Chapter 8: How and Why to Choose Friends.
Hello again, newborn baby! This is our 8th conversation. I am your self-appointed mentor, telling you things that you’ll need to know in order to make some sense of all the crazy things you are going to see on Planet Earth. Equally true, I’m telling you about the things that I wish I had learned when I was very young.
Today we’re going to talk about friends, which seems like a rather friendly topic if there ever is such a topic. But I’m going to shoot straight about friendships and this straight talk is probably going to make me seem mean-spirited.
First of all, what is a friendship? A friendship is a partnership, a two-way street where the two friends invest time in each other’s lives and keep each other in their realm of concern. There are many flavors of friendship and they are all good and well as long as the friends are happy with each other. When choosing friends, you’ll want to consider the purpose of spending time with each other. Some people merely want a card-playing partner (and not much more). Others want to hang around supporting each other as they both raise children. Others want art or craft friends. Others want friends with whom they can go to movies, shows and sports events and chit chat about those events. Others want honest, probing and thoughtful conversation about the meaning of life. Some of us actively seek out friends who will give us the unvarnished truth (as they see it), challenging us in direct but kind ways, serving as a sounding board so we don’t fall off the rails regarding our world views.
Friends are extremely important to each others’ happiness, making it critical that we show patience and kindness to our friends. That said, for self-preservation, there must be limits to your loyalty, as I will discuss below.
Second, how does one make friends? For most people it’s mostly a matter of luck. You bump into other people in school or work and one way or the other you end up doing things together, thus “cementing” the “friendship.” You’ll hear that you should be loyal to your friends. You should be the one willing to stick with them thick and thin and if your friendship is a good one, you’ll be even willing to help your friend bury the body, so to speak. Even though this method sometimes helps to find others to hang around with, it’s not an efficient method and it often comes at a great cost. I’m going to suggest a completely different approach for making friends.
What if someone you loved (e.g., your sister) asked you to find some good friends for her? Would you really follow such a haphazard approach, or would you do your best to use a Machiavellian approach, doing some serious work to identify people with excellent habits and character (much as you would if you were looking for a romantic partner). Further, if one of your sister’s friends took a bad serious turn–they became wealth obsessed or proudly addicted to chemicals that changed them for the worse–would you tell your sister to be “loyal” and stick with that deteriorating person through thick and thin because “once a friend, always a friend”? I sincerely hope not.
I would offer these two basic rules regarding relationships: A) Don’t expect a person to change and B) don’t expect a person to not change. My point here is a simple one: people can become more and less compatible with each other over time but, sometimes friends fall horribly out of sync and the relationship becomes painful. Similarly, someone you wrote off in high school as a knucklehead might have proceeded to get an “A” in the School of Life,” which you noticed, with some shock, when you had a chance meeting 20 years after high school–they dramatically changed for the better. So always keep your eyes open for the ebb and flow of a relationship and never rule out redemption. As you know, I often quote Nietzsche. In the following passage he discusses what he calls “star friendship.”
Star friendship. We were friends and have become estranged. But that was right, and we do not want to hide and obscure it from ourselves as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each of which has its own goal and course; we may cross and have a feast together, as we did–and then the good ships lay so quietly in one harbor and in one sun that it may have seemed as if they had already completed their course and had the same goal. But then the almighty force of our projects drove us apart once again, in two different seas and sunny zones, and maybe we will never meet again–or maybe we will, but will not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we had to become estranged is the law above us; through it we should come to have more respect for each other–and the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our different ways and goals may be included as small stretches–let us rise to this thought!
I would advise the following: A) carefully pick who will be in your friendship circle, B) constantly evaluate each other for “fit” as the years go by and, C) without apology (but usually with sadness) distance yourself from friends that are no longer working out. Loyalty is not (always) a virtue. Don’t believe the people who say you must, for ever and ever spend your unreplenishable 1,000 months of life with people who are no longer a good fit. Most important of all, in order to have good friends, you need to be a good friend and this will require an investment of your time and energy into the partnership of friendship. You’ll need to listen as much as you talk. You’ll need to show through your actions that you care about the relationship.
Why do people keep spending time with “friends” who are bad influences? Love is blind and friendship can be blind too. After that initial period where a friend seems too good to be true, one can start seeing the problems, but by then you had already declared your friendship and it seemed rude to pull back. Even when the problems are major, some people are afraid to leave. Some people maintain a “friendship” even when the “friend” is an active and proud alcoholic, or when the “friend” is emotionally abusive, or when the “friend” is demonstrably dishonest with others or with himself.
Many people feel they simply can’t leave such a friendship, even though the friendship has soured so badly that they complain to their other friends about this “friend.” Perhaps they stay around because they are afraid they won’t make new friends. I know several middle aged people who think this way—they think that the only proper time to make friends is when you are young. Many of these people want the comfort of an old friend, but it is physically impossible to make brand new old friends. Maybe they cling to a dysfunctional friendship because they are afraid the “friend” will get mad or call them names (this fear should be instructive). Perhaps they are procrastinating, but it’s important to note that one of the main reasons for procrastination is fear.
There is never a better time than today to move on from toxic, boring, dishonest “friends” who insist that you should stick around indefinitely as their co-dependant. There are many such people out there and they gas-light and accuse you of disloyalty you if you ever make the tiniest move that suggests your need for distance. If you are ever in this kind of situation where you are unwilling to state your needs, run (don’t walk) to get therapy and then leave that friendship. As a good incentive, remind yourself that you only have 1,000 months of life. You don’t have time to burn on a pretend friendship. If you don’t know how to leave a friendship, here is how to not do it:
If you live mindfully and take the ego out of the situation, you’ll take care to assemble your own friend network with the same careful decision-making that you would use to assemble a friendship network for someone you cared about. Don’t saddle anyone (including yourself) with a dysfunctional group of friends. Choose friends with the idea that you will live only one short life. Who should you choose to share this lifetime adventure?
I started off discussing how to make and leave friends, but I haven’t mentioned why it’s important to have friends. Friends help us out when we are in need of emotional support. We share information and tools with friends. We share stories. Friends help us create meaning in our respective worlds. Research is now showing that having a vibrant circle of friends relates directly to our health. Robin Dunbar spells out the importance of maintaining friendships in his new book, Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships (2021).
Friendship and loneliness are two sides of the same social coin, and we lurch through life from one to the other. What has surprised medical researchers over the last decade or so is just how dramatic the effects of having friendships actually are —not just for our happiness, but also for our health, wellbeing, and even how long we live. We do not cope well with isolation. Friendship, however, is a two-way process that requires both parties to be reasonably accommodating and tolerant of each other, to be willing to spare time for each other. Nowhere has this been so obvious as in the modern world. Just when we might think social life couldn’t get better, suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of a plague of loneliness.
How serious is the lack of well-maintained friendship?
Loneliness is turning out to be the modern killer disease, rapidly replacing all the more usual candidates as the commonest cause of death . . . . Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge from the medical literature over the past two decades has been the evidence that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to fall prey to diseases, and the longer we will live.
Pages 4, 6.
Recent research shows that having healthy relationships increases your ability to survive heart attacks and strokes by as much as 50 per cent. Dunbar comments that the only other factor this important is giving up smoking:
[Y]ou can eat as much as you like, drink as much alcohol as you want, slob about as much as you fancy, fail to do your exercises and live in as polluted an atmosphere as you can find, and you will barely notice the difference. But having no friends or not being involved in community activities will dramatically affect how long you live. That’s not to say that all these other things make no difference, of course.
Additional research shows the effect on our immune systems. The number of friends we have affects how well we respond to the flu vaccine.
There was also an independent effect of the number of friends they had: those with only four to twelve friends had significantly poorer responses than those with thirteen to twenty friends. These two effects seemed to interact with each other: having many friends (a large social group of nineteen or twenty friends) always seems to buffer you against a weakened immune response, but feeling lonely and having few friends results in a very poor immune response.
And here are more reasons it is important to have good friends:
[T]he health risk of having few friends was similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and more dangerous than being obese or not exercising in terms of decreasing your lifespan. Keep in mind that means real friends. Not Facebook friends or Twitter followers.
But don’t hang out with the wrong types of friends. An article from the BBC tells you why:
We often think that self-control comes from within, yet many of our actions depend just as much on our friends and family as ourselves. Those we surround ourselves with have the power to make us fatter, drink more alcohol, care less about the environment and be more risky with sun protection, among many things.
This is not simply peer pressure, in which you deliberately act in a certain way to fit in with the group. Instead, it is largely unconscious. Beneath your awareness, your brain is constantly picking up on cues from the people around you to inform your behaviour. And the consequences can be serious.
It is now well accepted that our personal sense of self is derived from other people. “The more of your identity you draw from a group, even when you’re not around that group, the more likely you are to uphold those values,” says Amber Gaffney, a social psychologist from Humboldt State University.
I’m going to end this talk on a sad note, given that we already know that lack of friends impairs your health: Many people no longer have close friends. These numbers are from Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect, by Matthew D. Lieberman:
“To me the most troubling statistics focus on our friendships. In a survey given in 1985, people were asked to list their friends in response to the question “Over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?” The most common number of friends listed was three; 59 percent of respondents listed three or more friends fitting this description. The same survey was given again in 2004. This time the most common number of friends listed was zero. And only 37 percent of respondents listed three or more friends. Back in 1985, only 10 percent indicated that they had zero confidants. In 2004, this number skyrocketed to 25 percent. One out of every four of us is walking around with no one to share our lives with. Being social makes our lives better. Yet every indication is that we are getting less social, not more.”
For more, consider this article on the metrics of friendships by Eric Barker.
