RECONSIDERING FRIENDSHIP
How important is our need for social bonds? So important that we come into the world with it, just as we arrive with a need for food and water, clothing and shelter. If any of these requirements is missing, we fail to thrive.
Naturally our first ties are typically with family members, but while these may be among our most formative they are not the only relationships we will need over the course of our lives. Peer relationships begin to have an influence on our development fairly early in childhood, and the prosocial skills we develop during these years affect many measures of health and well-being in adulthood. Studies across cultural contexts indicate that those who lack strong social networks are more likely to succumb to (and have difficulty recovering from) mental and physical illness. As we age, friends tend to outnumber family in these networks, giving them an ever more important role in keeping us healthy.
But besides the benefits to physical, mental and emotional resilience conferred by a solid network of supportive social bonds, friendships serve other important functions. In part, we learn about who we are and who we hope to become through feedback from others. With some of these others, we will have deep and lasting relationships. With some we’ll have more casual relationships. But the importance of what we learn about ourselves from their feedback may have very little to do with the perceived depth of the individual relationship. Even our most casual relationships are capable of influencing us in surprisingly profound ways, as some researchers have found, and even in the Internet age it seems that friendships remain very diverse and complex in the lives of most people.
In their effort to understand this complexity, British social researchers Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl undertook a detailed analysis of the nature of friendship and its role in today’s society. Published in 2006 as Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, the study mapped the “personal communities” of men and women across different ages, life-course stages, and socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds throughout Britain. The researchers looked for any existing patterns while also observing the rich variety in the way people arrange their social worlds. Interestingly, rather than bolstering fears that the Internet has weakened social ties and made face-to-face interaction obsolete, they found that “there has not been a mass retreat from face-to-face sociability, and it seems that the Internet is mainly used to complement and sustain existing relationships, rather than creating entirely new personal networks.” In examining through in-depth interviews the kinds of relationships people include in their personal communities, Spencer and Pahl observed that family and friends are not necessarily distinct groups in the minds of most. Some friends may be valued as family, while some family members may enjoy more of a friend-like status than others do. They also exposed a depth of field in patterns of friend-making that makes it clear why terms such as extraversion and introversion are woefully inadequate and even misleading when used to describe human modes of social interaction.
“Without knowing something about the quality of different friendships, it is difficult to draw many conclusions from the fact that some people include more than twenty friends [in their personal community maps], others just one or two,” Spencer and Pahl observed. In fact, their study turned up at least seven prominent forms of overall personal communities, eight types of friendships and four kinds of friendship repertoires, a term intended to describe the roles people allow friends to play in their personal community.
For instance, those with a basic friendship repertoire might look only to family members or a partner for supportive, confiding relationships, or might prefer “to sort things out on their own.” They may allow friends to play limited, casual roles, but they do not view friends as confidants or support networks.
People with an intense repertoire define their personal community only by their closest, most complex relationships. Their personal community map would not include any level of friendship beyond, for instance, a best friend or soulmate-type friendship such as a partner or other important family member.
In contrast, those with a focal repertoire would include both simple and complex friendships in their personal community maps, although they would distinguish between a small core of soulmates or confidants alongside a larger variety of associates and “fun” friends.
Last but by no means least (though they do not intend any of their categorizations to describe the full limits of the nature of friendship) is what Spencer and Pahl term broad repertoires. Individuals with a broad friendship repertoire would include both simple and complex friendships, much as those with a focal repertoire might. However, their maps contain an even wider range of friendship types, including representatives of almost all of the eight types of friends: associates, useful contacts, favor friends, fun friends, helpmates, comforters, confidants and soulmates. “Friends play many different roles and people with this kind of repertoire take their friendships very seriously,” observed Spencer and Pahl. “They tend to appreciate the particular qualities of different kinds of friendship.”
While social commentators sometimes dismiss the importance of relationships based on sociability and fun, Spencer and Pahl found that these relationships can be stress relievers, making important contributions to emotional resilience. As one of their research subjects noted, “Because life is so serious most of the time, . . . it is nice to meet people that you can relax with. . . . Nowadays everybody works so hard and it’s so fast, that sometimes you just need to get away from it and have a really good laugh together.”
This sentiment can actually claim empirical support, in the sense that persistently talking about a problem (rumination) has been linked by researchers to unhappiness and even depression, and while it can certainly help to share a problem with a friend, mulling over it incessantly has the opposite effect. In addition to fueling depression and impairing problem-solving abilities, rumination tends to wear down the compassion of one’s social network, driving away even the closest of friends. Clearly, considering this factor alone, it can be useful for a social support network to include some friends with whom troubles can be shared and others who might serve as distractions.
Indeed, when Spencer and Pahl compared the results of mental-health and well-being measures to the personal community structures of their subjects, they found some interesting patterns. Poor mental health scores were clustered among those with very small personal communities as well as those whose personal communities were fragile, whether due to family instability during childhood or simply through failure to nurture friendships. Spencer and Pahl attribute this mental health pattern to the fact that people with broader personal communities have a range of people to rely on for support. On the other hand, people who have “all their eggs in one basket” are likely to find their entire world rocked if their sole supportive relationship becomes unavailable.
Spencer and Pahl’s study is not simply one more proof that social relationships are essential to human health. One of its most important contributions to our understanding of social bonds is the fact that our connections are so richly diverse and our patterns of forming and maintaining them so individual that labels such as “introvert” or “extravert,” or claims that the Internet spells the death of social interaction, completely miss the point. As human beings, our need for social interaction is innate. Introvert, extravert or ambivert, everybody needs a variety of bonds with other people in order to be mentally, physically and emotionally healthy.
It would seem, then, that people who need people aren’t just the luckiest people in the world, or even just the happiest people. They’re the only people. They are all of us.
GINA STEPP
gina.stepp@visionjournal.org
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