Friending: Creating Meaningful, Lasting Adult Friendships

Friendships are like any other relationships — when they work, they make our lives better. When they aren't working, or are hard to find, they make our lives more difficult.

Gina Handley Schmitt saw her therapy clients struggling to make and keep close friends, and wrote this book to help solve what is becoming a full-blown friendship crisis in the age of social media. In this book, you'll learn: How to identify and reach out to potential new friends. How to maintain long term friendships through busy times and life transitions. When and how to state your needs and set boundaries with your friends. Skills for strengthening your friendships by resolving conflicts. The difficult art of ending a friendshipYou'll do all this using the five core skills of being available, authentic, affirming, assertive, and accepting. Life is so much sweeter with good friends by your side!

Designed + Produced in Portland, Oregon
* Woman Owned Business

Portland's most colorful, authentic, and empowering publishing house and distributor, Microcosm Publishing equips readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and zines about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice.Microcosm has lived in milk crates, in closets, in a mud room, in a windowless basement, in a church, and under a desk at a major credit card company. We've brought our brightly colored books to infoshops, zine fests, media summits, bicycle conferences, parks, street corners, house shows, dirty bars, all­night coffeeshops, art museums, and every corner of the mainstream where we can clear away a little space to set up shop. We set out to save ourselves from not caring, but out there in the margins we've found communities worth always doing it better for. Now we have contracts instead of handshakes, a warehouse instead of a fanny pack full of zines. We have a staff, we have relationships in the industry that send our books to places we wouldn't have dreamed we could walk into ourselves. We're not as drunk or dirty as we used to be. But still, at heart, we've got this milk crate strapped to the back of a bike and we're riding wildly across town to hand you the book that might just be the one that saves your life!