Meaningful connections with others play a vital role in creating a fulfilling life.
Some years ago, before my wife and I had kids, we moved to a town in Wisconsin where we had no real ties. We made a few friends, but none of them had ties there either, and within a few years they’d nearly all moved away.
After our first daughter was born, we became consumed with the duties of modern parenthood. Still, we tried to find our community. Sometimes on a walk, I would try to think of someone I could drop in on to say hello, but there was no one. I tried to imagine who might notice if we picked up and left town, but hardly anyone came to mind.
A common measure of social connection is the number of people you can call on in an emergency. In that town, I couldn’t think of a soul.
Then I started having a strange fear. Whenever we were away for any period of time, I became sure that our house had burned down. My wife found this alarming and paranoid.
It was. In retrospect, I know it was a sign of something deeply wrong. It was becoming hard for me to envision a future in which my life was intertwined with the lives of others. The fear of fire, I think, pointed to the fact that everything that mattered to me was contained within the walls of our home.
In psychology, there’s a school of thought that holds that our identity, our «self», is a story we tell ourselves. We recall the important events in our lives and the way they have made us into who we are. The flip side, however, is that everyone’s story needs an audience, real or imagined. The longer we lived in that town, the harder I found it to imagine any such audience. To me, that is the essence of loneliness.
At my wife’s behest, we sold our house and headed north to a city in Minnesota, one where we had family and friends. Slowly, the balance between solitude and social life tipped back.
That period of my life left some scars that took a while to heal. But it also led me to ask myself some questions that until then I’d never had to confront. I’d never had a problem making friends. It had never occurred to me that this could be a problem. I’d always had friends and assumed I always would. Now I knew that wasn’t necessarily so.
Around the turn of the last century, a young man who’d moved to Chicago from a smaller town had the same realization. «There is no place like a city park on a Sunday afternoon to feel one’s loneliness», wrote Paul Harris in his memoir My Road to Rotary. «To me one essential was lacking, the presence of friends. Emerson said, ‘He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare.’ In my earliest days in my adopted city, I had neither the thousand nor the one.»
In 1905, Harris addressed this problem by organizing the first Rotary club. «I was sure that there must be many other young men who had come from farms and small villages to establish themselves in Chicago», he wrote. «In fact I knew a few. Why not bring them together? If the others were longing for fellowship as I was, something would come of it.»
Something did. By the time Harris died in 1947, Rotary International had nearly 300000 members, many of whom were seeking fellowship. Today that number is 1.2 million. Yet only recently have we started to understand exactly how important a role an organization like this can play in our lives.
«Loneliness is an enormous health problem», says Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond. «It’s a really serious problem that we used to think was this minor emotion. We understand now how bad it is for you.»
Loneliness increases your risk of heart attack, stroke, and dementia. It impairs your immune system. It puts you at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and suicide. Lonely people, one study found, are 26 percent more likely to die prematurely than those who are not lonely – a risk on par with smoking and obesity.
While it’s been widely reported that there’s an epidemic of loneliness in America today, Denworth disputes this. According to some studies, loneliness has increased slightly, but not significantly.
People’s core relationships remain more stable than those news reports would lead us to believe; it’s more the case that most of us feel lonely at some point in our lives.
Friendship, which Denworth defines as «a close bond that’s long-lasting, positive, and cooperative», is a core biological necessity. It’s part of what the researcher and social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues termed «the need to belong», an evolutionary drive that underlies almost every aspect of our psychology.
«Friendship isn’t a cultural extra», says Denworth. «It’s feeding a fundamental drive to connect and a need to belong.» The science of friendship, she says, gives us «permission to hang out with our friends, and recognize that we’re doing something good for us».
In her book Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, Barbara L. Fredrickson, the director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes that three things happen when you connect with another person: a sharing of positive emotions, a synchronizing of brain activity known as «neural coupling», and a reflected interest in each other’s wellbeing. This can happen with any person you know, and Fredrickson argues that this connection is actually what we mean when we talk about «love».
She also notes something Paul Harris would have appreciated: True connection wants physical proximity. We best connect with someone, in a biologically satisfying way, if we’re in the same room.
Friendship may be deeply biological, but it’s also cultural, and people around the world define it differently. In the Papua New Guinea Highlands, writes anthropologist Daniel Hruschka in his cross-cultural study Friendship: Development, Ecology and Evolution of a Relationship, friends among the Wandeki people greet each other by shouting, «I should like to eat your intestines!» and responding, «Yes, I too should like to eat your intestines.» In north-central Africa, Zande «blood brothers» consume each other’s blood to ensure the friendship will last. In Japan, there are different words for different kinds of friends. For example, young children have playmates (tomodachi) while older children have close friends (shinyuu). And among the Tausug people in the Philippines, a «blood friend» can be counted on to «assist with debts, to loan guns if need, to provide food and shelter, and to come to his aid in a fight», Hruschka writes.
Americans value things like «self-disclosure» (sharing secrets) and informality in our friendships. But not everyone feels the same way. Of the 400 cultures Hruschka analyzed, only 33 percent prized self-disclosure and 28 percent valued informality. Much more common across all cultures were mutual aid (93 percent), «positive affect», or warmth, affection and closeness (78 percent), and gift giving (60 percent).
Despite those differences, every culture has some form of friendship, or «friend-like relationship», as Hruschka calls it. But no matter what we call it, and no matter how much ideas of friendship differ across the world, there’s some-thing at its core that we all need.
The science of friendship gives us permission to hang out with our friends, and recognize that we’re doing something good for us.
Julie Beck, an editor at The Atlantic, became fascinated with the varieties of the friendship experience, which she writes about in a series called «The Friendship Files».
«What’s really interesting to me about friendship is that it doesn’t have a set cultural script in the way other relationships have», Beck says. «You meet someone. You like each other. Then everything after that is up to the friends themselves.»
Beck has interviewed people who met on Bumble BFF, an app for finding friends. She’s talked to a group of friends who’ve been playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons for 30 years. She wrote about two friends who live a mile and half apart and walk to the midpoint between their homes each week to give each other a high five.
«One recurring theme», Beck says, «is that it helps to have a structure or a container for your friendship; some kind of built-in ritual that helps you stay in contact. It’s not imperative, and it doesn’t much matter what it is, but it helps you avoid slipping into that zone where you keep meaning to reach out, but you’re busy or you forget.»
Ritual or no, making and maintaining friendships takes time. According to research cited by Denworth, it takes 40 to 60 hours to move from being an acquaintance to a casual friend, 80 to 100 hours to become a friend, and 200 hours to earn consideration as a best friend. That adds up to 40 Rotary meetings just to reach the most basic rung of friendship.
«I don’t think we understand just how much time it takes to get close to people», she says. «Work and family are important, but so are your friends. We should strive to give it more time, even at busy times of our lives. We think of friendship as a want, but it’s a need. It’s not a luxury. It’s part of our infrastructure.»
Text: Frank Bures
Illustration: George Wylesol
