• Now that people are living well into their 70s, 80s and 90s, intergenerational friendships are becoming more common. Research into friendships is also relatively new, with studies springing up in the past few decades.
• Friendships are unbelievably valuable for human beings as they deal with life's tragedies and crises. If you maintain them, you are far better able to survive and live your best life.
• Intergenerational friendships keep us informed: Older adults have much wisdom and experience, while younger ones tend to be more tuned into trends and happenings about town.
• Finding common ground, such as through sports, hobbies or arts is the best way to connect with a friend from another generation and stave off the human tendency to stereotype. Steer away from things you disagree on. Listen to what others are engaged in and engage. Seek the opinions of others.
• Intergenerational friendships are great for busting loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions and can lead to depression, drug use, and suicide.
• Reach out for relationships beyond your relatives. Focusing too much on achievement or family relationships at the expense of maintaining close friendships is a "losing strategy," Nussbaum says. Smile. Get out there among your neighbors. Look for common ground and engage!

Annette Lareau is a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Malcolm Gladwell has featured her ideas in his book Outliers. Annette studies family life and is interested in how the social position of children and parents affects their life experiences and how they raise their kids. Annette has a golden academic resume: She's been president of the American sociological association and got her PhD from Berkeley.

Margie Warrell is an Australian motivational speaker who emboldens people to lead braver lives. She is also the author of four books: Find Your Courage, Stop Playing it Safe, Brave, and Make Your Mark. And she has interviewed fascinating characters including British billionaire Richard Branson on her Live Brave Podcast.

Margie grew up one of seven children on a small dairy farm in rural Australia. Since then, she has crossed the Sahara Desert, stayed in Palestinian refugee camps, swam with piranhas in the Amazon and recently summited Mt Kilimanjaro with her husband Andrew and their four kids.

She's lived many places around the world including in Papua New Guinea, Washington, D.C., and Singapore. Now that she's a year away from becoming an empty nester, she's working on her PhD.

You can Develop Close Relationships by Sharing Vulnerabilities and Emotions -

I'm here today at Yale University with Margaret Clark/, a psychologist and one of the world's top experts on personal relationships.

Margaret has her own laboratory here where she studies human connection.

Her work includes how romantic relationships and friendships unfold over time. She also

studies how people forge and maintain close bonds with others.

To create close relationships, she says, you need to be active, get out there/ and find others with similar interests.

Once you find new acquaintances with similar interests, you must be willing to trust them/

and take the risk of opening up. Sharing your vulnerabilities and emotions is the glue that helps connect you to others.

People Often Banish Loneliness by Sharing Fears with Acquaintances or Relative Strangers Rather than with Close Friends or Family

With Mario Luis Small, Harvard sociology professor and author of Someone to Talk to: How Networks Matter in Practice

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• Just venting and talking about issues that are disturbing to us provides mental health benefits and improves our overall well-being.
• People often confide highly personal matters to people they barely know. They may share their deepest concerns with the hairdresser, the uber driver, the guy they saw at the gym or someone at church.
• People avoid telling their parents, siblings or close friends their deepest concerns because those special men and women perform other roles in their lives. For example, if you tell your mother about troubles with a romantic partner, she may try to protect you rather than just listen. Or, you simply don't want to worry her.
• When we are distressed or worried, we are looking for "cognitive empathy," or someone who can truly understand or empathize.
•  You can expand your personal networks by doing what you like to do. If you are a golfer, you will find others who have similarities and who have self-selected into this group.
• Short, bright interactions with relative strangers in your everyday travels break isolation and soothe the soul.

Mary Ann Frank, a clinical psychologist in New Haven, had much more than the empty nest to cope with after her last child went to college. She also lost her husband of 28 years to a brain tumor, a glioblastoma. He was Ralph Hoffman, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale medical school and a renowned research scientist in schizophrenia. "Little did I know how empty the empty nest was going to become," she says. Seeking to make sense of it, Mary Ann tapped her talents as writer, singer and actress and launched a one-woman musical memoir "Spinning" in New Haven to tell her story. She says we "spin" when our sense of the future is lost: "It's like having vertigo." As she worked through the trauma, she found—as people often do—new creativity and ambition. Mary Ann aims to share her play in regional theaters and has recorded music from "Spinning," which is about marriage, loss, resilience and transformation.

With Emily Esfahani Smith, a writer, editor, speaker and author of The Power of Meaning, an international bestseller that draws on psychology, philosophy and literature to explore why we are the way we are and how we can find grace and meaning in a world full of suffering.

Smith's articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. She has also appeared on NBC's The TODAY Show, CBS This Morning, and NPR.