Friendship and Social Fitness

It is nearly impossible to be happy without friends

A while back I spoke with one of my best friends from childhood. Tom and I met when I was 8 years old, shortly after I’d been adopted from foster care. Back then, all of my worldly possessions were regularly stuffed into a single garbage bag as I prepared to move to yet another home.

Although Tom and I now only call each other about once a year, we remain close and share the ups and downs of our lives. Tom explained that he was recently fired from his job at Walmart and that his fiancée subsequently broke up with him. He went on to tell me about another old friend of ours who got into a fight outside a bar. The guy he was fighting suddenly pulled out a gun, and as he squeezed the trigger, our mutual friend grabbed the barrel to pull it away. He’s alive, but now he has a hole in his hand.

Tom brought me up to date on his car, his dogs, and how his dad is doing. He asked what I’ve been up to, and I replied vaguely that I’ve been taking a short break after promoting my book. Tom then brought up events from high school, and we reminisced about the year I had to live with him and his dad after my family’s home was foreclosed. I was relieved — I didn’t want to dwell on my present circumstances because it would have highlighted how much our paths have diverged.

I thought about my friendship with Tom as I read a new paper published in the journal Communications Psychology by social psychologists Lara B. Aknin and Gillian M. Sandstrom. The paper, titled “People Are Surprisingly Hesitant to Reach Out to Old Friends,” reports study results from more than 2,000 participants. More than 90 percent of the subjects said they’d lost touch with an old friend, but the majority of these subjects also said they felt neutral or negative about reaching out to them. Oddly, people reported being as willing to speak with a complete stranger or pick up garbage as they are to contact an old friend.

The researchers then asked people to think about an old friend they still liked and cared about, someone whom they’d like to reconnect with, who they believed would like to hear from them, and for whom they had contact information. The researchers even gave them time to draft a brief message and send it. Only 30 percent of participants sent their message. Even when the researchers encouraged the participants by saying “Your friend will appreciate it more than you know” and “Don’t overthink it,” the majority of participants still refrained from contacting old friends they still cared about.

The researchers believe the reason for this reluctance is that if enough time elapses without regular contact, people eventually come to see their old friends not as friends at all but as strangers. Just as you’d probably feel awkward about texting or emailing a stranger out of the blue to tell them you’re thinking about them and hope they’re well, so it is with old friends.

Think of it as an investment

One lesson here is preventive — don’t let your friends become strangers. The more time that passes between conversations, the more they become an unfamiliar person.

This is important for a society that is growing increasingly concerned about loneliness and friendlessness. Some even suggest that we are in a “friendship recession,” with 20 percent of single men now saying they don’t have any close friends. It’s not just men, though. A 2019 survey found that 30 percent of millennials of both sexes said they are always or often lonely, and 27 percent said they have no close friends.

Gen Z doesn’t look much different and might even be in a worse position. In her 2023 book “Generations,” the psychologist Jean Twenge points out that from the 1970s into the 2000s, teenagers spent about two hours per day with friends. By 2019, this had dropped to just one hour per day. In the 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their friends almost every day. By 2019, only 28 percent did.

Elsewhere, Twenge and her coauthors discuss their finding that in the mid-2000s — when I was in high school — 22 percent of 12th graders reported that they often felt lonely. By 2017, this had nearly doubled to 39 percent. Twenge characterizes Gen Z as “the loneliest generation on record.”

These trends have been developing for decades.

In his classic 1990 book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed: “Unfortunately, few people nowadays are able to maintain friendships into adulthood. We are too mobile, too specialized and narrow in our professional interests to cultivate enduring relationships. . . . It is a constant surprise to hear successful adults, especially men — managers of large companies, brilliant lawyers and doctors — speak about how isolated and lonely their lives have become.”

Of course, many of us still manage to invest in close relationships. And it is an investment. A widely cited study found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friendship and a total of 200 hours to become close friends. This underscores just how wasteful it is to let our friendships decay. It’s unwise to discard these investments or be reluctant to recover them, especially when the cost is a simple message and conversation every now and then.

Friends do more than just make us feel good. Research over decades suggests that it is nearly impossible to be happy without close social ties. Friendship, in fact, accounts for about 60 percent of the difference in happiness between people, even for introverts.

In their book “The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups,” the Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar and his coauthors report that the number and quality of your friendships have a larger effect on your health than your weight, how much exercise you do, what you eat, and the quality of air you breathe. They go on to write, “By far the biggest medical surprise of the past decade has been the extraordinary number of studies showing that the single best predictor of health and wellbeing is simply the number and quality of close friendships you have.”

One 2008 study found that having a friend you see regularly delivers as much life satisfaction as an extra $150,000 a year.

Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, advocates what he calls “social fitness.” He points out that just as you don’t go to the gym once or twice and assume your physical fitness has been addressed, the same applies to friendships. Good relationships wither away from neglect; if you don’t keep them up, they disappear from your life.

The unhappy truth is that relationship deterioration is the natural state of things unless we’re willing to do the work of maintenance.

Indeed, in his 2010 book on friendship, the anthropologist Daniel Hruschka writes that the most common friendship conflicts boil down to time commitments. No one likes to feel unnoticed or undervalued. This is the modern paradox of friendship: Despite their importance for our health and happiness, despite the fact that we often want to spend more time with friends, they are often relegated to the bottom of our to-do list. The sociologist Dalton Conley has pointed out that today, college-educated Americans spend more time with their children and at work than their parents did. “So what else have we given up,” Conley asks, “besides sleep? We’ve given up friendship.”

This notion is supported by a recent survey that found that about half of Americans lost touch with at least a few friends during the lockdown.

My situation was different — to stave off loneliness, I reconnected with old friends. The reason my friend Tom and I are in touch now is that after we were estranged for about four years, I sent him a text in the summer of 2020. This turned into a Zoom call that now, four years later, has evolved into periodic phone calls. I admittedly felt a little awkward getting back in touch after we’d drifted apart. During that first call, though, after about 10 minutes, I was both relieved that the conversation was completely natural and unforced and saddened by the realization that we could have had more conversations if we hadn’t let each other become strangers.

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This article was originally published by the Boston Globe under the title “Don’t be a stranger: The power of renewing old friendships.”