also, cast a wide net with your friendships. Don’t look at just the people who are the same age as you or who think exactly the same way you do. But maybe, lean into those friendships where you may think a little differently, but you have something in common like, a baseball, softball group or a hiking group or bowling group. Lean into those friendships and cast that wide net. And then also one of the things that I’ve heard before, and I’ve never really thought about it, is to develop a friendship, it takes roughly about 200 hours. From moving to acquaintance to a closer friendship. So put in that time and be willing to reach out and be that friend that you are looking for someone else to be. That’s all for this episode of Childfree Life by Design. Remember, intentionally choosing to invest in moments of joy is just as important as investing in your future. Until next time, happy designing.

Outro: From Childfree Insights, this is Childfree Life by Design, the go-to resource for building the Childfree life you want. Every episode gives you practical guidance, clear direction, and meaningful conversations to help you live intentionally and design a future on your terms. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.