Friendship
The Today’s Gossip
January 31, 2023
Ghosting
January 31, 2023Why Friendship is important?
The Germanic root of frēond and frēon is *frī-, which meant “to like, love, be friendly to.” Closely linked to these concepts is that of “peace,” and in fact Germanic made a noun from this root, *frithu-, meaning exactly that.
Friends prevent isolation and loneliness and give you a chance to offer needed companionship, too. Friends can also: Increase your sense of belonging and purpose. Boost your happiness and reduce your stress.
i should finish here as the sentence says it all but I will go futher to analyse friendship and behaviour, ask the question why we hurt people they close to us.
Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other’s sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy.
Healthy friendships improve your emotional intelligence. A powerful cocktail of oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin (all your feel-good hormones) elevate your mood and optimize your hormonal response to stress. Certain people inherently trigger these positive chemical reactions: Your friends! Humans like to feel happy
Healthy friendships and relationships also mean learning to respect and trust each other. People respect each other for who they are. People may disagree with each other. But with respect and trust, they can talk about how they feel and work things out.
As an adult, making new friends—and maintaining old friendships—can be tough. Life is busy and friends end up taking a backseat to other relationships and responsibilities, let’s talk about how to make new friends and strengthen and rekindle old friendship ties, why Americans’ friendship networks are shrinking, the differences between men’s and women’s friendships, and more.
When you were a kid, making friends might have seemed easy and natural. You were surrounded by potential playmates at school and on the playground and friendships just seemed to happen. And college may have been another situation where friendships easily blossomed. But for many adults, making new friends and maintaining old friendships is more difficult.
We’re all busy with work, our partners, childcare and other grown-up responsibilities, and friendships often end up taking a backseat to the other priorities in our lives.
Why is that? Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult? And why don’t we prioritize friendship more? If you want to make new friends, what’s the best way to do it? What about strengthening and rekindling old friendship ties? What are the essential ingredients of being a good friend and how do you know which friendships are worth the effort to maintain?
Whereas when we’re younger, we’re focused on expanding our sense of identity. So we’re just like, I’m going to be open to all different types of people who are going to show me new and different things.
So just what tends to happen is that we shrink our circles over time, but I’m not exactly sure if that’s because it’s getting harder or because we’re also doing so intentionally.
The recent research has found, and this was conducted in the pandemic, so that’s a caveat, that compared to decades ago, people are four to five times more likely to have no friends.
And it’s worse among men compared to, I think, it was like a few decades go like early nineties — the amount of men that have no friends has risen fivefold and fourfold for women.
And so other meta-analyses, and meta-analyses just combine research amongst a bunch of different studies, have been finding that our friendship networks have been decreasing over time.
And I think that this is a crisis. It’s a public health crisis because loneliness is as toxic for our bodies as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, the science finds.
For our longevity, actually, our social connection matters more than even our diet and our exercise, according to various meta-analyses. And so having friends, having connection for us as social creatures, it’s just central to our health and also just central to our sense of identity.
For us to feel like ourselves, for us to be able to explore who we are, often we find pieces of ourselves in other people and we begin to incorporate that, and that’s how we feel enriched and that’s how we feel full.
And so I think as our friendships start to decline, we’re going to see more health issues alongside feelings of just social unease or identity issues.
So what about someone whose concern is more about maintaining and deepening friendships rather than making new ones. Maybe we’re talking about a new parent who’s working full time and finding that old friendships are falling by the wayside. What are some tips for them?
So you want to create your own continuous unplanned interaction. So I would say schedule a monthly meeting on your calendar for you and your friend to catch up and put it there, so that it’s there, and you don’t have to figure out ‘when can we find the time?’ It’s there automatically, so that you can find that time to connect. Other things that I would suggest is taking that assuming people like you and applying it to old friendships you want to rekindle to. Right? Because often we don’t reach out to these old friends because we’re sort of like, oh, maybe they’re not interested. They’ve moved on. They have all these other things going on in their life. They’re too busy.
But instead, hey, they’re probably wanting to hear from me and they’re probably wondering about me too. And that being the mindset that can allow you to actually reach out to some people that you want to connect to. The other thing that I would say is as we become more busy, one way to keep friends is to incorporate friends in a goal that you would like to set for yourself. So maybe that’s like, I want to walk more and finding time to go on walk with friends, or I want to eat healthy and finding time to cook with friends, because that gives you something to anchor your friendship around. That gives you the excuse, that gives you the regularity of the interaction. That’s really important for maintaining the connectio
And that’s actually been found to predict whether best friendships maintain over time. Do we provide that identity affirmation?
The other thing that’s just really important is perspective taking. Unhealthy relationships, toxic relationships, often there’s a breakdown in perspective taking.
I’m thinking about my needs. I’m not thinking about your needs. So, just for an example of an interview that I did for my book.
This woman got sick during the pandemic. She wasn’t sure what it was. She was supposed to go to a dance contest with her friend. She says, I can’t, I have this mysterious illness. It’s a pandemic.
Her friend says, I can’t believe you’re abandoning me. You’re a horrible friend. That friend clearly is only thinking about her needs. I want my friend to show up to this dance competition, but not thinking about her friend’s needs at all.
And so healthy relationships, we want to find people who balance their own needs and our needs and try to collaborate and figure out how to navigate things in a way that is a win-win and suits both of us.
G.I.T.C
True friendships stand by you consistently both when you are present and when you are not. True friendships are full of support, and can offer a good laugh after a long day. They Answer You With Empathy, Perspective, And Honesty. True friends aren’t phony with you. They show you who they really are
What are the four types of friendships? Friendship is categorized into four types: acquaintance, friend, close friend and best friend. Over time, an increase in mutual respect and the degree of reciprocity builds up and strengthens friendship
- A good friend shows up. A good friend is there for you. …
- A good friend listens. …
- A good friend holds you accountable. …
- A good friend has earned your trust. …
- A good friend is committed to your well-being. …
- A good friend is someone you like being around.
- SIGNS OFA STRONG FRIENDSHIP
- is there for you, no matter what.
- doesn’t judge you.
- doesn’t put you down or deliberately hurt your feelings.
- is kind and respectful to you.
- is someone whose company you enjoy.
- is loyal.
- is trustworthy and willing to tell you the truth, even when it’s hard for you to hear.
- laughs with you
I think that it’s the context that we’re in. So, sociologists have argued that there’s a few ingredients that need to be at play for friendship to happen organically, and that’s continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability, and we have that when we’re younger.
Like at school, we’re on the playground, we have recess, we have all these clubs, but as we move into adulthood, we’re not in a lot of environments that allow for continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.
Like work, it gives us continuous unplanned interaction, but often there’s professionalism norms where people aren’t actually sharing a lot about themselves, and so that really impedes connection.
And so I think it’s just that we no longer find ourselves in the environments that have the right conditions for friendship, unless we intentionally seek them out as adults.
I would argue that it tends to start after college where you no longer have that environment. But what we see in the research is that people actually have the most friends in their young to mid-twenties and then it tends to taper out over time. Some of this is actually arguably good.
There’s a theory called the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis, which basically argues and finds that as we get older, we focus more on quality rather than quantity because we’re thinking, I have X amount of time left. I want to spend it with people that really matter.
Say someone who’s just moved to a new city and is feeling lonely, doesn’t know anybody.
So for people to make new friends, I recommend initiating, right? We tend to rely on this myth that friendship happens organically, so we don’t put ourselves out there. But actually the science finds that people that see friendship as something that doesn’t take effort are more lonely over time, whereas those that see friendship as taking effort are less lonely, and that’s because they make the effort.
I think the biggest problem is that we tend to be so self-defeating, we tend to fear rejection. We tend to think that if I reach out, they won’t want to talk to me. But in fact, that’s a bias that we all have. It’s not necessarily true according to the research.
There’s a study on a phenomenon called the liking gap, wherein the researchers had people interact, and afterwards, each person was asked, hey, how much do you like the person that you interacted with?
And the study actually found that people underestimated how liked they were by the other person. And the more self-critical people were, the more pronounced this bias was to underestimate how much people like them.
And so my advice to people who are thinking about initiating a little bit more is to get into the right mindset, which is going to require you to begin to assume that people like you, and then going out there and initiating with new people is going to look a lot easier.
And just to make this super practical, what does this look like? Simply saying a line like, hey, I really enjoy talking to you. I’d love to stay connected. Exchanging contact information, following up from there.
So we just have to put ourselves out there, really take the risk and reap the benefits.
Take the risk, reap the benefits, and believe that there will be benefits. Maintain your optimism because if you’re self-defeated, it’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What makes for a good friendship?
Early signs of reciprocity are very promising. Like you reach out and they’re also reaching out to you. What’s really important for friends is people that are rooting for your success.
When you share good news, are they happy for you? Are they excited for you? Research studies actually find that this predicts how satisfied we are in the relationship, even more so than whether someone shows up for us when we’re sad.
So that’s really important. We want someone who is looking out for us, wants the best for us.
The other thing is I really love this concept, it’s called identity affirmation. And that means we look for friends who support us in becoming the person that we want to be rather than imposing who they think we should be on us. Right?
So someone who’s high in identity affirmation, if I tell them, oh, I want to quit my job and take an intensive Spanish class in Mexico, right, they might think, oh my gosh, I would never do something like that. That’s so risky. But they would understand that these are my values, right? That this is what I enjoy.
Adventure. And so they would be able to say, I’m so happy for you. I want to support you because I understand that that aligns with your goal
