Golden Age For Friendship

 

Our social goals change in surprising ways over our lifespan – and understanding this can help us build fulfilling connections with others, research suggests.

Do you prefer meeting lots of new people, or spending time with a small circle of close friends? You may think the answer depends on whether you're naturally more of an extrovert or an introvert. But there's another crucial yet little-known factor that shapes our social preferences: age.

Friendship benefits people across all ages, even improving our health and lifespan, a large body of research shows. In later life, friendships can become an especially important source of happiness and life satisfaction. Frequent interactions with a close friend may in fact boost happiness in old age more than those with close family.

One simple explanation for this is that friendships can be more fun, and less tense and fraught, than other relationships. According to a study of Americans aged over 65, encounters with friends were seen as more pleasant than those with family members. These findings contrast with older studies that focus more on close family as the key source of support for aging adults.

Compared to young people, there is however one important difference in how older people choose and maintain their friendships. While young people tend to actively look for new contacts, older people deliberately shrink their social networks, says Katherine Fiori, a professor of psychology at Adelphi University, New York. While this reduction in the number of relationships in our lives has important advantages, it also has some disadvantages that can be worth addressing, she and others say.

One advantage of cultivating a smaller circle is that the remaining, carefully chosen ties tend to be high-quality.

"As people age, their perspective on the future changes – they have less time to live, essentially," Fiori says. "Their priorities shift, and they tend to be focused on socio-emotional goals."

This is also known as the socio-emotional selectivity theory. Younger adults see their future as expansive and focus on building new connections. Older adults prioritise spending time with people who know them well, and therefore whittle their connections down. Fiori explains that the winnowing down of these weaker ties is purposeful – people are doing it to focus on their close ties as they get closer to death.

Expanding vs shrinking

Researchers have found that as part of that whittling-down, older adults even deliberately drop less-close acquaintances from their social networks. This increases the so-called "emotional density" of their social circle – meaning they work towards creating a smaller, tighter group. Older adults also tend to be more forgiving and positive with those chosen contacts, as they try to savour life and their remaining time together, the research suggests.

This focus on joy chimes with other findings on the role of positivity in older age. For example, compared to younger adults, older adults generally have a more positive attitude, and focus on positive life events and memories – a phenomenon known as the "positivity effect".

However, you don't necessarily have to be elderly to experience this effect of focusing more on close, joyful, positive relationships. When younger people are prompted to think about the fragility of life, and their limited time on Earth, they also change their social goals from a more expansive strategy to a more focused one, according to a 2016 study.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, this effect was particularly stark: at the peak of the pandemic, people across all age categories favoured emotionally meaningful partners, a series of studies showed. In other words, older people continued their standard, age-typical strategy of focusing on fewer but closer ties, while younger people changed their previously open, expansive strategy, and acted more like older people in terms of their social preferences.

"Findings suggest that widely documented age differences in social motivation reflect time horizons more than chronological age," according to the study. In other words, how much time we think we have affects our social strategy more than our actual age.

Welcoming new friends

However, even as a person cultivates those close ties, it's a good idea to also remain open to new friendships, researchers say. Fiori and her colleagues have found that reducing one's network too much isn't necessarily healthy. Perhaps surprisingly, Fiori says there is no evidence to suggest that an exclusive focus on close ties is beneficial for mental or physical health – at any age.

"Friendships are very beneficial for the well-being of people across the lifespan, and part of it is because different relationships fulfil different roles," she says. "Our closest ties tend to be the ones that provide us with social support, emotional support, instrumental support – but there are other functions that we get from our relationships that tend to be just as important, if not more important, but often come from different types of ties."

For example, our friendships might offer intellectual stimulation or simply allow us to have fun – the key difference being that friendships are voluntary, non-obligatory relationships, that can begin or end at any time.

Alexandra Thompson, a mental health research fellow at Newcastle University in the UK, echoes this. "Friendships give us slightly different benefits to our family relationships for a variety of reasons," she says. "Family relationships can be strained – they can be based on obligation. But friendship is about shared interests, and this can increase positive mood."

Cultural crossovers

The importance of friendship is more strongly related to health and happiness among older adults, women, people with lower levels of education, and people living in individualistic cultures, according to a 2021 study of over 300,000 people from 99 countries.

For older adults, the study suggests that placing high importance in social relationships can serve as a "successful coping strategy that enhances well-being when encountering the adversity of older adulthood".

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- Author: Molly Gorman, BBC