When we look at the ark of people’s lives, one fundamental ingredient of a life lived well, of a good life, repeatedly shines through: the quality of one’s relationships. When we think of what we want for the people we love, for our children, one thing shines through: we want, above most things, for them not to be lonely.
The recent report from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (Tilda) highlights the persistent levels of loneliness among the older population, with similar studies identifying rates of loneliness among younger people close to 30 per cent. This is concerning data that has public health and indeed wider societal implications and impacts. It is also something that can be modified.
One of the longest scientific studies of human life, The Harvard Study of Adult Development, now in its 85th year, is an extraordinary scientific study of human wellbeing. It has followed three generations as they navigate life’s challenges, and it has highlighted the crucial importance of our relationships.
The Harvard study revealed a simple but terribly important truth: the stronger our relationships are, the happier and healthier our lives will be. This finding is replicated in several other longitudinal studies; they tell us again and again that human connection is essential to our wellbeing. People who are connected to their family, friends, and community are happier and physically healthier than those who are less connected.
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What might surprise many of us is that necessitates a network of friendships that enables the individual to explore. When we think of physical health, we tend to think of things like exercise, eating less processed and fatty food, and drinking less alcohol. However, the Harvard and Tilda studies suggest that actually the quality of our relationships plays a crucial role in our physical health.
This web of human relationships encompasses family, romantic partners, friends, and the wider community. One of these ingredients is often overlooked: friendship. The shelves of self-help sections in bookshops and libraries are close to collapse with books on how to improve relationships with your partner, your children, your parents, your work colleagues and even your boss. Books about friendships seldom feature on these shelves.
Friendships tend to fall into the optional category, the nice but not essential category. This couldn’t be further from the truth. As we age, friendships can be relegated to the optional category, squeezed by the demands of work, family life, and care for ageing parents.
One of the most important psychological aspects of friendships during adolescence and early adulthood is that they provide a stage for individuals to explore and try out different identities. The well-known “identity crisis” of adolescence and early adulthood necessitates a network of friendships that enables the individual to explore various aspects of themselves. Friendships provide a stage for adolescents and young adults to try out different roles and identities.
This does not come to an abrupt end when adolescence and early adulthood finish – it continues, in less dramatic ways perhaps, across the course of our lives. Our friendships offer a place of safety from which we can reconsider, reprioritise, and reshape our way of being in the world as we age.
Friendships allow us to make a mess, to be a mess, to be vulnerable, and to stop pretending
The safety and shelter of friendships offer us hospitable ground from which we can return to what matters most, remember what’s truly important, and repair what needs repair. Friendships offer us the space to reimagine, and the really good ones might know exactly when to nudge us towards adventure, abandon and bravery.
Friendships differ from family relationships. One of the crucial distinctions is this: we choose our friends, we don’t choose our families. Our friends are sometimes referred to as our “chosen family” as opposed to our biological or “first family”. As a result, friends are in a unique position; they come without the same psychological trimmings our family members or romantic partners do. They have a kind of latitude that allows for a directness we might not tolerate in romantic or family relationships.
Across decades of research, one factor consistently emerges as crucial for maintaining relationships: frequent contact is essential for relationships to thrive. Simply put: without frequent contact, perfect friendships can fade away. Families tend to have events dotted throughout the calendar year that create frequency. The things that bring them together, like birthdays, Christmas, and anniversaries, can provide a scaffolding, a kind of binding agent, that provides one of the most important ingredients of all relationships: frequency.
Friendships don’t necessarily have the scheduled events that are common in family relationships to provide for frequency. If we want to keep our friendships alive, we need to create this scaffolding; we need to work hard sometimes to avoid the drift that can happen and see friendships wither as a result.
Think of friendship as a verb; an action word, friendship is something we “do” – it doesn’t just magically happen or mysteriously keep itself alive. Friendships are things we do; they require action. Scheduling must occur in conjunction with spontaneity and impulse, but be cautious about relying solely on spontaneity. The adult years can make frequent contact difficult: our responsibilities increase, our energy decreases, and with all of that, our spontaneity tends to wane. Late nights are replaced by early mornings, often our network of friends scatters geographically, people may partner up, move cities, and children arrive.
Friendships are also essential when someone is in a long-term romantic relationship. Long-term romantic relationships rarely survive in the absence of friendships because friendships moderate the harsh expectation that a romantic partner will meet all our emotional, intellectual and psychological needs. This is a catastrophic burden to place on a romantic partner and will suffocate the most promising romantic relationship. There is no “better half” out there waiting around the corner to make us whole: this illusion sets us up for failure. Finding your “other half” is romantic fiction; finding compatibility that allows room for friendships is a wiser pursuit, leading to a much richer life.
Friendships open us up and open us out – sometimes against our will
There will be change, our friendships will unfold, roots will deepen, storms will be weathered, leaves will be lost. There may be an autumn for friendships when we stop holding on and gently let go, unsure of the outcome, holding but not holding on. There may come a time when a friendship has had its season, when gracious letting loose is called for. This letting loose is a delicate act and by its very nature needs to be protracted; we need to be cautious about any sudden moves in friendships. Abruptness is a concerning manoeuvre in friendships and may signal a reluctance to tolerate the emotional disquiet of bumping into personal psychological patterns that will show up in other relationships again and again.
There will be times when our friendships may feel temporarily unbalanced; this is a time for great gentleness and tender reflection. We will brush up against a season of life a friend is experiencing, which makes them less available, more preoccupied, and less spontaneous. There will be times when one friend listens more, extends more, and travels more. This is to be expected as we make our way into the worlds we inhabit.
And we will fall short; our frailty and failures will become evident in our friendships. We will get it wrong, miss the mark, overlook, overthink, overestimate, and we will hurt our friends. There will be ruptures; they cannot be avoided: they are to be expected. A rupture is not a sign indicating termination – it may be an invitation to a deepening of friendship, an invitation to risk, to go out on a limb, to say “you matter to me, you matter more than our misunderstanding”.
Friendships allow us to make a mess, to be a mess, to be vulnerable, and to stop pretending. Vulnerability is what distinguishes friendships from acquaintances. Friendships make room for the breakdowns, the breakups, the breakthroughs and for all the broken bits. A friendship worth its weight in gold is the one that digs us out of the rut of certainty, which is a deadening emotional landscape where nothing new can flourish, in which possibility and potentiality and our personal well of creativity and imagination will dry up. The great gift of friendship is the capacity of our friend to, indirectly sometimes, challenge our certainty.
Friendships open us up and open us out – sometimes against our will. In the safety and shelter of friendship, we find a tender and brave voice from which we can ask ourselves big, bold, and courageous questions like: how do I live a meaningful life? What is enough? How do I love? In this way, friendships are gently disruptive; they undermine the narrow stories we tell ourselves, the stories that keep us small and lonely.
- Dr Paul D’Alton is associate professor at the school of psychology, UCD
