In sorrow and in joy: why friendship is most important

“When my son was in intensive care, I felt helpless and lost,” recalls Maria. – The only thing that helped me at that time was the support of a friend whom I had known for over 30 years. Thanks to her, I believed that everything will be fine. She knew exactly what to say and do to make me feel better.”

Something similar must have happened to many. This is the strength of friendship, its main secret. We love friends not only for who they are, but also because they make us who we are.

“Now they counted you too”

Humans are social animals, so our bodies and brains are designed to make all sorts of connections. Starting to be friends, we make contact with the help of:

• touch, which activates the production of oxytocin and helps us trust others;
• conversations that allow us to determine our place in the team and find out who is not from our group and who should not be allowed into it;
• sharing a movement with others that releases endorphins (think of teenage girls hugging, gossiping, and dancing at a party).

However, although we are created to communicate with others, our capabilities have a limit. So, a study conducted by British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar showed that a person can maintain up to 150 contacts of varying degrees of closeness. Of these, up to 5 people are best friends, 10 are close friends, 35 are friends, 100 are acquaintances.

What is the reason for such restrictions? “Friendships are not like relationships with relatives with whom we can not communicate for some time, because we know that they will not go anywhere, because we are connected by blood ties,” says psychologist Cheryl Carmichael. “Friendship requires constant communication and emotional return.”

This does not mean at all that you should have strictly five best friends or exactly a hundred contacts in social networks. But our brain is so arranged that we can’t pull it emotionally and physically anymore.

Friendly support and help

All kinds of friendship are useful in their own way. In difficult life situations, we turn to a narrow circle of friends for help, who give us something that we cannot get even from a partner or relatives.

With someone you are happy to go to a concert or in a cafe to chat. Ask others for help, but with the condition that you will also render them a service later. You can come to friends from social networks for advice (although the emotional ties with them are not so strong, but these people can throw an idea or help to look at the problem from a new angle).

Friends give us physical, moral, emotional support when we need it, Carmichael explains. She believes that friendship protects us from the traumatic influence that the world around us sometimes has on us. It helps to remember who we are, to find our place in the world. In addition, there are people with whom it is just fun and easy for us to communicate, laugh, play sports or watch a movie.

In addition, Carmichael points to the negative aspects of friendship: it is not always healthy and lasts a long time. Sometimes the paths of best friends diverge, and those we trusted betray us. Friendships can end for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding, different cities and countries, opposing views on life, or we just outgrow these relationships.

And although this happens all the time, losing friends hurts: parting makes us lonely. And loneliness is one of the most difficult problems of our time. It is dangerous—perhaps even more dangerous than cancer and smoking. It increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, dementia and premature death.

Some feel lonely even when surrounded by people. They feel like they can’t be themselves with anyone. That’s why maintaining close, trusting relationships is good for your health.

More friends – more brain

Have you ever wondered why some people have more friends than others? Why do some have a huge circle of social connections, while others are limited to a few friends? A large number of factors affect the ability to interact socially, but there is one particularly surprising one. It turns out that the number of friends depends on the size of the amygdala, a small area hidden deep in the brain.

The amygdala is responsible for emotional reactions, for how we recognize who is not interesting to us, and with whom we can communicate, who is our friend and who is our enemy. All these are the most important factors in maintaining social relations.

To establish the relationship between the size of the amygdala and the circle of friends and acquaintances, the researchers studied the social networks of 60 adults. It turned out that the number of social contacts is directly related to the size of the amygdala: the larger it is, the more contacts.

It is important to note that the size of the amygdala does not affect the quality of connections, the support people receive, or the feeling of happiness. It remains an unresolved question whether the amygdala increases in the process of communication or whether a person is born with a large amygdala and then makes more friends and acquaintances.

“Without friends, I’m a little bit”

Experts agree that social connections are good for health. Older people who have friends live longer than those who don’t. Friendship protects us from heart attacks and mental disorders.

The researchers analyzed the behavior of more than 15 teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults and older adults who provided information on the number and quality of their relationships. Quality was assessed by what kind of social support or social tension they received from family, friends, buddies and classmates, whether they felt cared for, helped and understood – or criticized, annoyed and devalued.

The number depended on whether they were in a relationship, how often they saw family and friends, what communities they considered themselves to be. The researchers then checked their health after 4 years and 15 years.

“We found that social connections affect health, which means that people should approach their maintenance more consciously,” said one of the authors of the study, Professor Kathleen Harris. “Schools and universities can hold activities for students who are not able to socialize on their own, and doctors, when conducting an examination, should ask patients questions about social relationships.”

Unlike younger and older subjects, middle-aged people with a wide range of social contacts were not healthier than their less socialized peers. For them, the quality of the relationship was more important. Adults without real support suffered more inflammation and disease than those with close, trusting relationships with friends and family.

Another important point: at different ages we have different communication needs. This is the conclusion reached by the authors of a study by the University of Rochester, begun back in 1970. It was attended by 222 people. All of them answered questions about how close their relationship with others is and how much social contact they have in general. After 20 years, the researchers summed up the results (then the subjects were already over fifty).

“It doesn’t matter if you have many friends or you are content with just a narrow circle, close communication with these people is good for your health,” comments Cheryl Carmichael. The reason why certain aspects of friendship are more important at one age and others at another is because our goals change as we age, Carmichael says.

When we are young, numerous contacts help us learn social skills and better understand where we belong in the world. But when we are in our thirties, our need for intimacy changes, we no longer need a large number of buddies – rather, we need close friends who understand and support us.

Carmichael notes that social relationships at the age of twenty are not always characterized by closeness and depth, while at thirty the quality of relationships increases.

Friendship: the law of attraction

The dynamics of friendship is still an unsolved mystery. Like love, friendship sometimes “just happens.”

New research has shown that the process of forming friendships is much more complicated than many people think. Sociologists and psychologists have tried to determine what forces attract friends to each other and what allows friendship to develop into true friendship. They explored patterns of intimacy that occur between friends and identified the elusive “thing” that puts a friend in the “better” category. This interaction happens in a minute, but it is very deep. It lies at the heart of the mysterious nature of friendship.

Login to the friendzone

A few years ago, researchers set out to find out what kind of friendships arise between residents of the same house. It turned out that residents of respectable upper floors made friends only with their neighbors on the floor, while everyone else made friends throughout the house.

According to research, friends are more likely to be those whose paths constantly cross: colleagues, classmates, or those who go to the same gym. However, not all so simple.

Why do we chat with one person from yoga class, and barely say hello to another? The answer is simple: we share common interests. But that’s not all: at some point, two people stop being just friends and become true friends.

“The transformation of friendship into friendship occurs when one person opens up to another and checks whether he, in turn, is ready to open up to him. This is a mutual process,” says sociologist Beverly Fehr. Reciprocity is the key to friendship.

Friends forever?

If friendship is mutual, if people are open to each other, the next step is intimacy. According to Fer, friends of the same sex feel each other intuitively, understand what the other needs and what he can give in return.

Help and unconditional support are accompanied by acceptance, devotion and trust. Friends are always with us, but they know when the border should not be crossed. Those who always have an opinion about our way of dressing, about our partner or hobbies are unlikely to stay around for long.

When a person accepts the rules of the game intuitively, friendship with him becomes deeper and richer. But the ability to provide material support is not at all in the first place in the list of qualities of a true friend. Friendship can’t really be bought with money.

The desire to give more than receive makes us good friends. There is even such a thing as Franklin’s paradox: someone who has done something for us is more likely to do something again than someone to whom we ourselves have rendered a service.

My mirror light, tell me: the truth about best friends

Intimacy forms the basis of friendship. In addition, we are connected with truly close friends by a sense of duty: when a friend needs to talk, we are always ready to listen to him. If a friend needs help, we will drop everything and rush to him.

But, according to the research of social psychologists Carolyn Weiss and Lisa Wood, there is another component that brings people together: social support – when a friend supports our sense of self as part of a group, our social identity (it can be associated with our religion, ethnicity, social role) .

Weiss and Wood have shown the importance of maintaining a social identity. According to studies conducted with a group of students from the first year of study to the last, the closeness between them grew over the years.

A best friend is most often in the same social group as you. For example, if you are an athlete, your friend is likely to be an athlete too.

Our desire for self-determination, our desire to be part of a group, is so strong that it can affect even those who are addicted to drugs. If a person feels like they are part of a non-drug group, they are more likely to quit. If his main environment is addicts, then getting rid of the disease will be much more difficult.

Most of us prefer to think that we love our friends for who they are. In fact, they help us stay who we are.

How to keep friendship

With age, our ability to make friends hardly changes, but maintaining friendships becomes difficult: after school and college, we have too many responsibilities and problems. Children, spouses, elderly parents, work, hobbies, leisure. There is simply not enough time for everything, but you still need to allocate it to communicate with friends.

But, if we want to keep a friendship with someone, it will require work on our part. Here are four factors that help us be friends for a long time:

1. openness;
2. willingness to support;
3. the desire to communicate;
4. positive outlook on the world.

If you keep these four qualities in yourself, then you will keep friendship. Of course, this is not easy to do – it will take some effort – and yet friendship as an endless resource, as a source of support and strength and the key to finding yourself, is worth it.