The One Relationship We Take Most For Granted

I recently moved back to LA. When asked how I felt about making the move, I started by rattling off my excitement about starting my first company and seeing my parents more often (in no small part motivated by The Tail End post in Wait But Why) not to mention the weather and creativity. What I didn’t mention was my friends. Even though I’m from LA, I haven’t lived here in almost two decades. Silver lining is that I can build community with a blank slate but that’s also the rub–how do you build friendships later in life?

And to be fair, it’s a struggle I’ve faced all my life–born in London, growing up between the Middle East and LA, the Bay Area for college and then several years on the East Coast as well as overseas. So I wasn’t surprised when I looked back to realize that I had never spent more than a few years in one place. I had less control over this growing up but bouncing around all over the world was my normal and so the wanderlust later in life was par for the course–and intentional.

____________________

But You Say He’s Just A Friend

What did surprise me was how little I really knew about building friendships. Not just how to build this in my new LA home but how to strengthen the relationships I had elsewhere in the US but also overseas. And so earlier this year, I started talking to friends and family I respected about how they not only viewed but practiced friendship in their life. As a self-proclaimed self-help junkie, I also began diving into what others from academics to spiritual guides to thought leaders had to say on the subject.

And what I found shocked me. Not only was friendship an area of life that meant a great deal to most if not all of the friends and family I spoke to, it was also an area where I heard the most struggle. So many of the folks I spoke to said that rarely if ever in their lives had they talked with someone or learned something about friendship from the media. And so I dug in to find that they were right–the content out there was limited to say the least. When it comes to relationships, the number of movies, books, podcasts and everything in between on love or family is boundless...on friendship? Quite the opposite.

____________________

What About Your Friends

So you might think this isn’t that big an issue. That most of us don’t need to worry about friendship because these are arguably the relationships we need to worry about the least–we choose our friends, they require less ‘work’ so to speak than other seemingly more important relationships (read partner and family) and they’ll always be around. But this hasn’t been my experience. While we do choose our friends, the benefits of friendship come from cultivating them like we would any other relationship we care about.

And here’s the kicker–regardless of what you think about friendship or how much you want to invest in them, friendships are critical for two reasons. First, it’s precisely because we choose them that they are the perfect relationships to practice how to be better at the other relationships that get all the airtime. To put it bluntly, it’s arguably easier to make mistakes with your friends and rebound than it is with other relationships because there’s less at stake. Second, friendships are fundamental to our health–not only how long we live but more importantly, how well–quantity and quality. 

____________________

Don’t Believe the Hype

And I’m not using the term fundamental lightly–we’re social beings in every sense of the word and this has been true since the earliest days of our ancestors. Marry that to the highest rates of loneliness ever recorded and it baffles me why there isn’t more out there for us to learn how to be better at friendship. Let me give you three of the most telling examples–a mix of academic and anecdotal–about the importance of friendship that floored me.

Top 5 Regrets of the Dying

Bronnie Ware, a nurse who spent several years caring for patients in the last few months of their lives, recorded their dying expressions in a blog that gathered so much attention that she compiled them into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Three of the five speak to dreams (unfulfilled), feelings (suppressed) and happiness (deferred). The fourth is about working too hard.

The fifth? Not spending enough time with friends–Ware writes that patients had become “so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years.” And while it was more likely to make amends with a partner or family in one’s last days, “often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down.”

Harvard Study

While you may not have heard of Bronnie Ware or her book, you may have heard of the Harvard Study of Adult Development–one of the world’s longest studies of adult life covering both physical and mental health. Study director Robert Waldinger notes that “it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80."

Granted, relationships in this study refers to all types–partner, family and friends–but I come back to the point above that there is no manual or textbook for friendship, whereas the list is endless for the other two relationships. And if we were able to–in this study or another–parse out the specific impact of friends on our happiness and longevity, I believe we’d find out not just a strong correlation but potentially causation. 

Blue Zones

It’s hard to both have a personal and professional passion in health and wellness and not come across the Blue Zones, a term first coined by National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner, referring to five places in the world where people live the longest, healthiest lives. According to Buettner, these zones share nine lessons in common. Unsurprisingly, about half refer to physical health from diet to exercise to stress-relieving rituals while the remainder speak to purpose, faith, family (including partner) and wait for it...friends.

So the Blue Zones isn’t an academic study but the importance of specifically calling out friendships is not insignificant. It would have been easy to lump all relationships together–like the Harvard Study–but Buettner found that there were practices and in some cases, institutions, that blue zones formalized specifically around friendship. The most fascinating example of this is the Okinanawan moai, where a group of five children are paired together when young and make a commitment to each other for life–meeting regularly to support each other throughout their lives.

____________________

It Ain’t Us, It’s the Media

So why do we struggle with friendship? It’s easy to put the blame at the hands of technology in the form of smartphones or social media but it’s too easy to point fingers at the object and not look at our actions. Granted, technology and specifically social media do make it easier to engage with a broader network, but I don’t believe it’s helped us–yet–tackle how to stay better connected to those we really care about. We’ve got breadth beyond words nowadays but depth remains elusive.

We can also put the blame on progress as we’re more likely to not live where we grew up (assuming we were raised in one place for the most part) and to move more often as adults. And this makes it hard to not only create but also sustain friendships because they arguably require repeated spontaneous contact. This wasn’t true for most of our history as hunter-gatherers to agricultural communities but the birth of cities and suburbs has dramatically changed this.

To be fair, technology has helped me stay connected with friends that don’t live near me–especially those overseas through messaging and video. And it’s also introduced me to people that I otherwise would not have met. And the same is true when it comes to mobility–I’ve been blessed to have experienced so much of the wonder of the world from living and working all over the world…and don’t regret a second of it.

____________________

How To Win Friends

So we know friends are not just important but critical to our lives in more ways than we care to count. So how do we build friendships? Again, shocked but a little less surprised this time around. Most of the literature is transactional–how to win friends (literally) according to the international bestseller from Dale Carnegie–not relational in nature. I was also not surprised to find that most if not all of the content out there on friendship as a relationship is written by and for women, not men.

I don’t think there are fundamental differences here in friendships between men and women but I know that I personally struggle more in building friendships with men. And as a lover of frameworks and practical advice, most of the literature I found was not practical. Whether it’s useful self-discovery tools like The Five Love Languages or What is Your Love Style or the countless online and residential programs for love and family relationships not to mention therapy, why aren’t there more actionable resources on friendship?

____________________

Count on Me

I’m going to dig into how we can create and sustain friendships throughout our lives no matter how we or our contexts change from marriage to moving and everything in between. And I’m also interested in exploring how technology can be leveraged to help–rather than demonized–us build stronger friendships in pursuit of a long life, well lived.

And so I’d love to hear from you–whether it’s stuff on this topic you’ve read that resonates, how you’ve succeeded (or failed) in friendship over the years and everything in between. I’d even appreciate anything you want to share that while not specifically written about friendship but you think could apply...thank you!