As friendships fuel and underpin our lives, makchic will be beginning a series of articles on friendships. Whether it is falling out with besties, maintaining lifelong bonds or delving into the friendships of men, we hope to begin a conversation about how we can better our health and hearts by improving the quality of our friendships.
We kickstart our #FriendshipFocus series with our publisher Laych Koh’s take on why more conversations on friendships are necessary as mums, as women, and as human beings who want better and happier lives.
Pain Got Me Interested in the Science of Friendships
When I moved from Malaysia to London more than a decade ago, I was leaving a life filled with strong social roots and friendship groups. As an extrovert with intermittent introvert tendencies and a curious person by nature, I thought I’d have no problems with establishing the same strong and joyful friendships in London. I also thought I’d have no issues maintaining my longstanding friendships from across the seas.
How did I know my experiences with friends over the past decade were to be fraught with challenges, doubts and pain? A relationship with a best friend ruptured due to a serious disagreement on values, some friendships I had counted on made me feel unappreciated and unsafe, and goodness gracious, how do you start all over again and make new close friends in your thirties and forties? But like, really close, not just Pose-on-Instagram close. The I-know-your-mum-and-dad close or I-really-love-your-kids-too close. The kind of closeness that means a friend will see you through your worst, but also truly rejoice in your successes.
Was it really harder to make really close friends as one got older, or was it just me? Is everyone having a grand old time with their best-friendships, or are we all just not talking about the trials and tribulations of friendships?
I eventually found the safety and comfort of strongly bonded friendships, but boy, did it take a while. It has also taken a lot of work, and continues to require work and reflection. There were more than a few times my husband had to question me as a reminder: “But are you sure this person would go out of the way for you though?”
A Season for Re-evaluation
Through the years of these experiences I had many questions: Why do we not talk about friendships more? Why do I read thousands of articles on romantic and familial relationships, but less on friendships, when friends form such an important pillar of our lives? How do we navigate toxic friendships and what happens when friendships change? And why are we all pretending that these friendships don’t impact us deeply or break our hearts, that we are too cool for school to mourn the end of bonds, or say how much they have affected us?
And then COVID swept across the world and everyone needed a mental health check, break and reflection about what and who really mattered. Painful experiences and a mental health setback made me re-evaluate everything. In 2020, I came across Yale Professor of Psychology Dr Laurie Santos‘ amazing course ‘The Science of Well-Being‘, and first became interested in the science behind happiness, longevity and friendships.
I read books that highlighted how crucial social bonds are for longevity, such as Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. I devoured the series of articles on friendship called ‘The Friendship Files’ by Julie Beck for The Atlantic, where she interviews people about their friendships. Books by friendship experts like psychologists Marisa G. Franco and Robin Dunbar, and science journalist Lydia Denworth opened my eyes to science-based terms, concepts and theories in friendship such as avoidant attachment, Dunbar’s Number and ambivalent friendships.
Here are just some of the things I have learned:
1. Having Good Friendships Will Improve Your Health
We know close friendships feel good, but there is the science behind how friendships are truly good for your health. Studies have shown that those who are socially-connected live longer, and that close bonds with friends are critical to our health and longevity. The more friends you have, the lower the risk of physiological problems, says science journalist Lydia Denworth of the research on these bonds. “If you only focus on friendships when your family and professional obligations slow, you will be at a disadvantage. Damage will have been done.”
The payoff in making friendship a priority was born out in the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development, which followed more than 700 men for the entire course of their lives. What best predicted how healthy those men were at 80 wasn’t middle-aged cholesterol levels, it was how satisfied they were in their relationships at 50,” Denworth writes.
Brain experts such as neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki also talk about the debilitating effects of loneliness and isolation, which causes long-term stress that can damage the brain and makes it less healthy. An interesting example is one from the Blue Zones research on centenarians by Dan Buettner, where he talks about the ‘moais’ in Okinawa, Japan. A moai is a lifelong circle of friends that keep each other healthy and thriving into their old age. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has said that if he were to pitch solutions to the NHS (UK’s National Health Service), it would be to “just find everyone a friend or two” as the effect of friendship was far stronger than “all the things your family doctor worries about on your behalf.”
2. Past Relationships Affect Our Present Relationships
Could deep reflection about our past and how we grew up make us better and more self-aware friends? Dr Marisa G. Franco explains that our own individual styles of friendships can be better understood by attachment theory, or how we formed bonds with our primary caregivers and attachment figures in childhood. She writes in her book ‘Platonic’ that people can have either secure, anxious or avoidant styles of friendship.
Secure people assume they are worthy of love, and others can be trusted to give it to them; anxious people assume others will abandon them and be clingy or overly self-sacrificing; and avoidantly attached people also fear people will abandon them, but instead keep others at a distance. According to research, Franco writes that the distinguishing feature of ‘super friends’ (people who were experts at making new friends and keeping friends) were that they were secure, and this leads them “to give others the benefit of the doubt, open up, ask for what they need, support others, assume others like them, and achieve intimacy.”
3. Ambivalent Friendships Are Worse Than Negative Relationships
We all have that friend that leaves us feeling horrible or confused in their wake – is this a friend or frenemy? Was that a backhanded compliment? Are they talking behind me behind my back? Research by psychologists Bert Uchino and Julianne Holt-Lunstad shows that these friendships you are unsure about – ambivalent relationships – can be damaging to our health, affecting us even more than purely negative relationships.
“In multiple experiments throughout the past 10 years, Holt-Lunstad has shown that interactions with frenemies can heighten our stress responses – compared to both supportive and aversive relationships. And over the long term, that seems to provoke worse cardiovascular health,” the BBC writes about her research.
If they cause us such stress, why do we keep them as ambivalent friends? Holt-Lunstad‘s follow-up on this had subjects who mentioned that these friendships were part of a network we could not escape, but that actually the top reason was internal pressure – people want to see themselves as those who can ‘keep friends’. Is this a sign for us to ditch this internal pressure and drop your ambivalent friends?
4. If You’re A Super Friend, You’re Going To Thrive
‘Super friend’, as described by Dr Marisa G. Franco in her book Platonic, are those whose friendships were closer and more enduring. She said they were not just flourishing in their relationships, but in all aspects of life.
“Studies find that these super friends have better mental health and are more likely to feel that they matter. They are more open to new ideas and harbour less prejudice. They are more satisfied at work and are viewed more positively by co-workers. They feel less regret and are able to roll with the punches of life. In typically stressful events, like math tests or public speaking, they keep calm. They are less likely to have physical ailments like heart attacks, headaches, stomach troubles, and inflammation,” Franco writes. Big enough incentives for all of us to strive to be better friends?
5. The 6 Forces That Fuel Friendship
I have read more science-based theories on friendship recently, but some of the sweetest insights I have read comes from Julie Beck, who conducted 100 conversations on friendships over the course of three years. Her takeaway from all her interviews was that there were six forces that fuel friendships. She details this better herself here, but to summarise, the forces are:
- accumulation, or how much time you spend with them;
- attention, when you notice if you click with someone or are open to friendship opportunities;
- intention, which is action and effort;
- ritual, which builds something into the life of your friendship regularly;
- imagination, which is to imagine how you want your friendship to be if you want to prioritise it; and
- grace.
Grace, she said, could be seen in two ways – one in a sense that offers each other forgiveness and space to be imperfect, and the second, grace in a more spiritual sense. “(That friendship is) just a gift that is so huge and so profound that you could never earn or deserve it. And I do think that that is what friendship is for a lot of us.”
There are so many more lessons and I have only scratched the surface here. But the literature and research on friendship is clear – we should take our friendships seriously, invest in them, and not leave them on the sidelines. I am certainly no expert in this field, and like everyone else I am still learning how to be a better friend. How can we all do this better?
Join us in this new friendship series on makchic as we explore this topic further, and elevate our friendships to the status that they deserve – one as important as our family members and romantic partners. Call, meet up with, or hug a good friend today!
By Laych Koh
