S1E1: Meet the hosts!

What if friendship deserves the same care, commitment, and investment that we give to romantic relationships?

In the very first episode of The Third Thing, Michelle and Danyelle introduce the concept at the heart of the podcast: The Third Thing.

While we often celebrate romantic love and assume familial love will always be there, friendship is frequently treated as optional. Yet some of the most meaningful, transformative, and enduring relationships in our lives are platonic.

Drawing from their 26-year friendship, Michelle and Danyelle share how they met, the life experiences that shaped them, and why they believe friendship is one of the most powerful forms of connection available to us.

They discuss community care, belonging, identity, healing, conflict, and the work required to sustain meaningful relationships over time.

In This Episode

•  What inspired The Third Thing
•  Defining the "third kind of love" 
•  Why friendship deserves intentional investment 
•  The differences between romantic, familial, and platonic love 
•  How Michelle and Danyelle met as teenagers 
•  Growing up feeling different and finding belonging 
•  Friendship as a source of healing and support 
•  The realities of maintaining a 26-year friendship 
•  Why conflict and repair matter in long-term relationships 
•  Community care and radical friendship 

Meet Your Hosts

Danyelle

•  Psychotherapist 
•  Community builder 
•  Tarot practitioner and spiritual guide 
•  Advocate for community care and collective healing 

Michelle

•  Executive coach and strategist 
•  Life coach 
•  MBA graduate and former nonprofit leader 
•  Champion of intentional relationships and personal growth 

Together, they bring professional expertise, lived experience, and decades of friendship into conversations about what it means to build meaningful relationships in modern life.

Reflection Questions

•  What is "The Third Thing" in your life? 
•  Which friendships have helped shape who you are? 
•  Are there relationships that deserve more attention or investment? 
•  How do you currently nurture your platonic connections? 
•  What might become possible if friendship were treated as a priority rather than an afterthought? 

Card Pull: Nine of Cups

The episode closes with the Nine of Cups, a tarot card associated with fulfillment, contentment, gratitude, and celebrating what you've built. A fitting card for the beginning of a new chapter and a reflection on the beauty of enduring friendship.

Connect With Us

📸 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod

🌐 Website: TheThirdThingPod.com

🎧 Join our Patreon community for deeper conversations, monthly gatherings, exclusive content, workbooks, and early access to episodes.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend and leave a rating or review. It helps more people discover the show and join the conversation around friendship, community, and connection.

Transcript

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Danyelle 0:00

Welcome to The Third Thing, a podcast about friendship in all its fullness. The conflict worth repairing, the evolution worth honoring, and sometimes the letting go.

Michelle 0:10

Think of it as a kitchen table conversation with honesty, laughter, validation, and plenty of tea.

Danyelle 0:17

I'm Danyelle, a therapist, healer, and Hudo practitioner who's been thinking about the way we love each other for most of my life.

Michelle 0:25

And I'm Michelle, a life coach, facilitator, and a spaceholder at my core. I've spent a lifetime helping people communicate better and more honestly.

Danyelle 0:34

We've been best friends for 26 years and we've got the receipts. We've done the work and we want to share what we've learned. The tools, the hard parts, the things nobody taught us.

Michelle 0:45

There are a lot of people figuring out their friendships without a roadmap. So we're pulling up a chair.

Danyelle 0:50

Oh my goodness.

Michelle 0:51

Here we are.

Danyelle 0:52

We're actually doing it. Episode one. Welcome to the third thing. Feels like it's been a long time coming. Yes, I would agree. On multiple layers. Not just today. But here we are. Here we are, we've arrived. I'm proud of us. What I will say off top is that just in the last month, we have worked through some things every day.

Michelle 1:21

Yeah.

Danyelle 1:22

As friends. As my platonic beloved. And I one am so blessed to do this with you. And two, it's making me realize how much we need this space. How much we need to be here talking about this every day because we do it every day.

Michelle 1:43

Yeah. And I feel like that's a really important thing to name is that we are coming here as professionals and as best friends of 26 years, but we are not perfect at all.

Danyelle 1:56

Yes.

Michelle 1:57

And I think that's what makes us the most qualified to talk about friendship and the tools in relationship to platonic love or the third thing is because we're still navigating it. And I do think though that we get better and better. Yes.

Danyelle 2:14

Without a doubt in my brain.

Michelle 2:17

And that's what I wish for anyone listening is that by joining us at the third thing, you get the tools to navigate your relationships in a way that makes you stronger.

Danyelle 2:29

Michelle. Yes. What's the third thing?

Michelle 2:31

The third thing is the third kind of love. I know we talked about it in our cute little intro, but we know that folks invest in romantic love. You have couples therapy when things aren't going well. And you literally have contracts around the relationship, you have ceremony and with friendship love, not always the same kind of investment. I'm not, you know, definitely we do invest in vacations and fun together, but even when your relationship's not going well, you might go on a date night. And then we also talk about familial love. I think the unique thing about familial love is there's sort of an unspoken assumption that you will always have a relationship with a parent, a sibling, and that even if things are hard, you just have to deal with it and you'll always stick around. Whereas with friendship love, it's not the same.

Danyelle 3:24

There is actually, I would say, an expectation of the it's okay to walk away. There's always a door open, it's not the same kind of connection.

Michelle 3:37

Yeah. And I think that's what we're offering here friendship, love, platonic love being the third kind of love. Our thesis, our feeling is that it deserves an equal amount of attention. And that given the state of the world, the amount of pressure that we're all under, that community is more important than ever. And how can you nurture that and make your relationship stronger?

Danyelle 4:08

Yeah. Radical friendship. It's so important. It's vital. It's survival. And we understand that as two humans who have been walking together for, as Michelle said, 26 years. So let's introduce ourselves. I'm Danyelle. I like to start with identities because I think it's just helpful for people to like socially locate. Um, I use She They pronouns. I am a black queer femme and a Bay Area native. I hold master's degrees in social work and public administration, and I've spent the past almost 20 years in community work. It has led me to become a psychotherapist. I'm a professional cardomancer. That's tarot, oracle, playing cards, very like witchy spiritual tool things. I'm a hoodoo practitioner. I identify as a witch and a magical being. I really love to incorporate the clinical and the spiritual. That's a big part of who I am. I really love plants and the cosmos and the moon, the elements. I really like to get down in that world. Yeah, I'm deeply passionate about community. I think you will often hear me talk about community this and community that. I'm always trying to get Michelle to move to a commune. She will not.

Michelle 5:39

It will not.

Danyelle 5:40

She will not. She's shut it down. I believe that community care is what heals us. And it's not just a belief that I hold in seeing the state of the world, but it is an inner knowing, it is in my bones. It is like how I connect to the divine through my community, through my friendships, through all of my beloveds. Yeah. I feel like friendship holds us, it grounds us, it reminds us who we are, it calls us out all the time.

Michelle 6:14

Yes, that part. Yeah. I feel like it's sacred. Thank you for that introduction. I'm Michelle. I am also a Bari native. I suppose I have to say I was born in Los Angeles County, but then moved up north when I was one year old. So it feels like I can claim that. Yeah, that feels like for my adult life, spent the first 10 years of my career in the nonprofit space and the next 10 years in family-owned businesses in the private sector. I have an executive MBA from Haas in business. I was class president, if that tells you anything about me. I am also an eldest daughter, so I give big eldest daughter energy, big mom energy. I am a mother. My wife Ashley and I have a daughter who's five years old, very precocious young lady. You'll hear me speak about her often.

Danyelle 7:12

Shout out to my nibblings.

Michelle 7:14

But I would say that between the two of us, I tend to be a more, how would you put it? A more grounded logical strategic thinker. Absolutely. We are good balance for each other because the ways in which we overlap our Venn diagrams are very fiery, but I'm really action-oriented individual. And I think where our friendship really shines is in the spaces where we bring newness to each other. And so I would say that spirituality is newer for me. And I I learn from Danyelle and all the time. So there's that. I'm also, I we will in future episodes get into astrology and how that plays into friendship.

Danyelle 8:04

Yes, we will.

Michelle 8:04

Danyelle likes to say that I woke up and chose violence because I'm very Aries energy. And I think that's also part of where we get into the tools of friendship and of conflict and communication, where a lot of both my just innate fiery energy coupled with the way that I experienced conflict growing up, being very loud, communicative, but sometimes emotionally toxic or violent, violent communication, then led me to counseling and therapy, and then coaching and all of the ways that I could find healing and balance. So I don't lose that fiery energy, but I also bring more of a nuance now, which I look forward to sharing. So that's the sort of bit about me. I've for a long time been explained as and explained myself as a Jane of all trades. But I don't think master of none, I think master of many. And you're welcome.

Danyelle 9:09

Yeah. I mean, thank you. Very, very, very much. You're welcome. Thank you for sharing all of that. I have to name that I'm thrilled to be doing this with you. Beyond. Yes, correct. Six hours in of today. And we're still here. You're my puzzle piece. And we will be talking about the stars. But I think of Michelle as the Saturn to my Neptune. I need that groundedness. I need that structure. I need to be able to feel contained because it is easy for me to float away in the 5D. But like I do come with the very grandiose, very outlandish things. And Michelle's like, okay, let's take a tenth of it and make that happen. And I love that about the way that we balance each other. I feel like, in a lot of ways, I bring that flowy out disconnected from the body. And she just pulls me right back in. And yeah, after 26 years, we're just getting started.

Michelle 10:22

Which is a nice transition into the beginning. Dun dun dun how we met. Danyelle and I met in high school when we were 15 years old. We had a mutual bestie that had brought us into the same circle. But it wasn't really until we decided to get together one night. Right? An instant, it's a connection and it's friendship, but it's but we knew that it was deeper. Yes. And that was the start of what we have done together for the past more than quarter century, which is sit and talk. And now you all get to be part of it. Welcome. Yeah, but that was the beginning of our connection was in a I think in a parking lot or sitting in your car and sitting on the curb and you know, watching the sun come up because we talked for so long.

Danyelle 11:22

Yeah. Yeah. It was one of those moments. And I know I didn't have the language at 15, but now it can be like, oh, this is a soulmate. Oh, this is a soul connection. This is somebody who immediately I felt safe with. I felt like I could share things, I could open up with. And where Michelle and I grew up wasn't always a safe landing space for me. And so it was absolutely a breath of fresh air. It was like a newness I hadn't experienced to have a friend get me the way that you did. And we did. We talked for hours, we shared things for hours, we figured out that we lived three minutes away from each other.

Michelle 12:12

I was at the top of the hill, she was at the bottom of the hill. And I think naming that two of for those who are familiar with Marin County, directly north of the Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco, one of the wealthiest counties in the world. And we were poor. Yeah, frankly. And so to have grown up being sort of the odd man out or the odd person out, not only because of class, but also from my experience, the way that my body looked and how I moved through that space as you know, in gymnastics and in cheerleading. It was nice to meet somebody where I felt like all of a sudden I wasn't alone.

Danyelle 12:57

Yeah. And I there's an admiration there too, because of the ways that we show up so differently. I got to learn from you, like the ways that you moved through the world in your body in ways that I absolutely didn't, you know, and the ways that you showed up in class and I shrunk. Like I literally shrunk. I hid. I felt very empowered to be like, oh, I can be different on you know, across multiple spectrums. You know, yes, Marin is still very affluent, very white. I am black. My mom is queer. I'm queer and didn't have that language fully. It was the 90s. People didn't talk about those things. And so the layers of othering went deep. And meeting you was like, oh, I can take up space in the world.

Michelle 14:00

Well, and we fell so we fell so quickly into oh my goodness, here's another person that's like me, and we became best friends, and it was so quick. And what I look forward to continuing to unpack as we go on this journey is it was really fast that you then left high school and started going to school and entered the workforce. And so it was very early in our relationship that we had to navigate those life transitions. And we have had and continue to have these moments through our friendship where you were the only person helping me apply to college. I had no idea what I was doing, which also landed me in like upper level classes as a as a freshman.

Danyelle 14:46

I also didn't know. I I had just been going to college a little bit longer.

Michelle 14:51

Shout out to Sociology, Drugs and American Society. I will never forget that first class. No idea what I was doing.

Danyelle 15:00

I mean, it sounded like a really good class.

Michelle 15:02

It was great. It was great. It was terrible. I mean, I sobbed because I was still out of place, but I got into school and we did that together. And then I got to show up for you and with you in applying to grad school.

Danyelle 15:15

In so many ways. Applying to grad school times two. Yeah. Both times. That's right.

Michelle 15:21

That's right.

Danyelle 15:22

I really I think there's something really interesting about the perspectives of self and this idea of like becoming very close very quickly. We met when we were 15. I left high school at 15. It was in the second semester of our sophomore year. And like it's so funny because I don't think of it as like anyone missing me or that disconnection. It was not working for me. And it was time to depart that uh that structure, right? And again, at 15 didn't have the language. It makes sense now why the seventh richest county in the United States for a black queer witch wasn't working.

Michelle 16:11

But I think what you've named a couple of times is not having the language yet. Like we had, as you do in any new relationship where it's exciting, you're finding those beats of connection. And then when those moments of disconnect happen, which they are bound to with any individuals that come together and start to share life together. I mean, we've worked together several times. This is our fourth time working together. Yeah. And so as we've navigated into our adulthood and even in, you know, throughout our teenage years, into our 20s and 30s, and now 40s. Um, how the conversations shift and also how we've been able to revisit some of those years. And you brought up race and sexuality, and both of us were still learning and exploring and coming into our own. And now we've had the opportunity to revisit many of those topics through a more adult and learned lens. But we made a lot of mistakes too, and we had a lot of uh trials and tribulations, if you will. Um scraped knees. You know, there was some raves, there were some concerts, there were boyfriends and girlfriends, I mean, you name it. We've been through it together, and here we are recording a podcast. So it's gone well. Yeah, there were some lows.

Danyelle 17:38

Absolutely. Yeah. And like the reason why we were we are here. We'll keep hitting on this today, is because it's not perfect, it's not what it's supposed to be every single time. We are learning and unlearning and expanding, like I said, every day and doing that over two and a half decades.

Michelle 18:01

Look at how young we look. I feel pretty good about it.

Danyelle 18:04

It does take work. And what we wanna create here is validating the work that it takes, validating the grief that is experienced, validating just the individual experience within this relationship. And you'll hear me use relationship for friendship. I invite you to do the same because we are in relation with one another. This is the longest relationship I've been in. This is my longest non-familial relationship. That's what I like to say.

Michelle 18:40

And some of the tools that we use are not dissimilar, actually, to the tools that you might use in any other relationship, familial, romantic, otherwise. We check in, we have quality time, we go on vacations together and we talk about the hard things. I'm not saying it's perfect, and and sometimes it takes time to be ready to broach the subject in a way that's respectful and collaborative, and that's gonna like lead us to the other side. And we don't shy away from it. We what I can confidently say is that every time we tackle a roadblock, it leads us to a better place. Every single time. And that's what we get to bring here is the experience, the tools through a lens of a therapist and a life coach, and all of the other descriptors that we bring to the table. We know the story like the back of our hands. Is there anything we talked about today that bubbled to the surface or sort of cracked you open a unique way?

Danyelle 19:53

Yes, it is really two things. One thing under two umbrellas. Today, listening to you know, the disconnection piece, it is really interesting to be able to talk about something that happened so long ago and revisit it in a way through your eyes. At 15, we never talked about the fact that I left high school and started college.

Michelle 20:20

And like, yeah, like I write as we were becoming friends. Yeah. We were like, no buy, like no conversation, like I had no idea what was going on.

Danyelle 20:30

I did. I took my California high school proficiency exam, and our junior year was my freshman year of college. Wow. And I remember my first political science class. One of the requirements was to be registered to vote. And I was like, I can't. I'm but a child. I am but a child. And so, yeah, like I just I'm naming, I'm excited for more of those moments. And I'm also in the moment sitting with, oh dang, there's impact. And I think we go through life in so many ways taught to be selfish, taught to think of ourselves. And I think it's really beautiful to be like, oh yeah, that thing happened and it impacted you too.

Michelle 21:23

Yeah. What is coming up for me is pride that we can look at our friendship and there's so many beautiful moments that we've created together, but also some that it's funny to even bring up now because they feel many of them feel so far in the past, but some that nearly crushed me or crushed us in our friendship. And I feel prideful. Not only that we overcame them, but that we get to bring them to the surface or bring them to the table now in this space of healing, connection, and offering, and that somebody. Who might be going through it or something similar can take from that through our willingness to be vulnerable and share the real real and admit when we were crazy, literally unwell that part. And that it could help somebody. Yeah. Or just even just feel validated. That's what's coming up for me. Yeah.

Danyelle 22:26

Yeah. We really hope that you can take away a feeling of validation. And we want you to think about like, how does the third thing show up in your life? What is it for you? Do you think about it in that way? Have you heard it talked about in this way? A part of why we're doing this is to shine a light on it. And so before you tune into episode two, we want you to reflect back with yourself around the third thing in your life.

Michelle 23:00

And if there's anything in those relationships that you'd like to invest more in, grow, evaluate, and we're here to help. With that, we're gonna pull a card. This is one of the perks of being friends with Danyelle.

Danyelle 23:19

And we be pulling the cards, the cards be talking.

Michelle 23:22

And for those of you who aren't as familiar with tarot, or if your experience starts and ends at now and then, it to me, to someone less experienced in the witchcraft, to me, it's an opening. It's an opportunity to see what comes up for you when that card lands and to have a moment to reflect. And so what do we have today?

Danyelle 23:54

The Nine of Cups. I'll say about that. I'll say it like that every time. The Nine of Cups is all about contentment and where you are in this really prideful way. In this really like, I did that way. Our cups is connected to the element water. And it is just feeling really good about where you are. The figures sitting with all of their cups displayed above them with their arms crossed, like, hell yeah, I fucking did that. That's right. It feels very perfect for today. Thanks for joining us on The Third Thing. We'll see you next week.

Michelle 24:36

If today's episode meant something to you, share it with a friend. Find us on Instagram at The Third Thing Pod, and everything we're building lives at www.thethirdthingpod.com. Episode notes, our workbooks, all of it.

Danyelle 24:51

And if you're ready to go deeper, real community, monthly events, early access, and to join the group chat, we're on Patreon. The link is in the show notes.

Michelle 25:02

If you're loving the show, a rating and review genuinely helps more people find us. It takes two minutes and it means everything.