Fantastic Friendship

My guest for this 2023 special edition Valentine’s Day podcast about friend love, called “Fantastic Friendship,” is my best friend in the world, Melanya Gonshorowski. While some people have marriage ceremonies and hand fast rituals to honor a coupling, Melanya and I decided that we are each other’s best friends and that we are platonically committed to each other. After knowing each other since we were about five years old (and we’re both closing out our thirties) we have a pretty thorough history together of being connected and stoked for our connection. 

There’s something incredibly special about being witnessed throughout your entire life by another person. I feel seen by Melanya and she by me. We’re real with each other in a way that is informed by grace, acceptance, and mutual adoration. 

We have created way more memories together than we can possibly recount here. Although, we did decide that since this was so fun to do, this will be the first installment in a series of episodes on “The Positive Fantastic” about our fantastic friendship. Because Melanya’s life is woven into mine in a seamless way that I never take for granted, I always know I can lean into her for love, support, and council. She feels the same way about me. I’ve often tagged along to her family’s gatherings and life celebrations. And she in mine. 

A few years back we decided to formalize our commitment to each other, and we had a simple ceremony of acknowledgement that we are each other’s ride or die buddy. In our 30 plus years of friendship we’ve never had a fight. Disagreements, confusions, and healthy communication check-ins, absolutely yes. But, we kind of pride ourselves on always choosing to take the high road with each other. It feels like a rare, and beautiful act of kindness to honor each other that much.

Additionally, Melanya has spent the last several years working on becoming a mediator, so she’s invested in keeping the peace beyond the scope of our friendship. And I’ve studied a fair amount of Non-violent communication over the last 20 years, and am always finding ways to improve my ability to empathize, listen, and support healing. 

We created this podcast episode to share about the sweetness of our friendship, and also to offer insight into the wonders of being willing to have difficult conversations in a safe, secure connection. It’s not that we’ve never been through difficult things. We’ve been kids together. We went to college together. We followed each other around the world, traveling, moving, and recalirating all the time. We have been raising our kids together. We’ve been through the beauty and the shadow together. We’re all in. 

I hope that you’ll enjoy the giggle fest that follows. It’s somewhat difficult to follow what we’re saying at first because we have a style of talking where we both talk simultaneously and in my excitement to have my best friend on the podcast, I kept finishing her sentences, and likewise she could read my mind and finish my statements.

So, our interview is full of tangents started and best friend references that are mostly intelligible to the auditory observer. The tone that comes across is giddy and reminds me of sleepover vibes of yore —you know, the ones where you stayed up all night, surfing the natural high of getting to spend special time with your best buddies. Although you may be left with stories unfinished and narrations erupting into laughter, the love that we wanted to convey definitely comes through. 

The song for this podcast is “Wise Old Woman” by Alice DiMicele because Melanya and I have visions of becoming grandmother crone types that do handwork projects together in our elder years while visiting in our side by side rocking chairs. I hope that you’ll enjoy our bubbly, goofy, but completely adoring friend love story for this special Valentine’s Day of “The Positive Fantastic” podcast.