Meet Quinn and Nikki ❤️
We became platonic friends in college, and it’s rad.
We partnered on projects our senior year, and then due to life circumstances, we became second-year seniors together. During our final senior year, a switch flipped and we became very close. It turns out that Nikki is a platonic superhero of sorts——forming platonic bonds with men and women as she goes through life. Once Quinn finally learned how to reciprocate this kind of bond, the relationship deepened. This also opened his heart to other platonic relationships, which he tells his friends has “changed his life.” We want to share this superpower with everyone.
The duo worked to understand what had happened for Quinn and what had been preventing this type of love in his life before. Doing a deep dive on Google Scholar, what they found shocked them: platonic love is practically taboo in psychology research, and is terribly misunderstood or misrepresented in the little research that does intersect it. Also, surprisingly, a lot of people don’t even know what “platonic” really means.
What is it about western culture that makes platonic love such a challenge for some people? This seems to be a very important topic, at the root of the so-called “friendship crisis” in the western world today. Although scientific thinking led Nikki and Quinn to a rich understanding of the problem and how to solve it, the two felt hopeless when they contemplated the work to move the social sciences in the direction needed. This is when the idea of a young adult sci-fi novel came up.
We care about platonic love, and if you are still reading, we know you do too. Learn more about us below, and be sure to sign up for our mailing list so we can share updates about the book with you. We will be releasing some platonic friendship resources along with the book, and we don’t want you to miss that!
Quinn and his wife Melissa ❤️
Quinn went from building planes to running a space company.
Halfway through his Junior year at WSU, Quinn won a NASA grant for a new type of Mars drill. This kind of thing doesn’t usually happen——college students don’t normally win NASA grants when they don’t even have a degree yet.
During his second senior year, Quinn won another NASA grant, for a new way to search for life in raindrops on Saturn’s moon Titan. He remains the only person to ever win NIAC fellowship twice as an undergraduate. This project continued after Nikki and Quinn graduated, and in the fall of 2023 Nikki worked with Quinn to pull the troubled TitanAir project out of the ditch. Working together every day with Nikki was a rewarding experience, which the two continued after the grant ended. That’s when this book project started in earnest. The love we both feel when working on the book is off the charts. This is what we are supposed to be doing.❤️
To learn more about Quinn, visit https://www.quinnmorley.com/
Nikki and her son ❤️
Nikki went from being a free spirit in Maui to being a working mom in Seattle.
Nikki always follows her heart, and it has taken her a lot of places. Ultimately, the desire to raise her son close to her family led her back to the Seattle area, where she went back to school to get her engineering degree. This was a big task while juggling solo mom life with a young son!
After graduation and summer adventuring, the chance to work with Quinn on his TitanAir NASA project was a great way to flex her project management muscles while staying by the phone——her son had started public school for the first time, and it was a big transition for everyone! Even so, Nikki saved the day with TitanAir and her son is loving school. And he’s really great at making friends! Hopefully when he is older, the adventures of Robin and Patrick can be a jumping-off point for Nikki to talk about platonic love with her son.❤️
Check out Nikki’s LinkedIn to learn more about her: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikki-froyd/
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