Marisa Franco

American psychologist and researcher of friendship, loneliness, and the science of human connection. After her own struggle with loneliness, she became one of the first researchers to take adult friendship as seriously as romantic love. Her book Platonic draws on attachment theory and decades of social-science research to argue that close friendship is not a luxury but a developmental need — and that most of us underestimate, badly, how much other people already like us. She coined the phrase "the liking gap" for popular audiences and made the case that putting effort into friendship is not needy; it is what mature people do.