The Friendship Guide: How To Make New Friends, Have A Healthy Social Life & Let Go Of Red Flags + Toxicity

When Jaden Haley says she used to eat lunch in the bathroom stalls and had no friends through middle school and barely high school, she is not speaking hypothetically. Now, as the host of Busy, Yet Pretty, she describes herself as someone with many great relationships and a balanced social life. This episode is a practical guide on how she got from one place to the other—and how anyone else can, too. The core argument is that making and keeping friends as an adult is a skill, not a matter of luck, and it requires deliberate action, a tolerance for rejection, and a willingness to let go of relationships that no longer serve you.

The Mechanics of Making the First Move

A central barrier to new friendships, Haley argues, is the passive hope that someone else will do the work. She frames the solution bluntly: "You have to be willing to make the first move." The assumption that another person will initiate is often a shared one, leading to a stalemate where both people are waiting. To break this, she recommends specific, low-stakes tactics. The first is giving a genuine compliment on a shared interest—not a generic "nice shirt," but a compliment that opens a door to a topic you can both discuss, like asking where someone got their matcha or their Pilates gear. The second is asking questions and showing real interest in the other person, leveraging the psychological pr