August 4, 2014 • 54 mins
What's the scientific function of best friendship? Cristen and Caroline put besties and bromances under the microscope to discover the pros and cons of how these influential relationships shape our lives.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristen. And in honor of International Friendship Day,
which is August three, Kristin and I are looking at
the science of friendship, what benefits friendship has for you,
(00:25):
What does it mean to have a BFF, what will
that BFF bring to your life, and how the role
of friendship has sort of changed and evolved over the centuries.
Because even the Greeks used to talk quite a bit
about friendship and their philosophy. Yeah, obviously, friendship is something
that goes back throughout human history, and Aristotle had a
(00:48):
well known philosophy on the different types of love, one
of which is philia, which is affectionate regard or friendly feeling.
And our deepest and closest friendships probably also intersect with
the idea of a gop a, which is love for humankind,
although do you think that it crosses every into arrows?
(01:10):
Probably could passionate love. Yeah, philia with benefits. Yeah, well,
people often talk about how they marry their best friends,
so those Venn diagrams can often intersect. Yeah, that's right,
and it's interesting. I mean, like not to get off
on a tangent, but it's interesting that, like, even the
idea of quote unquote marrying your best friend is relatively
(01:32):
kind of recent development. I mean, marriage for centuries was
just sort of an economic agreement right there. There wasn't
this idea that, oh, you marry someone that you would
like to live with for the rest of your life.
It would be oh, no, someone will be selected for
you that will benefit Yeah, I mean, because it's fine.
We're all going to die at thirty two, our children
will be apprenticed out. It's fine. Nobody has to like
(01:54):
each other. Yeah, and who cares anyway, because no one
has Facebook to each other is up to or how
happy one is or is not. That's right, and Aristotle
definitely did not have Facebook. And author Massimo Pigliucci, who
who wrote a book about the philosophy of friendship, talks
about Aristotle's philosophy and his theories that basically friends, He
(02:16):
thought that friends sort of had this mirroring role in
each other's lives. They could sort of hold a mirror
up to each other to help them improve personally, help
each other improve, and that they would help each other
achieve this thing called you deemonia hopefully and pronouncing that right,
which is often translated now as happiness. Maybe literally in
(02:39):
the Greek it meant having a good demon. So you
would help each other achieve that that thing you were chasing,
that elusive happiness, that that that good demon inside of you.
I like that. I just thought I was hungry, But
apparently it's happiness. It's just here, the happy demon inside
of you, asking for a sandwich. Um. But if we
(03:00):
move into more contemporary times and look at how the
nature of friendship has changed, it's interesting that more of
that aarrows type of passionate love has shifted from the
person who would have been like our our closest friend
(03:20):
and confidante to these days more commonly to a spouse
or a long term partner, because, for instance, if you
look back in the Victorian era at the closest of
female friendships, and if you read letters that women wrote
to each other, and even that men wrote to each
other during this time, they were so effusive and just
(03:43):
almost passionate in their love for the other person. Yeah,
because that was okay, that was okay. There was no
there was nothing in society really that was dictating that
it was weird to be like really like passionately in
like with your friends, especially like in terms of when
we think of male friendships background this time and it
(04:05):
being okay to be physically affectionate. Yeah, if you look,
for instance, at Abraham Lincoln and his best friend Joshua Speed,
they shared a tiny bed for four years while they
were living together, obviously in their bachelor days, and that
was no big deal. I mean, some people today think, oh, well,
(04:27):
that must mean that Lincoln must have been doing something
with Joshua Speed. But actually, that kind of physical intimacy
that you also see reflected in photos of male friends
at the time, where they might be holding hands or
touching uh one person's shoulders, or even in sort of
a side hug, a platonic side hug, it wasn't so
(04:48):
strange at the time. And some think that the Industrial
Revolution the rise of organized sports and outdoor activities led
to that breakdown in articular of male platonic intimacy. And
for women, the idea of having that closer, more emotional,
(05:11):
intimate best friendship was a little bit more of a
normalized idea because there's been that longstanding idea of women
just being the nurturing, emotive sex. But even still, when
you get to the nineteen twenties, for both men and women,
it wasn't so okay to be as passionately in friend
(05:34):
love with your bff because this was around the time
when you have the rise of homophobia. Yeah, and so
when you have something to be afraid of, you have
to actively show that you are not that thing, and
in this case it was. It was the rise of
the idea of what is manly and masculine and what
is female and feminine, and homophobia was really tied up
(05:57):
in that. And so the idea of having that like physical,
the affectionate close relationship whether you're a man or a woman,
was just not hunky dory anymore. Well, and also with
the industrial revolution, you have with at the rise of
the companion it in love marriage that we think of today,
And so that's when you start to see that kind
(06:19):
of emotion and closeness transposed from the best friendship into
the marriage. And a lot of parents became concerned at
this time, particularly for their daughters, that if they seem
too close to their best friend, then they weren't going
to make a good wife, you know. They could sort
of practice, you know, being uh compassionate and kind to
(06:41):
someone else. But there was definitely uh this line that
was drawn and was perpetuated by psychoanalysts in the nineteen
twenties who warned about the quote perversions of the libido
that were the tendencies of teenage girls to fix their
affections on members of the same sex. I mean that's silly, right,
(07:03):
I mean, like as far as being concerned about young
girls spending a lot of time together, yeah, well, and
I would assume to the penalties for that, where it
would be much harsher for men at the time, because
I feel like now maybe we're just not freaking out
as much. But for instance, it's so much more common,
(07:23):
it seems like for groups of girls to get together
and have slumber parties and play with each other's hair
and do each other's makeup and that kind of stuff
that involves lots of physicality, whereas boys friendship physicality is
often more of the rough and tumble play. There's not
that same kind of intimacy. Right. They're probably not sharing
(07:44):
a bed like Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. Yeah exactly, Well,
because they have to prove that they're masculine and so
you can't have that intimacy. But I mean, speaking of
intimacy and things that are good for you, friendship has
a ton of health benefits. And these health benefits have
been asserted over and over again forever, and you're probably
familiar with a lot of them, including the psychological ones
(08:05):
that uh Mayo pointed out. They include increasing your sense
of belonging and purpose, boosting your happiness and reducing stress,
helping to improve your self confidence and self worth, help
you cope with traumas, and also encouraging you to change
or avoid unhealthy lifestyle habits. These are all kind of
hallmarks psychological benefits of close friendships. Well, and that last
(08:28):
point to that the Mayo Clinic noted, encouraging you to
change or avoid your unhealthy lifestyle habits really hearkens back
to that Greek idea of the good friend helping you
find your your good demon inside of you. Yeah, you're
a good demon, whether that's just goodness or margarita. Yeah,
(08:49):
so whatever, But you know, all of that well being.
Once you've achieved all that well being, that definitely leads
to a lot of potential physical benefits, things like better
brain health. Harvard researchers back into thousand and eight found
that strong social ties could actually promote brain health as
we age, and so you know, that's why it's even
critical when we talk about like aging populations and older
(09:10):
people being alone and how awful that is. The stronger
your social network, the better you'll be as far as
emotional health and brain health. And the lower stress levels
associated with having close and healthy friendships also leads to
us being less likely to get colds. I mean, this
is just like one example of how it does improve
(09:33):
our overall health. Yeah, and studies have also pointed out
that this kind of social support can lower blood pressure,
protect against dementia, and reduce the risk of depression. So
it's apparently pretty important to have friends, you guys, and
all in all, this adds up to the possibility that
we might live longer as one byproduct of having friendships.
(09:55):
There was a two thousand five study published in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health which tracked a group
of Australians over ten years, and they found that those
with a large circle of friends were twenty two percent
less likely to die during the study period than those
with fewer friends. And I'm sure there are other issues
(10:16):
in there as well, but I mean that is that's
that's impressive, is nothing to to sneeze and when you
look at women in particular, um friendship also has an
effect on women who are battling breast cancer, as a
study in two thousand six in the Journal of Clinical
(10:38):
Oncology showed um. They did a study of nearly three
thousand nurses who had breast cancer and found that the
women without close friends were four times as likely to
die from breast cancer as women with ten or more friends.
And I think it's worth noting that proximity and the
amount of contact with the friend or friends was not
(10:59):
associated with vival It was just the fact that you
have friends who love you in your life that was
the protective factor. Having a spouse, however, was not associated
with survival rates. It's all about the friends well, and
men can also benefit from friendships as well. This was
a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine which looked
(11:20):
at a group of Swedish men over six years and
found that those with solid friendships more than an attachment
to one person, you know, just having the spouse perhaps
in the home appeared to affect the risk of heart
attack and fatal coronary disease in a positive way, probably
lowered the chance of that happening. Now, again, these are
(11:43):
kinds of correlation versus causation associations to make, but nonetheless,
the evidence is pretty strong that all in all, healthy
friendships are healthy for us. However, and this is something
probably all moms did in tell us many times when
we were growing up. Not so healthy friendships can negatively
(12:07):
impact us. Sure, yeah, it totally makes sense. If your
close friends are boozing it up or smoking or doing whatever,
then you are also more likely to do that, especially
if you have a strong desire to fit in. Um.
There was a study back in in Basic and Applied
social psychology that found that when you perceive a greater
(12:32):
alcohol use among your best friends, that predicts in you
higher levels of willingness to consume alcohol. So basically, if
it's the norm in your brain, whether it's true or not,
if the norm in your brain is that your friends
are drinking and smoking and doing whatever, you are more
likely to abuse those substances yourself. Yeah, And there was
(12:54):
a recent study that came out in the British Medical
Journal which found that friends see your our decisions in
when we were school age more so than parents, and
remembering when I was fourteen years old, that is not
a surprising finding at all because friends are so much
cooler than parents at that time anyway. But they found
(13:16):
that specifically, the impact of having a smoker as a
close friend during adolescents is greater than that of having
a smoking parent or siblings when it comes to predicting
whether you shall smoke in adulthood, not just whether you're
going to be out in the schoolyard smoking some smokes
that you stole from some cigarette stubs you found on
(13:37):
the ground, yes, and was some misty stubs that you snagged.
And another factor that comes into play is also having
cross sex friendships among adolescents. This was a study in
two thousand six in the Journal of Psychology looking at
kids in urban settings in six, seventh and eighth grades.
(13:57):
So not only did they find that developing cross sex
friendship is more likely to lead to or be related
to popularity, but they also found a lot of stuff
regarding smoking and drinking. Having these cross sex friendships is
also linked to the perception among seventh graders that the
best friends attitudes about smoking and drinking are less negative.
(14:18):
It's also linked to higher levels of cigarette use among
sixth and eighth graders, in addition to more alcohol use
among six seventh and eighth graders. Does that mean then
that our parents were right when you know they warned
us like, don't hang out with old Johnny who smoking
those he smoked cigarette but Virginia slims, he will turn
(14:42):
out like he's a bad apple. I well, I think
I think it's interesting, and there's probably a lot more
details that you could look into, or that maybe are
actually in the full study if we were to read
the full study. But I think it's interesting to look
at cross sex friendships in this very impressionable age when
your hormones are raging, you're really insecure. Everybody's really insecure
and doesn't know what's going on in life. Um, and
(15:04):
how that's linked to popularity and then what does it
mean to be popular? And then you're thinking about the
norms of like, oh well, if Johnny and Susie are smoking,
then that's cool and I can do it. And there's
a lot wrapped up in there that to me just
sets off alarm bells. If the terror of being a parent,
because you have to take in all of those different
variables when talking to little Suz about how to manage
(15:29):
those kinds of peer pressures. Yeah, but we there's even
more on cross sex friendships that we'll get into in
a minute. But let's talk about sort of beyond just
the physical and emotional and mental effects of friendship. Let's
talk about the science of friendship because there have been
some really interesting studies in the past couple of years,
including one that um took my Space into account and
(15:52):
side note, the study came out in two thousand eleven,
which was seems surprisingly recent considering that they were using
my Space data. Yeah, I actually double check that date.
I was like, that's got to be like two thousand one,
not two thousand eleven. But it was this just a
study that Tom conducted. Yeah, seriously, everybody's top friend. But
so the study was talking about this thing called cognitive alliances,
(16:15):
and they used the my Space Top ten Friends system.
If any of you were on my Space, you remember
how froughth that was. You know, I broke up with
him and so I'm moving him out of my top friends.
Are like, oh, we met and she's cool, So I'm
gonna put her in my top friends. Yeah, I remember
when I was setting up my MySpace account so long
ago now, and how it was just a terrifying experience
(16:40):
to you know, so carefully select who would be in
that top ten to make you look as good and
by you, I mean me look as good as possible.
I'm so glad that went away. I'm yeah, I we don't.
We don't need extra bad feeling stuff like that. And
looking at these top ten friends, researchers found support for
(17:02):
their alliance hypothesis, which basically held that human friendship is
caused by cognitive systems that function to create alliances for
potential disputes. So like, I guess your top ten friends
would function as your you know, your gang of Ruffians
in case the neighboring gang of Ruffians on my Space
came up and tried to beat you up. But they
(17:22):
also found that because an allies support can be undermined
by a stronger outside relationship, the alliance model predicts that
people will prefer partners who rank them above other friends.
So I'll like you more if you like me more. So,
this whole idea is that we form friendships and strong
friendships as human humans as sort of a status power
(17:46):
grab to ensure that if people we don't know with
threatening status has come along, then we have a leg
to stand on. Yeah, kind of that. We just have
these mental and emotional alliances that we formed that becomes
stronger the more the other person shows that were valued.
That takes out all of the romance of friendships for me.
(18:10):
Don't worry. It gets even weirder. I thought it was
so that you could trade those necklaces that are the
broken hearts. You get one half and I get the other. Yeah. Well,
so there's this. There was this really interesting New York
Times article a couple of years ago UM talking to
scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who along with co
(18:32):
researcher Jamie Suttle, have done a lot of studying up
on friendship networks, how and why we form these connections
and how health related risks and benefits end up being
kind of transmitted from person to person or even skipping
a person and going on to somebody else. And they
use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and this
(18:53):
thing called the Framingham Heart Study, which followed people in Framingham,
Massachusetts for several generations to see how their personal connections
and interactions affected their health. Yeah, and and Framingham, the
Framingham and Heart study is a fascinating one because it's
almost this ideal study population because so many people who
(19:14):
grew up in Framingham stayed in Framingham, so it gives
them this they can sort of isolate environmental variables and
toy around with all of that. And uh, these researchers
found some really compelling evidence for how good and bad
behaviors spread through our social networks, from both our best
(19:37):
friendships all the way to acquaintances or even people we've
never met before. Yeah, and they kind of treated it
like a virus. Things like quitting smoking, losing weight, and
being happy. Those are obviously good attributes, and they watched
how these things could spread or crop up versus negative
habits like picking up smoking, gaining weight, and becoming less happy.
(19:58):
So if if you're looking just at at the weight thing,
they found that obesity broke out in clusters. And a
lot of scientists who countered this said, well, it's probably environmental,
maybe more fast food restaurants opened, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But
they found out that it didn't really relate at all
to something like a McDonald's opening in the neighborhood. They
found that even if a friend in that group moved
(20:20):
away and gained weight, her social circle back home was
gaining weight too, and that the risk of obesity increased
even if a friend of a friend of a friend
gained weight. What is going on with that? Yeah, that
kind of pattern was so consistent that these researchers termed
it the three degrees of influence. That what you were
(20:42):
doing can have effect, you know, to your friends of
friends of friends, and vice versa. Yeah. Another theory that
was discounted was this thing called home a Philly, which
is basically like associates with like. But again that's kind
of discounted by the fact that Susie can move away
to a different state and gain weight and her friends
back home are still gaining weight. But some of the
(21:04):
things they looked at among these friend groups are maybe
there's some subconscious social signaling at work. As our friends
become heavier, we change our perception of what obese looks like,
and therefore give ourselves permission to gain a little weight
because maybe it's not so bad. Or if we don't
gain weight, maybe we just simply become more accepting of
other people in our social circles who do so maybe
(21:26):
they don't feel as bad about watching what they eat well,
And this jumped out to spouses tend to have less
of an effect on us, particularly in this area of
weight gain that they looked at. They have less of
an effect than close friends do because our ideas about
weight in particular are more influenced by people of the
same sex, which makes sense because you know, we're looking to,
(21:50):
you know, people who are more we're looking at essentially
like the beauty standards of our group. Absolutely, and they
found the degree of friendship matters. So this is sort
of like what we're talking about with these cognitive alliances
a second ago. If Steve likes Peter more than Peter
likes Steve, Steve will gain weight when Peter does. He'll
(22:10):
be influenced by Peter's weight gain, but Peter's weight won't
be influenced by Steve's because he doesn't whatevery verb you
want to use value Steve as much, noticed Steve as much,
care about Steve as much. But if there's a mutual
degree of friendship, the weight effect is significant. Poor Steve
what did you do wrong? And that sounds a lot
(22:32):
like that alliance hypothesis that you just mentioned from that
MySpace study, right exactly, So how you view your friends
and how they view you beyond just like the actual
closeness factor that what really exists, Like how you view
your friendship matters too, I guess. But if we go
back to Aristotle talking about mirroring, you know, he said
(22:53):
that friends hold a mirror up to you to help
you achieve your happiness, we should bring up mirror neurons
because Stock is a Fouler and Settle also talked about
mirror neurons and happiness simply the fact that the more
happy people you're exposed to on your in your day
to day life or in your social network, the more
often your spirits are lifted. And so it's the kind
(23:15):
of thing like I feel like we've seen marketing campaigns
and advertising campaigns that are kind of based on this
idea where if one person does something nice for you,
and then you do something nice for the next person,
suddenly the whole network is happier and more polite. Um,
And so it's sort of that idea of like mirror
neurons as as you smile at someone, they might smile
at someone else, and soon like all of our friends
(23:36):
are smiling at each other and they don't know why. Yeah,
And anecdotally, all of this kind of the ripple effect
of friendship rings so true thinking about the patterns of
my friends and even broader social networks as I have
moved through my twenties and now I'm approaching my thirties,
and just how are socializing habits have changed to send
(24:00):
to more around like domestic activities. We aren't going out
so much. We're doing more things like going on a
day hike rather than going on a night bar crawl.
And it's like as soon as one person or one
couple started doing that, than someone else took note and
they started doing it, and then you see their pictures
on Facebook and you're like, well maybe I needed to
(24:20):
watch it. And it's like we all have collectively become
just in general, like less wild. And I think it
has a lot to do not so much with like, oh, well,
we're running thirty, we must be boring, but I think
it's probably a lot of this, like the epidemic of
friendship essentially, Yeah, like what you perceived the norm to
(24:40):
be Yeah, I want to do what Peter is doing,
because Peter apparently is a cool guy. Actually want to
be Peter. But we'll watch out. If Peter has the
d r D two gene, well then you better watch out.
Because another thing that Christakis and Fowler found was that
there is a genetic compon into friendship, and this obviously
(25:01):
needs a lot more research, but one thing that they
found their their their preliminary findings are that friendship can
be influenced by certain genes and the gene d r
D two, which I kept in my mind saying, are
two D two influences drinking behavior. People with this gene
are not only susceptible to certain behaviors, including drinking and alcoholism,
but are susceptible to making friends with those exact same behaviors.
(25:25):
So there's an argument for like with like so I
party all the time, I want to be friends with
people who party all the time. But now there might
be a genetic component behind that as well. It's your
R two D two genes all coming together. This is
not the droid I'm looking for now we need to see, right, um.
But they also found a second gene that showed that
(25:46):
people are attracted to their opposite opposites when it comes
to other certain behaviors. So there's a lot of I
think research that still needs to be done there. But
the fact that you might be attracted to certain people,
whether romantically or on a friendship level, the because of genetics,
that's really interesting. Well, it's one of the things I
was reading about, was talking about how and we hear
(26:06):
about this a lot more in terms of our romantic attractions,
how we tend to subconsciously seek out partners who are
more genetically diverse so that it will give our offspring
a better chance of survival, whereas with friends, we seek
out people subconsciously who are more like genetically similar because
(26:28):
we want to tend and befriends. That's right, especially for ladies. Yeah,
and speaking of which, we have some gender differences to
get into in our friendship patterns. And also talk about
how making friends changes over our individual life terms, because
as I'm sure a number of our listeners who are
(26:48):
maybe heading into their thirties and beyond can attest making
friends as you get older changes it can be a
bit more challenging for a number of reasons that we
will get into you Okay, but if we look at
gender stuff first. Um, I thought that the search for
numbers on around this topic was interesting in and of
(27:10):
itself because there's a lot of studies looking at at
how many friends the average man has, but not so
many specific numbers for women. And I'm wondering if that's
not because people just assume that women have so many
more friends and that men don't make close relationships, and
so that's more interesting and they want to study that more.
But if you look at men's friends in particular, This
(27:31):
is from Men's Health Survey, so keep that in mind.
But they found that the average guy has four point
eight close friends whom he keeps in contact with, primarily
through text, and of guys said they had a best
friend of those who had known him since high school. Yeah,
and I do think that you're right that there is
(27:53):
so much of an assumption that women just make friends
all the time and that we will have a best
the at all points during our life, although that bestie
might change. That there's more focused on, well, what of men,
because there's been a lot more research into the dynamics
of female friendships. But I think it's more because it's
(28:15):
a given, so there's not as much attention to tallying up. Well,
just how many friends does a woman have? Well, yeah,
because she's always tending and befriending, so we don't have
to really worry about her. This is this is something
that we've talked about before a lot on the podcast.
We talked about it in our Female Friendships episode a
while ago. But it's the fact that women tend to
(28:35):
respond to stress with this huge flood of brain chemicals
that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other
women in particular. Yeah, this Landmark study found that when
we hang out with our lady friends, when we go
out for sex in the city style brunches every every
(28:56):
weekend somehow, uh, it actually releases the bonding chemical oxytocin
in our brain, and so we feel tended and befriended.
And that is sort of the more female analog to
the fight or flight response, right, and just that women,
when women get stressed, our oxytocin makes us go towards
(29:18):
one another, whereas men's testosterone testosterone makes them go the
other way. And female brains seem to really like this
tending and befriending because for the research has found that
once we reach out to our friends. We get a
little shot of oxytocin in our brain. The more that
we do it, the more oxytocin our brain's release. So
(29:40):
we're just like hugging all the time, Like I can't stop,
I'm just hugging my friends all the time. Well, it's true,
there is a certain kind of crisis management that a
very best friend can offer that no one else can offer,
even say a spouse or a girlfriend or a boyfriend
or a family member. Yeah, I mean that that's what's
(30:02):
really jumped out to me. That's so interesting in all
of these various studies that it's like, nope, it's friendship.
It's those close platonic friendships that really save you and
protect you well. And I wonder if it is that
oxytocin connection that explains something that's called the Steel Magnolia's effect,
which is the study finding that women tend to rate
(30:24):
their female best friends more highly than guys rate their
guy friendships. Like we we seem to value that even more.
Or maybe it might also be like a thing of
self reporting where maybe we simply gush more about our
girlfriends and guys gush about their guy friends. Because I
(30:44):
never want to contend that male friendships are are no
less strong and important. Um, but but it is interesting
and it's also yes called the steel magnolia's effect. Well,
I think that ties in with a study, a two
thousand study that was published in the journal Adolescents where
they basically put boy friends and girl friends in rooms
(31:06):
together and let them kind of hang out in chit
chat and kind of looked at the way that the
two boys talked to each other versus the two girls
and what they talked about. And boys ended up rating
their relationships with best friends higher and conflict than did girls.
But what's interesting about that is it's not that there's
not conflict, it's the researchers were saying that, like the
(31:28):
guys would just like hash it out, like what's your problem,
here's my problem. More confrontational. Girls are less likely to
be as confrontational to one another and to maybe talk
about Betty Sue behind her back. But I know Betty
Sue and Peter like God. So anyway, but girls rated
lower in withdrawal and higher in communication skills and support
(31:49):
validation than boys. So girls are better at talking about things,
although sometimes that talking happens behind the back. Um, just
one note on girl code versus guy code. There has
been some other research which has suggested that girls, especially
like adolescent girls, tend to hold their besties to higher
(32:13):
girl code standards than guys do for their guy friendships.
And I think it's partially because of the fact that
maybe boys tend to be a little bit more confrontational
to each other than girls do, because conflict resolution within
you know, thirteen year old girl friendships can be challenging
(32:35):
at times. Yeah, well, so I promised you that we
would talk about cross sex friendships again, and here it is. Uh,
we're still talking about adolescence and boys and girls here
and there was a two thousand eight study in the
Journal of Youth Adolescence that looked at gender age, cross
sex friendships and what that means regarding antisocial behavior. I
(32:58):
read the study and I was like, oh God, I
had a lot of good guy friends in high school. Lord. Anyway,
So here it is. They found that boys who had
only same sex best friends and girls who had other
sex best friends endorsed higher rates of anti social behavior.
(33:18):
Having other sex best friends predicted anti social behavior from
six to seventh grade and eight to eleventh grade, especially
for girls. So what does that mean then, I mean,
are they basically saying that maybe girls who are getting
along better with guys just don't get along as well
with girls, and so they're calling it antisocial behavior. I
(33:40):
don't know, but I wonder if it ties back to
the other cross sex friendship study, which talked about popularity.
It talked about choosing bad behaviors and things like smoking
and drinking, and the fact that girls who had more
cross sex friendships were more likely to engage in this
behavior or think it was normal. So that's that's an
interesting finder. Yeah, I mean I don't think. I don't know.
(34:02):
It sound the language that it uses sounds almost so
alarmous because we hear anti social think. Oh no, But
I think in this case, antisocial means something a little
gentler than the way it sounds. I think it means,
like maybe just things that go against the norm. Well.
As we move out of adolescence and into adulthood. Research
has also suggested that our patterns of cross sex friendships
(34:29):
also change, and essentially, women like move away from having
a best guy friend, usually in heterosexual relationships that would
be of the husband, and it moves away from them
to another female as we get older. Yeah, usually the daughter.
I am a perfect example of this. Like, so this study,
(34:50):
this study looked at basically phone records who were people calling,
and for several years the woman was calling a man
all the time, and then slowly that shift to be
a woman, typically the daughter. So, my mom calls me
all the time, you know, like I can't access my
e books? Well did you buy them? I don't know. Well, okay,
(35:10):
call Peach mac Um, called Betty Sue or Peter Mom.
I'm busy. Maybe they can deal with it since Peter
is so cool. Um. But what they found was that
men show a more consistent pattern of being linked to
a female best friend their entire lives, which I think,
judging by the fact that they qualified the male best
(35:30):
friend as someone who became the husband typically this just
sounds like. This just sounds like, whereas the wife starts
calling the daughter instead of the husband, the husband keeps
calling the wife, which I think is also a pattern
that holds true in my family. My my mother calls
me all the time, My father calls my mother. Yeah,
so I think that's all that is well, and that
(35:50):
brings up then how our pattern of making friends changes
as we age and if we're sort of bad sacking
out of the gendered lens and looking just at age. UM.
There was a two thousand eight study in the Journal
of Experimental Education looking at school attitudes and friendship and
as you might expect, adolescents who felt that they were
(36:14):
valued and respected by their classmates were more likely to
report adaptive achievement motivation. And what does that mean? That
just means that you're more likely to foster this long
term achievement in school. You're more likely to have good
quality friendships that put a value on academics versus poor
(36:35):
quality friendships and viewing classmates as resistant to school norms.
That's related to reports of maladaptive achievement motivation. So basically,
if you have good friends who value academics, you're going
to consider it the norm. Again, there's that thing, the norm,
and you are also going to value academics and do
well in school. And then though, as you start to
make the transition from high school to college, it really
(36:56):
starts to test your friendships. Not so surprised, thinly, um,
during just the first year in college, high school best
friendships declined and satisfaction commitment rewards and investments, according to
a two thousand three study published in the journal Personal Relationships,
and during this period that the freshman year of college,
(37:19):
there's also an increase in the costs and alternatives to
best friend relationships. So it's not so surprising because you
go to college unless you're maybe bunking with your best
friend from high school or still see them regularly, you're
being introduced to a whole, bigger, broader world of potential
best friendships. Yeah, a bigger, broader world. And also maybe
(37:41):
it's just harder to keep in touch with friends back
home and that kind of thing. And so they found
that what really helped these best friendships continue to thrive
from high school through into college was maintenance behaviors, also
things like supportiveness, self disclosure, interaction. Basically, the more you
continue to come indicate on a really intimate level, like
(38:02):
constantly and consistently, the better that friendship will be maintained well.
And that completely jives with a two thousand study called
Forecasting Friends Forever, which I really enjoyed that study title.
But these researchers collected data across nineteen years of different friends,
(38:24):
starting when these friends were in college and after nineteen years. Obviously,
like a lot of these people had kids. They had
moved an average of like five point six times, which
is kind of funny because like, what does moving points
six mean? It just means math is awkward sometimes. And
they found that expressions of intimacy at the outset of
(38:48):
the study, like when you know, these friends were talking
about each other when they were still in college, was
not a major predictor of whether they would still be
friends nineteen years later. So if you were like, oh
my god, we're just so but friends, She's awesome, I
love her, will be friends forever doesn't necessarily mean it's
going to happen. It was more the level of interdependence
(39:10):
and essentially thinking and perceiving the world in similar kinds
of ways that most strongly predicted whether they would be
friends almost two decades later, And so the researchers recommended
that really learning to communicate and sort of figuring out
how each person sees the world and what your value
(39:31):
systems are and all of that matters the most if
you want to be friends forever. Yeah, Like I have
two friends, both of whom I've known forever um but
one she and I are communication styles are very similar,
and that we don't. You know, we've been friends forever.
We we love and adore each other, but we can
(39:53):
go very very long times without seeing or hearing from
each other, and then when we do see each other,
we just have a glass of wine and pick right
back up where we left off, and it's great. Another
friend that I know, um, that I've had forever, she
has a slightly different set of needs and expectations, and
you know that's always dangerous in any type of relationship
to expectation. But um, you know, she's really hurt if
(40:14):
we go for too long without speaking to each other.
And so that relationship requires a different type of effort
and energy and communication style. Well, and the importance is
that you know that and you recognize that. Yeah, so
you're not kind of you know, because you clearly can
communicate with each other. So it's more the frequency of communication.
And I'm the same way with my closest friends. We
(40:36):
will go for long periods of time without talking because
I'm just I'm rulling not a phone talker. I'm more
of a podcast talker. Caroline, I'm not a phone talker either,
and that does make a lot of things difficult. Like
my mother all the time. Oh that's differently. But the
older you get, though, it can be challenging to make
(40:58):
new friends because obviously you know those some of those
friendships from say high school in college do fade away
because you develop your own life and your own rhythm
and probably move and maybe meet someone that you settled
down with. And um, one of us is sort of
a side note, but one major milestone that some that
(41:20):
the survey found is a great predictor of making new
friends is having a baby. Yeah, if you're feeling lonely,
just have a baby. Oh god, don't don't know. Um,
but yeah, this is a survey, so you know, keep
in mind it's not like an academic study, but a
survey funded by Nature's Purist, a baby products company, found
(41:41):
that fifty of new mom said it was easier to
bond with other women after having a baby, and seventy
of those said it was because they had so much
in common. In my brain, I'm just like, you have
a baby in common. But of course that brings with
it like an entirely new life, and a lot of
the moms surveys said not only did they now have
(42:02):
things in common like um post babies, sex worries or
you know, body worries or like I haven't slept in
seven months anymore. Ever, they're also worried about just boring
their old friends with baby talk. Yeah. I mean that
that those survey findings make total sense. Um, But when
it comes to just making friends, if you aren't in
(42:25):
you know, a baby circle, it can be challenging. This
was something that Alex Williams wrote about not too long
ago in the New York Times, and he said that
you sort of have to resign yourself once you get
into your thirties of making what he calls kind of
friends instead of best friends. They're not like the super
(42:45):
best friends that you would hang out with almost like
cheer style, like every night you hang out and it's awesome.
But it's more getting into the situational friend zone. So
you have your kind of friends that you will do
outdoors the stuff with, and then you have your kind
of friends that are like movie bops, so you go
to like film festivals with them. And then you have
your I don't know what it's another kind of friend
(43:09):
computer nerd friends. Yes, can you program computers together? Yes?
Those friends? Um. Yeah, but he says that you've like,
once you've crossed the threshold into your thirties, you're now
in the situational friend zone. Do do do do do
do do oh. Another big kind of friend, the couple friend.
(43:29):
You know, the two people to get along really well
so you can hang out at a fore top. There
you go. Well, so what's going on around this age?
Psychology professor Laura Carsonson, who is the director of the
Stanford Center on Longevity in California, has observed that people
tend to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife,
(43:49):
but that they end up growing closer to the friends
they already have. Why she kind of this is depressing.
She says that once we turn thirty, it reminds us
that our time horizons are shrinking, so we're less focused
on exploration and more concentrating on the here and now. Yeah,
just anecdotally speaking, that makes sense because at least in
(44:10):
my day to day I can't really see much beyond
the here and now because I have no free time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um,
there's also the whole issue. According to Marla Paul, who's
the author of The Friendship Crisis, finding making and keeping
friends when you're not a kid anymore. She also says
that the bar is simply higher than than it was
(44:30):
when we were younger, when we were in college, and
we're surrounded by like thousands of other humans, and we
can pick and choose our friends at will. We're not
just willing to meet in general, We're not just willing
to meet just anyone for an afterwork Margarita. Well, if
there's a Margarita is actually quite low, quite low. But
in yeah, in terms of like forming really close friendships,
(44:52):
I think it takes a little more now because I
guess once you're thirty, you know your politics are set,
your religious views are set, like all of these important things,
and your view on kids and marriage and whether you're
going to do that is set. Also, your schedule is
very set. Um. But what if if you are interested
in making a new solid friendship. There are three criteria
(45:15):
that sociologists say are critical for forging those bonds, which
are proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that
encourages people to let their guard down i e. Margarita's
um and also confide in each other. And those might
seem like a simple set of criteria, but actually finding
(45:37):
all of those in one. That is a challenge because
once you're like thirty ish and you're in the working world,
it is harder. Like, you know, you have work friends,
but work is an interesting situation because people move on
and change jobs. They compete with each other for roles
and tasks and whatever else they're competing for, and different
people earn less and more than each other. So there's
(45:58):
that whole money issued too. And if you're in a relationship,
if you're looking for couple of friends, it's like matchmaking
for two to all four people like each other. That's
a whole other thing. So what do we do then?
Obviously we have more challenges as we get older to
finding new friends. And if you're in the market for
a new friend, I think one good piece of advice
(46:21):
that Tracy Moore at Jezebel offered was that you you
need to just go lots of places, do lots of
things that you like to do, essentially set yourself up
to meet people who are like you, whether that's joining
an outdoor group or volunteering regularly, or essentially like pursuing
your passion where other people will be pursuing a similar passion.
(46:43):
And that right there will give you a foundation to
start from, right, because we're not sixteen anymore. Hopefully we'll
beyond the point where we lie about our interests and
you know what we like and don't like. And so
the more you put yourself in a situation where you
were genuinely happy and doing something that you love, the
more chance you'll meet somebody who also really loves doing
(47:03):
that thing. Well in one theme that I hear a
lot when I talk to girlfriends my age about this
process of meeting new friends is that it feels very
much like dating. For sure, Yeah, being a grown up
and finding a new friend. And I, yeah, I not
too long ago, have this conversation with a mixed group
men and women, and everybody agreed, it's like dating, and
(47:25):
then it's hard, and but that it's almost even more
rewarding than going on several first dates like with a
possible romantic partner, because at least, like there's no pressure
in the friendship thing. Yeah, well that's another thing. It's
like you have to relieve yourself of being terrified that
it might not work out, because it might not. You
(47:45):
might not see this person, you might this person might
not be your BFF. But that's okay because he or
she is busy, just like you are probably busy, and
there are plenty of friend fish in the sea, that's right. Yeah.
I mean that's another thing that that Tracy Moore said too.
It is like the stakes are very low. You know,
meet people who make you happy, and if they don't
make you happy, or they don't hang around or you
(48:07):
don't see them again, you'll meet somebody else. Yeah, but
I think it is important. I mean, particularly if you're
in a situation where you've moved to a new city
or you are at a new job. You're just sort
of in like an unknown spot, starting from zero, and
obviously want some face to face friends. It is. It
is work in a lot of ways, like like dating,
(48:29):
if you want to if you want to get out there,
you gotta put some effort into it. Yeah, but I
think yeah, to develop, I mean, anybody can have a
circle of acquaintances where you're you're friendly to people, but
if you really are after like a very close friendship,
it's so critical to be yourself. And I mean, I
know we say that in terms of romantic relationships too,
but like, how are you expected to have a bff
(48:50):
for a circle of close friends. If you're acting like
you're not who you say you are or something right,
because the truth will come out eventually, that's right. But
there was one article that was in the Daily Email,
so but bear with me. It was simply um piece
on friendships among women that had significant age gaps, and
(49:14):
it was just like anecdotes of how and why they
got along so well, and it was fascinating to see
these like much older women befriending much younger women and
vice versa, and how it's important to also as we
get older, to stay open to making friends who might
not be within you know, like two years on either
(49:35):
side of our age, because older folks are even younger
folks depending on how old you are, can make fantastic
friends too. Well. It's that whole diversity of experience thing.
One thing that relationship coach Karen Smadley pointed out was
that maybe you're an age where all of your friends
are having babies but you either can't, don't want to,
aren't ready, whatever. Having an older friend who you know,
(49:59):
having an older and or a younger friend who's having
a different life experience than your age group can be
very valuable because it kind of takes the pressure off.
You're like, oh, now I can see that there are
other lifestyles out there. I don't have to have this
pressure to do X y Z that all my friends
are doing. Yeah, but now, Caroline, is it time for
us to ask folks for friendship stories? For sure? Well,
(50:21):
we want to hear from you about your best friend
and how friendship has affected your life. Mom Stuff at
how stuff works dot com is where you can send
us your letters. You can also though, tweet us at
mom Stuff podcast or send us a message on Facebook.
And one final making friends tip, you know, you can
always bring up the podcast because you know, if you
(50:43):
both like the podcast, then hey you got you have
like over five topics to talk about. What's right? So
with that, we have a couple of letters to share
with you our friends right now. Okay, I have a
letter here from Anna who says that she used to
(51:05):
get the question no, where are you really from all
the time. She says, my family is a mix of German, Croatian,
Swedish and Ukrainian, and I came out looking very Eastern European.
My professors would pronounce my name with a strong accent
during roll call and after class seemed very interested in
asking where I was from. When I would reply, oh,
(51:25):
about two hours north in Ohio, they would reply with no.
Before that, I never quite knew how to respond. People
have even gone so far as to speak to me
in Russian or in very slow English. I also thought
it might be interesting to give a perspective on exotic
beauty from a slightly different perspective. I'm a very light skinned,
light haired, green eyed girl living in rural Japan. Not
(51:46):
many foreigners visit this part of Japan, let alone live here.
So for many people, I am their first white foreigner
they have seen in person. The initial reaction is lots
of squealing, with people touching my hair, getting uncomfortably close
to my eye, and complimenting me on how small my
face is and how big my nose and eyes are.
Those are apparently compliments. I've gotten many people asking me
(52:07):
to take and use my photo for advertising purposes with
no pay, because I have that quote unquote Russian beauty
that is sought after here. It all seems very forced, ultrapolite,
but definitely does make me feel an other. I would
also like to add that the amount of products here
to make people women in particular look Western is mind
boggling whitening creams. I take colored contacts for less than
(52:29):
the equivalent of ten dollars at a drug store, hair
lightning kits, and arm and face covers for the beach,
cars and bikes. I just thought I would share. Man. Okay, well,
thanks for the very interesting perspective. Anna Well, I've got
another letter here in response to our exotic beauty episode.
This is coming from Lillian, who writes, I grew up
in an inner city neighborhood in northern New Jersey as
(52:51):
a bi racial woman of Puerto Rican and Chinese ethnicity.
I've encountered a really uncomfortable amount of fetishizing, not only
from white men, but also from a Hispanic man who
generally watched too many Kung Fu movies. If I had
a dollar for every time I've been told I'm comprised
of quote the best of both worlds, or told that
somehow my mix is superior for stupid, stereotypical reasons, I'd
(53:14):
be a very wealthy woman Puerto Rican curves and a
docile freak in the bedroom. The sex must be amazing.
Imagine the food she can cook. The first person to
call me Exotic was my white male homeroom teacher in
my freshman year of high school. That was an uncomfortable year. Fortunately, though,
since then, I've heard the quote unquote compliment so many
(53:35):
times that I've developed the perfect response to it. Now.
Whenever someone calls me exotic, I say, oh great, another
one who wants to put me in a cage A
parent is exotic. I'm from New Jersey. The resulting flash
of embarrassment that tends to cross their faces is just priceless.
So thanks Lilian, and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
(53:57):
email address, but you can also reach us on Facebook
and tweet us at mom stuff Podcasts and for links
to all of our social media as well as all
of our podcasts, blogs, and videos. There's one place to go,
and it's stuff Mom Never Told You dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, does it
(54:17):
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristen. And in honor of International Friendship Day,
which is August three, Kristin and I are looking at
the science of friendship, what benefits friendship has for you,
(00:25):
What does it mean to have a BFF, what will
that BFF bring to your life, and how the role
of friendship has sort of changed and evolved over the centuries.
Because even the Greeks used to talk quite a bit
about friendship and their philosophy. Yeah, obviously, friendship is something
that goes back throughout human history, and Aristotle had a
(00:48):
well known philosophy on the different types of love, one
of which is philia, which is affectionate regard or friendly feeling.
And our deepest and closest friendships probably also intersect with
the idea of a gop a, which is love for humankind,
although do you think that it crosses every into arrows?
(01:10):
Probably could passionate love. Yeah, philia with benefits. Yeah, well,
people often talk about how they marry their best friends,
so those Venn diagrams can often intersect. Yeah, that's right,
and it's interesting. I mean, like not to get off
on a tangent, but it's interesting that, like, even the
idea of quote unquote marrying your best friend is relatively
(01:32):
kind of recent development. I mean, marriage for centuries was
just sort of an economic agreement right there. There wasn't
this idea that, oh, you marry someone that you would
like to live with for the rest of your life.
It would be oh, no, someone will be selected for
you that will benefit Yeah, I mean, because it's fine.
We're all going to die at thirty two, our children
will be apprenticed out. It's fine. Nobody has to like
(01:54):
each other. Yeah, and who cares anyway, because no one
has Facebook to each other is up to or how
happy one is or is not. That's right, and Aristotle
definitely did not have Facebook. And author Massimo Pigliucci, who
who wrote a book about the philosophy of friendship, talks
about Aristotle's philosophy and his theories that basically friends, He
(02:16):
thought that friends sort of had this mirroring role in
each other's lives. They could sort of hold a mirror
up to each other to help them improve personally, help
each other improve, and that they would help each other
achieve this thing called you deemonia hopefully and pronouncing that right,
which is often translated now as happiness. Maybe literally in
(02:39):
the Greek it meant having a good demon. So you
would help each other achieve that that thing you were chasing,
that elusive happiness, that that that good demon inside of you.
I like that. I just thought I was hungry, But
apparently it's happiness. It's just here, the happy demon inside
of you, asking for a sandwich. Um. But if we
(03:00):
move into more contemporary times and look at how the
nature of friendship has changed, it's interesting that more of
that aarrows type of passionate love has shifted from the
person who would have been like our our closest friend
(03:20):
and confidante to these days more commonly to a spouse
or a long term partner, because, for instance, if you
look back in the Victorian era at the closest of
female friendships, and if you read letters that women wrote
to each other, and even that men wrote to each
other during this time, they were so effusive and just
(03:43):
almost passionate in their love for the other person. Yeah,
because that was okay, that was okay. There was no
there was nothing in society really that was dictating that
it was weird to be like really like passionately in
like with your friends, especially like in terms of when
we think of male friendships background this time and it
(04:05):
being okay to be physically affectionate. Yeah, if you look,
for instance, at Abraham Lincoln and his best friend Joshua Speed,
they shared a tiny bed for four years while they
were living together, obviously in their bachelor days, and that
was no big deal. I mean, some people today think, oh, well,
(04:27):
that must mean that Lincoln must have been doing something
with Joshua Speed. But actually, that kind of physical intimacy
that you also see reflected in photos of male friends
at the time, where they might be holding hands or
touching uh one person's shoulders, or even in sort of
a side hug, a platonic side hug, it wasn't so
(04:48):
strange at the time. And some think that the Industrial
Revolution the rise of organized sports and outdoor activities led
to that breakdown in articular of male platonic intimacy. And
for women, the idea of having that closer, more emotional,
(05:11):
intimate best friendship was a little bit more of a
normalized idea because there's been that longstanding idea of women
just being the nurturing, emotive sex. But even still, when
you get to the nineteen twenties, for both men and women,
it wasn't so okay to be as passionately in friend
(05:34):
love with your bff because this was around the time
when you have the rise of homophobia. Yeah, and so
when you have something to be afraid of, you have
to actively show that you are not that thing, and
in this case it was. It was the rise of
the idea of what is manly and masculine and what
is female and feminine, and homophobia was really tied up
(05:57):
in that. And so the idea of having that like physical,
the affectionate close relationship whether you're a man or a woman,
was just not hunky dory anymore. Well, and also with
the industrial revolution, you have with at the rise of
the companion it in love marriage that we think of today,
And so that's when you start to see that kind
(06:19):
of emotion and closeness transposed from the best friendship into
the marriage. And a lot of parents became concerned at
this time, particularly for their daughters, that if they seem
too close to their best friend, then they weren't going
to make a good wife, you know. They could sort
of practice, you know, being uh compassionate and kind to
(06:41):
someone else. But there was definitely uh this line that
was drawn and was perpetuated by psychoanalysts in the nineteen
twenties who warned about the quote perversions of the libido
that were the tendencies of teenage girls to fix their
affections on members of the same sex. I mean that's silly, right,
(07:03):
I mean, like as far as being concerned about young
girls spending a lot of time together, yeah, well, and
I would assume to the penalties for that, where it
would be much harsher for men at the time, because
I feel like now maybe we're just not freaking out
as much. But for instance, it's so much more common,
(07:23):
it seems like for groups of girls to get together
and have slumber parties and play with each other's hair
and do each other's makeup and that kind of stuff
that involves lots of physicality, whereas boys friendship physicality is
often more of the rough and tumble play. There's not
that same kind of intimacy. Right. They're probably not sharing
(07:44):
a bed like Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. Yeah exactly, Well,
because they have to prove that they're masculine and so
you can't have that intimacy. But I mean, speaking of
intimacy and things that are good for you, friendship has
a ton of health benefits. And these health benefits have
been asserted over and over again forever, and you're probably
familiar with a lot of them, including the psychological ones
(08:05):
that uh Mayo pointed out. They include increasing your sense
of belonging and purpose, boosting your happiness and reducing stress,
helping to improve your self confidence and self worth, help
you cope with traumas, and also encouraging you to change
or avoid unhealthy lifestyle habits. These are all kind of
hallmarks psychological benefits of close friendships. Well, and that last
(08:28):
point to that the Mayo Clinic noted, encouraging you to
change or avoid your unhealthy lifestyle habits really hearkens back
to that Greek idea of the good friend helping you
find your your good demon inside of you. Yeah, you're
a good demon, whether that's just goodness or margarita. Yeah,
(08:49):
so whatever, But you know, all of that well being.
Once you've achieved all that well being, that definitely leads
to a lot of potential physical benefits, things like better
brain health. Harvard researchers back into thousand and eight found
that strong social ties could actually promote brain health as
we age, and so you know, that's why it's even
critical when we talk about like aging populations and older
(09:10):
people being alone and how awful that is. The stronger
your social network, the better you'll be as far as
emotional health and brain health. And the lower stress levels
associated with having close and healthy friendships also leads to
us being less likely to get colds. I mean, this
is just like one example of how it does improve
(09:33):
our overall health. Yeah, and studies have also pointed out
that this kind of social support can lower blood pressure,
protect against dementia, and reduce the risk of depression. So
it's apparently pretty important to have friends, you guys, and
all in all, this adds up to the possibility that
we might live longer as one byproduct of having friendships.
(09:55):
There was a two thousand five study published in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health which tracked a group
of Australians over ten years, and they found that those
with a large circle of friends were twenty two percent
less likely to die during the study period than those
with fewer friends. And I'm sure there are other issues
(10:16):
in there as well, but I mean that is that's
that's impressive, is nothing to to sneeze and when you
look at women in particular, um friendship also has an
effect on women who are battling breast cancer, as a
study in two thousand six in the Journal of Clinical
(10:38):
Oncology showed um. They did a study of nearly three
thousand nurses who had breast cancer and found that the
women without close friends were four times as likely to
die from breast cancer as women with ten or more friends.
And I think it's worth noting that proximity and the
amount of contact with the friend or friends was not
(10:59):
associated with vival It was just the fact that you
have friends who love you in your life that was
the protective factor. Having a spouse, however, was not associated
with survival rates. It's all about the friends well, and
men can also benefit from friendships as well. This was
a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine which looked
(11:20):
at a group of Swedish men over six years and
found that those with solid friendships more than an attachment
to one person, you know, just having the spouse perhaps
in the home appeared to affect the risk of heart
attack and fatal coronary disease in a positive way, probably
lowered the chance of that happening. Now, again, these are
(11:43):
kinds of correlation versus causation associations to make, but nonetheless,
the evidence is pretty strong that all in all, healthy
friendships are healthy for us. However, and this is something
probably all moms did in tell us many times when
we were growing up. Not so healthy friendships can negatively
(12:07):
impact us. Sure, yeah, it totally makes sense. If your
close friends are boozing it up or smoking or doing whatever,
then you are also more likely to do that, especially
if you have a strong desire to fit in. Um.
There was a study back in in Basic and Applied
social psychology that found that when you perceive a greater
(12:32):
alcohol use among your best friends, that predicts in you
higher levels of willingness to consume alcohol. So basically, if
it's the norm in your brain, whether it's true or not,
if the norm in your brain is that your friends
are drinking and smoking and doing whatever, you are more
likely to abuse those substances yourself. Yeah, And there was
(12:54):
a recent study that came out in the British Medical
Journal which found that friends see your our decisions in
when we were school age more so than parents, and
remembering when I was fourteen years old, that is not
a surprising finding at all because friends are so much
cooler than parents at that time anyway. But they found
(13:16):
that specifically, the impact of having a smoker as a
close friend during adolescents is greater than that of having
a smoking parent or siblings when it comes to predicting
whether you shall smoke in adulthood, not just whether you're
going to be out in the schoolyard smoking some smokes
that you stole from some cigarette stubs you found on
(13:37):
the ground, yes, and was some misty stubs that you snagged.
And another factor that comes into play is also having
cross sex friendships among adolescents. This was a study in
two thousand six in the Journal of Psychology looking at
kids in urban settings in six, seventh and eighth grades.
(13:57):
So not only did they find that developing cross sex
friendship is more likely to lead to or be related
to popularity, but they also found a lot of stuff
regarding smoking and drinking. Having these cross sex friendships is
also linked to the perception among seventh graders that the
best friends attitudes about smoking and drinking are less negative.
(14:18):
It's also linked to higher levels of cigarette use among
sixth and eighth graders, in addition to more alcohol use
among six seventh and eighth graders. Does that mean then
that our parents were right when you know they warned
us like, don't hang out with old Johnny who smoking
those he smoked cigarette but Virginia slims, he will turn
(14:42):
out like he's a bad apple. I well, I think
I think it's interesting, and there's probably a lot more
details that you could look into, or that maybe are
actually in the full study if we were to read
the full study. But I think it's interesting to look
at cross sex friendships in this very impressionable age when
your hormones are raging, you're really insecure. Everybody's really insecure
and doesn't know what's going on in life. Um, and
(15:04):
how that's linked to popularity and then what does it
mean to be popular? And then you're thinking about the
norms of like, oh well, if Johnny and Susie are smoking,
then that's cool and I can do it. And there's
a lot wrapped up in there that to me just
sets off alarm bells. If the terror of being a parent,
because you have to take in all of those different
variables when talking to little Suz about how to manage
(15:29):
those kinds of peer pressures. Yeah, but we there's even
more on cross sex friendships that we'll get into in
a minute. But let's talk about sort of beyond just
the physical and emotional and mental effects of friendship. Let's
talk about the science of friendship because there have been
some really interesting studies in the past couple of years,
including one that um took my Space into account and
(15:52):
side note, the study came out in two thousand eleven,
which was seems surprisingly recent considering that they were using
my Space data. Yeah, I actually double check that date.
I was like, that's got to be like two thousand one,
not two thousand eleven. But it was this just a
study that Tom conducted. Yeah, seriously, everybody's top friend. But
so the study was talking about this thing called cognitive alliances,
(16:15):
and they used the my Space Top ten Friends system.
If any of you were on my Space, you remember
how froughth that was. You know, I broke up with
him and so I'm moving him out of my top friends.
Are like, oh, we met and she's cool, So I'm
gonna put her in my top friends. Yeah, I remember
when I was setting up my MySpace account so long
ago now, and how it was just a terrifying experience
(16:40):
to you know, so carefully select who would be in
that top ten to make you look as good and
by you, I mean me look as good as possible.
I'm so glad that went away. I'm yeah, I we don't.
We don't need extra bad feeling stuff like that. And
looking at these top ten friends, researchers found support for
(17:02):
their alliance hypothesis, which basically held that human friendship is
caused by cognitive systems that function to create alliances for
potential disputes. So like, I guess your top ten friends
would function as your you know, your gang of Ruffians
in case the neighboring gang of Ruffians on my Space
came up and tried to beat you up. But they
(17:22):
also found that because an allies support can be undermined
by a stronger outside relationship, the alliance model predicts that
people will prefer partners who rank them above other friends.
So I'll like you more if you like me more. So,
this whole idea is that we form friendships and strong
friendships as human humans as sort of a status power
(17:46):
grab to ensure that if people we don't know with
threatening status has come along, then we have a leg
to stand on. Yeah, kind of that. We just have
these mental and emotional alliances that we formed that becomes
stronger the more the other person shows that were valued.
That takes out all of the romance of friendships for me.
(18:10):
Don't worry. It gets even weirder. I thought it was
so that you could trade those necklaces that are the
broken hearts. You get one half and I get the other. Yeah. Well,
so there's this. There was this really interesting New York
Times article a couple of years ago UM talking to
scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who along with co
(18:32):
researcher Jamie Suttle, have done a lot of studying up
on friendship networks, how and why we form these connections
and how health related risks and benefits end up being
kind of transmitted from person to person or even skipping
a person and going on to somebody else. And they
use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and this
(18:53):
thing called the Framingham Heart Study, which followed people in Framingham,
Massachusetts for several generations to see how their personal connections
and interactions affected their health. Yeah, and and Framingham, the
Framingham and Heart study is a fascinating one because it's
almost this ideal study population because so many people who
(19:14):
grew up in Framingham stayed in Framingham, so it gives
them this they can sort of isolate environmental variables and
toy around with all of that. And uh, these researchers
found some really compelling evidence for how good and bad
behaviors spread through our social networks, from both our best
(19:37):
friendships all the way to acquaintances or even people we've
never met before. Yeah, and they kind of treated it
like a virus. Things like quitting smoking, losing weight, and
being happy. Those are obviously good attributes, and they watched
how these things could spread or crop up versus negative
habits like picking up smoking, gaining weight, and becoming less happy.
(19:58):
So if if you're looking just at at the weight thing,
they found that obesity broke out in clusters. And a
lot of scientists who countered this said, well, it's probably environmental,
maybe more fast food restaurants opened, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But
they found out that it didn't really relate at all
to something like a McDonald's opening in the neighborhood. They
found that even if a friend in that group moved
(20:20):
away and gained weight, her social circle back home was
gaining weight too, and that the risk of obesity increased
even if a friend of a friend of a friend
gained weight. What is going on with that? Yeah, that
kind of pattern was so consistent that these researchers termed
it the three degrees of influence. That what you were
(20:42):
doing can have effect, you know, to your friends of
friends of friends, and vice versa. Yeah. Another theory that
was discounted was this thing called home a Philly, which
is basically like associates with like. But again that's kind
of discounted by the fact that Susie can move away
to a different state and gain weight and her friends
back home are still gaining weight. But some of the
(21:04):
things they looked at among these friend groups are maybe
there's some subconscious social signaling at work. As our friends
become heavier, we change our perception of what obese looks like,
and therefore give ourselves permission to gain a little weight
because maybe it's not so bad. Or if we don't
gain weight, maybe we just simply become more accepting of
other people in our social circles who do so maybe
(21:26):
they don't feel as bad about watching what they eat well,
And this jumped out to spouses tend to have less
of an effect on us, particularly in this area of
weight gain that they looked at. They have less of
an effect than close friends do because our ideas about
weight in particular are more influenced by people of the
same sex, which makes sense because you know, we're looking to,
(21:50):
you know, people who are more we're looking at essentially
like the beauty standards of our group. Absolutely, and they
found the degree of friendship matters. So this is sort
of like what we're talking about with these cognitive alliances
a second ago. If Steve likes Peter more than Peter
likes Steve, Steve will gain weight when Peter does. He'll
(22:10):
be influenced by Peter's weight gain, but Peter's weight won't
be influenced by Steve's because he doesn't whatevery verb you
want to use value Steve as much, noticed Steve as much,
care about Steve as much. But if there's a mutual
degree of friendship, the weight effect is significant. Poor Steve
what did you do wrong? And that sounds a lot
(22:32):
like that alliance hypothesis that you just mentioned from that
MySpace study, right exactly, So how you view your friends
and how they view you beyond just like the actual
closeness factor that what really exists, Like how you view
your friendship matters too, I guess. But if we go
back to Aristotle talking about mirroring, you know, he said
(22:53):
that friends hold a mirror up to you to help
you achieve your happiness, we should bring up mirror neurons
because Stock is a Fouler and Settle also talked about
mirror neurons and happiness simply the fact that the more
happy people you're exposed to on your in your day
to day life or in your social network, the more
often your spirits are lifted. And so it's the kind
(23:15):
of thing like I feel like we've seen marketing campaigns
and advertising campaigns that are kind of based on this
idea where if one person does something nice for you,
and then you do something nice for the next person,
suddenly the whole network is happier and more polite. Um,
And so it's sort of that idea of like mirror
neurons as as you smile at someone, they might smile
at someone else, and soon like all of our friends
(23:36):
are smiling at each other and they don't know why. Yeah,
And anecdotally, all of this kind of the ripple effect
of friendship rings so true thinking about the patterns of
my friends and even broader social networks as I have
moved through my twenties and now I'm approaching my thirties,
and just how are socializing habits have changed to send
(24:00):
to more around like domestic activities. We aren't going out
so much. We're doing more things like going on a
day hike rather than going on a night bar crawl.
And it's like as soon as one person or one
couple started doing that, than someone else took note and
they started doing it, and then you see their pictures
on Facebook and you're like, well maybe I needed to
(24:20):
watch it. And it's like we all have collectively become
just in general, like less wild. And I think it
has a lot to do not so much with like, oh, well,
we're running thirty, we must be boring, but I think
it's probably a lot of this, like the epidemic of
friendship essentially, Yeah, like what you perceived the norm to
(24:40):
be Yeah, I want to do what Peter is doing,
because Peter apparently is a cool guy. Actually want to
be Peter. But we'll watch out. If Peter has the
d r D two gene, well then you better watch out.
Because another thing that Christakis and Fowler found was that
there is a genetic compon into friendship, and this obviously
(25:01):
needs a lot more research, but one thing that they
found their their their preliminary findings are that friendship can
be influenced by certain genes and the gene d r
D two, which I kept in my mind saying, are
two D two influences drinking behavior. People with this gene
are not only susceptible to certain behaviors, including drinking and alcoholism,
but are susceptible to making friends with those exact same behaviors.
(25:25):
So there's an argument for like with like so I
party all the time, I want to be friends with
people who party all the time. But now there might
be a genetic component behind that as well. It's your
R two D two genes all coming together. This is
not the droid I'm looking for now we need to see, right, um.
But they also found a second gene that showed that
(25:46):
people are attracted to their opposite opposites when it comes
to other certain behaviors. So there's a lot of I
think research that still needs to be done there. But
the fact that you might be attracted to certain people,
whether romantically or on a friendship level, the because of genetics,
that's really interesting. Well, it's one of the things I
was reading about, was talking about how and we hear
(26:06):
about this a lot more in terms of our romantic attractions,
how we tend to subconsciously seek out partners who are
more genetically diverse so that it will give our offspring
a better chance of survival, whereas with friends, we seek
out people subconsciously who are more like genetically similar because
(26:28):
we want to tend and befriends. That's right, especially for ladies. Yeah,
and speaking of which, we have some gender differences to
get into in our friendship patterns. And also talk about
how making friends changes over our individual life terms, because
as I'm sure a number of our listeners who are
(26:48):
maybe heading into their thirties and beyond can attest making
friends as you get older changes it can be a
bit more challenging for a number of reasons that we
will get into you Okay, but if we look at
gender stuff first. Um, I thought that the search for
numbers on around this topic was interesting in and of
(27:10):
itself because there's a lot of studies looking at at
how many friends the average man has, but not so
many specific numbers for women. And I'm wondering if that's
not because people just assume that women have so many
more friends and that men don't make close relationships, and
so that's more interesting and they want to study that more.
But if you look at men's friends in particular, This
(27:31):
is from Men's Health Survey, so keep that in mind.
But they found that the average guy has four point
eight close friends whom he keeps in contact with, primarily
through text, and of guys said they had a best
friend of those who had known him since high school. Yeah,
and I do think that you're right that there is
(27:53):
so much of an assumption that women just make friends
all the time and that we will have a best
the at all points during our life, although that bestie
might change. That there's more focused on, well, what of men,
because there's been a lot more research into the dynamics
of female friendships. But I think it's more because it's
(28:15):
a given, so there's not as much attention to tallying up. Well,
just how many friends does a woman have? Well, yeah,
because she's always tending and befriending, so we don't have
to really worry about her. This is this is something
that we've talked about before a lot on the podcast.
We talked about it in our Female Friendships episode a
while ago. But it's the fact that women tend to
(28:35):
respond to stress with this huge flood of brain chemicals
that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other
women in particular. Yeah, this Landmark study found that when
we hang out with our lady friends, when we go
out for sex in the city style brunches every every
(28:56):
weekend somehow, uh, it actually releases the bonding chemical oxytocin
in our brain, and so we feel tended and befriended.
And that is sort of the more female analog to
the fight or flight response, right, and just that women,
when women get stressed, our oxytocin makes us go towards
(29:18):
one another, whereas men's testosterone testosterone makes them go the
other way. And female brains seem to really like this
tending and befriending because for the research has found that
once we reach out to our friends. We get a
little shot of oxytocin in our brain. The more that
we do it, the more oxytocin our brain's release. So
(29:40):
we're just like hugging all the time, Like I can't stop,
I'm just hugging my friends all the time. Well, it's true,
there is a certain kind of crisis management that a
very best friend can offer that no one else can offer,
even say a spouse or a girlfriend or a boyfriend
or a family member. Yeah, I mean that that's what's
(30:02):
really jumped out to me. That's so interesting in all
of these various studies that it's like, nope, it's friendship.
It's those close platonic friendships that really save you and
protect you well. And I wonder if it is that
oxytocin connection that explains something that's called the Steel Magnolia's effect,
which is the study finding that women tend to rate
(30:24):
their female best friends more highly than guys rate their
guy friendships. Like we we seem to value that even more.
Or maybe it might also be like a thing of
self reporting where maybe we simply gush more about our
girlfriends and guys gush about their guy friends. Because I
(30:44):
never want to contend that male friendships are are no
less strong and important. Um, but but it is interesting
and it's also yes called the steel magnolia's effect. Well,
I think that ties in with a study, a two
thousand study that was published in the journal Adolescents where
they basically put boy friends and girl friends in rooms
(31:06):
together and let them kind of hang out in chit
chat and kind of looked at the way that the
two boys talked to each other versus the two girls
and what they talked about. And boys ended up rating
their relationships with best friends higher and conflict than did girls.
But what's interesting about that is it's not that there's
not conflict, it's the researchers were saying that, like the
(31:28):
guys would just like hash it out, like what's your problem,
here's my problem. More confrontational. Girls are less likely to
be as confrontational to one another and to maybe talk
about Betty Sue behind her back. But I know Betty
Sue and Peter like God. So anyway, but girls rated
lower in withdrawal and higher in communication skills and support
(31:49):
validation than boys. So girls are better at talking about things,
although sometimes that talking happens behind the back. Um, just
one note on girl code versus guy code. There has
been some other research which has suggested that girls, especially
like adolescent girls, tend to hold their besties to higher
(32:13):
girl code standards than guys do for their guy friendships.
And I think it's partially because of the fact that
maybe boys tend to be a little bit more confrontational
to each other than girls do, because conflict resolution within
you know, thirteen year old girl friendships can be challenging
(32:35):
at times. Yeah, well, so I promised you that we
would talk about cross sex friendships again, and here it is. Uh,
we're still talking about adolescence and boys and girls here
and there was a two thousand eight study in the
Journal of Youth Adolescence that looked at gender age, cross
sex friendships and what that means regarding antisocial behavior. I
(32:58):
read the study and I was like, oh God, I
had a lot of good guy friends in high school. Lord. Anyway,
So here it is. They found that boys who had
only same sex best friends and girls who had other
sex best friends endorsed higher rates of anti social behavior.
(33:18):
Having other sex best friends predicted anti social behavior from
six to seventh grade and eight to eleventh grade, especially
for girls. So what does that mean then, I mean,
are they basically saying that maybe girls who are getting
along better with guys just don't get along as well
with girls, and so they're calling it antisocial behavior. I
(33:40):
don't know, but I wonder if it ties back to
the other cross sex friendship study, which talked about popularity.
It talked about choosing bad behaviors and things like smoking
and drinking, and the fact that girls who had more
cross sex friendships were more likely to engage in this
behavior or think it was normal. So that's that's an
interesting finder. Yeah, I mean I don't think. I don't know.
(34:02):
It sound the language that it uses sounds almost so
alarmous because we hear anti social think. Oh no, But
I think in this case, antisocial means something a little
gentler than the way it sounds. I think it means,
like maybe just things that go against the norm. Well.
As we move out of adolescence and into adulthood. Research
has also suggested that our patterns of cross sex friendships
(34:29):
also change, and essentially, women like move away from having
a best guy friend, usually in heterosexual relationships that would
be of the husband, and it moves away from them
to another female as we get older. Yeah, usually the daughter.
I am a perfect example of this. Like, so this study,
(34:50):
this study looked at basically phone records who were people calling,
and for several years the woman was calling a man
all the time, and then slowly that shift to be
a woman, typically the daughter. So, my mom calls me
all the time, you know, like I can't access my
e books? Well did you buy them? I don't know. Well, okay,
(35:10):
call Peach mac Um, called Betty Sue or Peter Mom.
I'm busy. Maybe they can deal with it since Peter
is so cool. Um. But what they found was that
men show a more consistent pattern of being linked to
a female best friend their entire lives, which I think,
judging by the fact that they qualified the male best
(35:30):
friend as someone who became the husband typically this just
sounds like. This just sounds like, whereas the wife starts
calling the daughter instead of the husband, the husband keeps
calling the wife, which I think is also a pattern
that holds true in my family. My my mother calls
me all the time, My father calls my mother. Yeah,
so I think that's all that is well, and that
(35:50):
brings up then how our pattern of making friends changes
as we age and if we're sort of bad sacking
out of the gendered lens and looking just at age. UM.
There was a two thousand eight study in the Journal
of Experimental Education looking at school attitudes and friendship and
as you might expect, adolescents who felt that they were
(36:14):
valued and respected by their classmates were more likely to
report adaptive achievement motivation. And what does that mean? That
just means that you're more likely to foster this long
term achievement in school. You're more likely to have good
quality friendships that put a value on academics versus poor
(36:35):
quality friendships and viewing classmates as resistant to school norms.
That's related to reports of maladaptive achievement motivation. So basically,
if you have good friends who value academics, you're going
to consider it the norm. Again, there's that thing, the norm,
and you are also going to value academics and do
well in school. And then though, as you start to
make the transition from high school to college, it really
(36:56):
starts to test your friendships. Not so surprised, thinly, um,
during just the first year in college, high school best
friendships declined and satisfaction commitment rewards and investments, according to
a two thousand three study published in the journal Personal Relationships,
and during this period that the freshman year of college,
(37:19):
there's also an increase in the costs and alternatives to
best friend relationships. So it's not so surprising because you
go to college unless you're maybe bunking with your best
friend from high school or still see them regularly, you're
being introduced to a whole, bigger, broader world of potential
best friendships. Yeah, a bigger, broader world. And also maybe
(37:41):
it's just harder to keep in touch with friends back
home and that kind of thing. And so they found
that what really helped these best friendships continue to thrive
from high school through into college was maintenance behaviors, also
things like supportiveness, self disclosure, interaction. Basically, the more you
continue to come indicate on a really intimate level, like
(38:02):
constantly and consistently, the better that friendship will be maintained well.
And that completely jives with a two thousand study called
Forecasting Friends Forever, which I really enjoyed that study title.
But these researchers collected data across nineteen years of different friends,
(38:24):
starting when these friends were in college and after nineteen years. Obviously,
like a lot of these people had kids. They had
moved an average of like five point six times, which
is kind of funny because like, what does moving points
six mean? It just means math is awkward sometimes. And
they found that expressions of intimacy at the outset of
(38:48):
the study, like when you know, these friends were talking
about each other when they were still in college, was
not a major predictor of whether they would still be
friends nineteen years later. So if you were like, oh
my god, we're just so but friends, She's awesome, I
love her, will be friends forever doesn't necessarily mean it's
going to happen. It was more the level of interdependence
(39:10):
and essentially thinking and perceiving the world in similar kinds
of ways that most strongly predicted whether they would be
friends almost two decades later, And so the researchers recommended
that really learning to communicate and sort of figuring out
how each person sees the world and what your value
(39:31):
systems are and all of that matters the most if
you want to be friends forever. Yeah, Like I have
two friends, both of whom I've known forever um but
one she and I are communication styles are very similar,
and that we don't. You know, we've been friends forever.
We we love and adore each other, but we can
(39:53):
go very very long times without seeing or hearing from
each other, and then when we do see each other,
we just have a glass of wine and pick right
back up where we left off, and it's great. Another
friend that I know, um, that I've had forever, she
has a slightly different set of needs and expectations, and
you know that's always dangerous in any type of relationship
to expectation. But um, you know, she's really hurt if
(40:14):
we go for too long without speaking to each other.
And so that relationship requires a different type of effort
and energy and communication style. Well, and the importance is
that you know that and you recognize that. Yeah, so
you're not kind of you know, because you clearly can
communicate with each other. So it's more the frequency of communication.
And I'm the same way with my closest friends. We
(40:36):
will go for long periods of time without talking because
I'm just I'm rulling not a phone talker. I'm more
of a podcast talker. Caroline, I'm not a phone talker either,
and that does make a lot of things difficult. Like
my mother all the time. Oh that's differently. But the
older you get, though, it can be challenging to make
(40:58):
new friends because obviously you know those some of those
friendships from say high school in college do fade away
because you develop your own life and your own rhythm
and probably move and maybe meet someone that you settled
down with. And um, one of us is sort of
a side note, but one major milestone that some that
(41:20):
the survey found is a great predictor of making new
friends is having a baby. Yeah, if you're feeling lonely,
just have a baby. Oh god, don't don't know. Um,
but yeah, this is a survey, so you know, keep
in mind it's not like an academic study, but a
survey funded by Nature's Purist, a baby products company, found
(41:41):
that fifty of new mom said it was easier to
bond with other women after having a baby, and seventy
of those said it was because they had so much
in common. In my brain, I'm just like, you have
a baby in common. But of course that brings with
it like an entirely new life, and a lot of
the moms surveys said not only did they now have
(42:02):
things in common like um post babies, sex worries or
you know, body worries or like I haven't slept in
seven months anymore. Ever, they're also worried about just boring
their old friends with baby talk. Yeah. I mean that
that those survey findings make total sense. Um, But when
it comes to just making friends, if you aren't in
(42:25):
you know, a baby circle, it can be challenging. This
was something that Alex Williams wrote about not too long
ago in the New York Times, and he said that
you sort of have to resign yourself once you get
into your thirties of making what he calls kind of
friends instead of best friends. They're not like the super
(42:45):
best friends that you would hang out with almost like
cheer style, like every night you hang out and it's awesome.
But it's more getting into the situational friend zone. So
you have your kind of friends that you will do
outdoors the stuff with, and then you have your kind
of friends that are like movie bops, so you go
to like film festivals with them. And then you have
your I don't know what it's another kind of friend
(43:09):
computer nerd friends. Yes, can you program computers together? Yes?
Those friends? Um. Yeah, but he says that you've like,
once you've crossed the threshold into your thirties, you're now
in the situational friend zone. Do do do do do
do do oh. Another big kind of friend, the couple friend.
(43:29):
You know, the two people to get along really well
so you can hang out at a fore top. There
you go. Well, so what's going on around this age?
Psychology professor Laura Carsonson, who is the director of the
Stanford Center on Longevity in California, has observed that people
tend to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife,
(43:49):
but that they end up growing closer to the friends
they already have. Why she kind of this is depressing.
She says that once we turn thirty, it reminds us
that our time horizons are shrinking, so we're less focused
on exploration and more concentrating on the here and now. Yeah,
just anecdotally speaking, that makes sense because at least in
(44:10):
my day to day I can't really see much beyond
the here and now because I have no free time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um,
there's also the whole issue. According to Marla Paul, who's
the author of The Friendship Crisis, finding making and keeping
friends when you're not a kid anymore. She also says
that the bar is simply higher than than it was
(44:30):
when we were younger, when we were in college, and
we're surrounded by like thousands of other humans, and we
can pick and choose our friends at will. We're not
just willing to meet in general, We're not just willing
to meet just anyone for an afterwork Margarita. Well, if
there's a Margarita is actually quite low, quite low. But
in yeah, in terms of like forming really close friendships,
(44:52):
I think it takes a little more now because I
guess once you're thirty, you know your politics are set,
your religious views are set, like all of these important things,
and your view on kids and marriage and whether you're
going to do that is set. Also, your schedule is
very set. Um. But what if if you are interested
in making a new solid friendship. There are three criteria
(45:15):
that sociologists say are critical for forging those bonds, which
are proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that
encourages people to let their guard down i e. Margarita's
um and also confide in each other. And those might
seem like a simple set of criteria, but actually finding
(45:37):
all of those in one. That is a challenge because
once you're like thirty ish and you're in the working world,
it is harder. Like, you know, you have work friends,
but work is an interesting situation because people move on
and change jobs. They compete with each other for roles
and tasks and whatever else they're competing for, and different
people earn less and more than each other. So there's
(45:58):
that whole money issued too. And if you're in a relationship,
if you're looking for couple of friends, it's like matchmaking
for two to all four people like each other. That's
a whole other thing. So what do we do then?
Obviously we have more challenges as we get older to
finding new friends. And if you're in the market for
a new friend, I think one good piece of advice
(46:21):
that Tracy Moore at Jezebel offered was that you you
need to just go lots of places, do lots of
things that you like to do, essentially set yourself up
to meet people who are like you, whether that's joining
an outdoor group or volunteering regularly, or essentially like pursuing
your passion where other people will be pursuing a similar passion.
(46:43):
And that right there will give you a foundation to
start from, right, because we're not sixteen anymore. Hopefully we'll
beyond the point where we lie about our interests and
you know what we like and don't like. And so
the more you put yourself in a situation where you
were genuinely happy and doing something that you love, the
more chance you'll meet somebody who also really loves doing
(47:03):
that thing. Well in one theme that I hear a
lot when I talk to girlfriends my age about this
process of meeting new friends is that it feels very
much like dating. For sure, Yeah, being a grown up
and finding a new friend. And I, yeah, I not
too long ago, have this conversation with a mixed group
men and women, and everybody agreed, it's like dating, and
(47:25):
then it's hard, and but that it's almost even more
rewarding than going on several first dates like with a
possible romantic partner, because at least, like there's no pressure
in the friendship thing. Yeah, well that's another thing. It's
like you have to relieve yourself of being terrified that
it might not work out, because it might not. You
(47:45):
might not see this person, you might this person might
not be your BFF. But that's okay because he or
she is busy, just like you are probably busy, and
there are plenty of friend fish in the sea, that's right. Yeah.
I mean that's another thing that that Tracy Moore said too.
It is like the stakes are very low. You know,
meet people who make you happy, and if they don't
make you happy, or they don't hang around or you
(48:07):
don't see them again, you'll meet somebody else. Yeah, but
I think it is important. I mean, particularly if you're
in a situation where you've moved to a new city
or you are at a new job. You're just sort
of in like an unknown spot, starting from zero, and
obviously want some face to face friends. It is. It
is work in a lot of ways, like like dating,
(48:29):
if you want to if you want to get out there,
you gotta put some effort into it. Yeah, but I
think yeah, to develop, I mean, anybody can have a
circle of acquaintances where you're you're friendly to people, but
if you really are after like a very close friendship,
it's so critical to be yourself. And I mean, I
know we say that in terms of romantic relationships too,
but like, how are you expected to have a bff
(48:50):
for a circle of close friends. If you're acting like
you're not who you say you are or something right,
because the truth will come out eventually, that's right. But
there was one article that was in the Daily Email,
so but bear with me. It was simply um piece
on friendships among women that had significant age gaps, and
(49:14):
it was just like anecdotes of how and why they
got along so well, and it was fascinating to see
these like much older women befriending much younger women and
vice versa, and how it's important to also as we
get older, to stay open to making friends who might
not be within you know, like two years on either
(49:35):
side of our age, because older folks are even younger
folks depending on how old you are, can make fantastic
friends too. Well. It's that whole diversity of experience thing.
One thing that relationship coach Karen Smadley pointed out was
that maybe you're an age where all of your friends
are having babies but you either can't, don't want to,
aren't ready, whatever. Having an older friend who you know,
(49:59):
having an older and or a younger friend who's having
a different life experience than your age group can be
very valuable because it kind of takes the pressure off.
You're like, oh, now I can see that there are
other lifestyles out there. I don't have to have this
pressure to do X y Z that all my friends
are doing. Yeah, but now, Caroline, is it time for
us to ask folks for friendship stories? For sure? Well,
(50:21):
we want to hear from you about your best friend
and how friendship has affected your life. Mom Stuff at
how stuff works dot com is where you can send
us your letters. You can also though, tweet us at
mom Stuff podcast or send us a message on Facebook.
And one final making friends tip, you know, you can
always bring up the podcast because you know, if you
(50:43):
both like the podcast, then hey you got you have
like over five topics to talk about. What's right? So
with that, we have a couple of letters to share
with you our friends right now. Okay, I have a
letter here from Anna who says that she used to
(51:05):
get the question no, where are you really from all
the time. She says, my family is a mix of German, Croatian,
Swedish and Ukrainian, and I came out looking very Eastern European.
My professors would pronounce my name with a strong accent
during roll call and after class seemed very interested in
asking where I was from. When I would reply, oh,
(51:25):
about two hours north in Ohio, they would reply with no.
Before that, I never quite knew how to respond. People
have even gone so far as to speak to me
in Russian or in very slow English. I also thought
it might be interesting to give a perspective on exotic
beauty from a slightly different perspective. I'm a very light skinned,
light haired, green eyed girl living in rural Japan. Not
(51:46):
many foreigners visit this part of Japan, let alone live here.
So for many people, I am their first white foreigner
they have seen in person. The initial reaction is lots
of squealing, with people touching my hair, getting uncomfortably close
to my eye, and complimenting me on how small my
face is and how big my nose and eyes are.
Those are apparently compliments. I've gotten many people asking me
(52:07):
to take and use my photo for advertising purposes with
no pay, because I have that quote unquote Russian beauty
that is sought after here. It all seems very forced, ultrapolite,
but definitely does make me feel an other. I would
also like to add that the amount of products here
to make people women in particular look Western is mind
boggling whitening creams. I take colored contacts for less than
(52:29):
the equivalent of ten dollars at a drug store, hair
lightning kits, and arm and face covers for the beach,
cars and bikes. I just thought I would share. Man. Okay, well,
thanks for the very interesting perspective. Anna Well, I've got
another letter here in response to our exotic beauty episode.
This is coming from Lillian, who writes, I grew up
in an inner city neighborhood in northern New Jersey as
(52:51):
a bi racial woman of Puerto Rican and Chinese ethnicity.
I've encountered a really uncomfortable amount of fetishizing, not only
from white men, but also from a Hispanic man who
generally watched too many Kung Fu movies. If I had
a dollar for every time I've been told I'm comprised
of quote the best of both worlds, or told that
somehow my mix is superior for stupid, stereotypical reasons, I'd
(53:14):
be a very wealthy woman Puerto Rican curves and a
docile freak in the bedroom. The sex must be amazing.
Imagine the food she can cook. The first person to
call me Exotic was my white male homeroom teacher in
my freshman year of high school. That was an uncomfortable year. Fortunately, though,
since then, I've heard the quote unquote compliment so many
(53:35):
times that I've developed the perfect response to it. Now.
Whenever someone calls me exotic, I say, oh great, another
one who wants to put me in a cage A
parent is exotic. I'm from New Jersey. The resulting flash
of embarrassment that tends to cross their faces is just priceless.
So thanks Lilian, and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
(53:57):
email address, but you can also reach us on Facebook
and tweet us at mom stuff Podcasts and for links
to all of our social media as well as all
of our podcasts, blogs, and videos. There's one place to go,
and it's stuff Mom Never Told You dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, does it
(54:17):
how stuff works dot com
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.