3 ways to find and nurture better friendships

Why do you think anything is normal?

Presumably, somewhere in your childhood, someone normalized things. Your parents only ever talked about certain subjects. Your friends dressed and behaved in a certain style. The miasmic shadows of society told you that some kinds of thoughts are acceptable, and others are deviant. Suppress! Deny! It’s abnormal.

One of the hundred reasons I love philosophy is that it allows us to reexamine our own “normal.” We can drag our concepts onto the syllogistic dissecting table to scrutinize their genesis and their worth. But sometimes, philosophy needs a little help from its friends. And when it comes to one of the most important parts of life, we need to call upon a bit of psychology. With the topic of “friendships,” we need to work together.

What does a “normal” relationship look like to you? What makes you think this friendship is broken, but this one is healthy? And how can answering these questions help us be better at relationships?

Let’s find out.

The usual suspects

So many of our conversations these days dance to the tune of Sigmund Freud. We often unthinkingly accept the idea of an “unconscious self” guiding us. We assume our upbringing was inevitably stewed in a parental soup of trauma and neurosis. And, most relevantly here, we recognize that our model of a “good relationship” comes from those we witnessed or experienced in our formative early years.

Freud argued that we interpret all our adult relationships through the lens of our childhood ones. And Susan M. Andersen’s “social-cognitive transference” argues that when we meet someone who behaves like or resembles someone from our past, we reproduce old emotional states. We’re attracted to people who look like our first lovers. We hate people who talk in the same way as our childhood bullies.

Psychologists like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth talked about this in terms of “attachment styles.” How we commit to and view relationships depends on what our childhood caregivers were like. If we were loved and always supported, we’re likely to be trusting and secure. If we were often abandoned or witnessed neurotic behaviors, we tend to become anxious and clingy.

These kinds of psychoanalytic and psychological theories tend to place the most emphasis on our parents. As the poet Philip Larkin famously wrote: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

The quiet miracle

In the mid-20th century, the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan took a slightly different path, arguing that early friendships were especially critical to our development. For Sullivan, the best and healthiest thing any child can experience is what he called a “chumship.”

Sullivan argued that sometime just before puberty — between 8 and 11 years old — we often form an intimate relationship with a “best friend.” It’s what Sullivan called the “quiet miracle of preadolescence.” Up until this point, the child is mostly passive and mostly a receiver. They take instructions from parents and teachers, concerned only with their own thoughts. Then, when the “chum” first appears, suddenly and for the first time the child’s question shifts from “How do I get what I want?” to “What can I do for this person?” The friend’s happiness and standing start mattering. For Sullivan, that is literally the first appearance of love — where another person’s satisfaction and security matter to you as much as your own. Good chums early in life teach you how to love well.

There’s some good evidence to suggest how important these early friendships are. In 2017, a team from the University of Virginia showed that having good “best friends” at 15 predicted increased feelings of self-worth and decreased feelings of anxiety and depression by age 25. By contrast, being broadly “popular” predicted more social anxiety. In 2015, the same team found that adolescent close-friendship quality predicted better physical health at ages 25 to 27.

In other words, friendship quality seems to matter more than quantity. If you have deep, loving, reciprocal relationships in your early years, you are more likely to be confident and happy. You are more likely to have further good relationships later in life. The popular kid at school is often more likely to seek validation and anxiously try to stay popular. The loved, “chumship” kid learns that the company of a few great friends is better than the half-assed double-tap-to-like company of flittering social butterflies.

Three lessons in friendship

What can we learn from all this? What tips and actionable takeaways can we pull from among this swirl of psychoanalysis, data, and philosophy? Well, here are three.

Audit your template before you reuse it

You have a “normal” in your head. You have a model that you think all friendships should look like. For example, as Rebecca Roache argued for Aeon, we often assume that friends have to chatter, chatter, chatter all the time. A quiet interaction with long pauses is a failed interaction and a bad friendship. Where did that idea come from? Look back at your childhood, look back at recent years, and find out what you view as a “good” relationship and evaluate how true or useful that template is.

Treat “coming and going” as healthy and useful

A lost friendship is not necessarily a “failed” friendship. Not only is there the obvious point that all friendships help us grow in certain ways, but also the practicalities of life sometimes simply force a friendship to drift. Research suggests that roughly half of a person’s close network is replaced every seven years, and as we get older, we invariably have fewer — and often more important — relationships. Recognizing that quality is far, far better than quantity, and that a friendship can come and go, is valuable. It allows us to be more hopeful and receptive in approaching new relationships, and it allows us to surrender that guilt or pointless effort in trying to salvage a friendship that has passed its time. A friendship can fade away without any drama or wrongdoing and still be successful and important.

Choose depth and time over breadth and brevity

In 2018, the researcher Jeffrey Hall showed it takes roughly 50 hours to make a casual friend, 90 to make a friend, and 200 to make a close one. Of course, as we get older, the realities of adulthood mean our hours get squeezed. It’s somewhere between unrealistic and impossible to devote 200 hours to dozens of friends. And so, if we are to find the existential comfort of “best friendship,” we need to prioritize. Limit our focus. See fewer friends, more often. Talk about deeper things. People often fixate on the risks of “going deep” — awkwardness, rejection, failed interactions — while underappreciating the benefits — intimacy, love, connection.

Friendships are important to our happiness and health, and we should be far more intentional about nurturing them. So, think about how true or useful your model of a “good friendship” is. Accept that some people will come and go, and that’s not anyone’s fault. And finally, devote yourself to fewer friends, and with more of your heart. Because if Sullivan is right, a good friend is where we first learn to love — and they’re where we keep learning.

This article is featured on Big Think.