Friendships are a crucial part of living a fulfilling life, especially as we get older. It’s so important that we surround ourselves with people who we have fun with, who support us, and people who we learn from. You may already have beautiful friendships in your life, but if you’re still in the market for friends, as I am, it’s never too late to cultivate new relationships that will make your life better.
As we get older, we find that there are many things out of our control. We can’t choose our parents, our genes, or control the things that happen in the world around us. One thing we can control is who our friends are, and this decision can either make our lives so much richer and beautiful, or more stressful and unhappier.
Why Friendship Matters
Having friendships is important for many reasons. Friends make life more enjoyable and manageable. We share beautiful life experiences with our friends, whom we love and who can enrich our everyday experiences. In addition, our friends help us through the difficult times. Having friends to support us through hard times can make unimaginably difficult situations seem more tolerable and less stressful.
The most beautiful part about pouring our time and energy into friendships is that not only do friends help enrich our lives, but we enrich theirs too. Friendships get us through the tough times in life, make things more fun and enjoyable, and all-around make our lives better. I urge you to take stock of your friendships and ask yourself if your current friends are people that build you up and support you, or is the friendship more one-sided?
As we explore our friendships, we also have to include our lovers. I believe that the foundation for any healthy relationship is friendship. So therefore, we need to include our romantic partners into our thinking about friendships.
Finding Friends
Finding friends can be challenging, but if we provide time and energy on it, it happens. Friendships take energy, time, and commitment. If you put your time and energy into someone who isn’t enriching your life and giving you the support you need, it may be time to reevaluate that friendship. If you find yourself in the market for friends (who isn’t?) I recommend you find groups or activities that you genuinely enjoy. This way you’ll have the opportunity to connect with people who have similar interests. Once you are there, start talking to people, exchange contact information, and follow up with them. It may feel scary at first, but the reward can be great.
Existing friends can sometimes be difficult and even stressful, but it’s important to work through those tough times. The tricky part is that it will take two people to fix that issue. We can only control our actions and hold ourselves accountable, but we cannot control our friend or our partner’s reaction. Therefore, one area you need to focus on in the process of developing the relationship is developing knowledge of how to work with differences in the relationship. In addition to our own actions, we have control over the friends or partners that we choose in the first place. If we prioritize choosing good people who we can trust will work through issues with us, then we can work through anything.
Friend relationships that often make up the highs and lows of our lives, and in some ways, they affect our daily well-being even more than our family does. For better or for worse, friend relationships, or the lack thereof, can largely determine our happiness. They help us develop the rhythm of our days and can even shape our goals and our dreams, encouraging us to become who we want to be. Despite their vital importance, though, true friendships in adulthood can be much harder to make and maintain than they were during our youth.
Friendships Affect Physical Health
Solid friendships are crucial to our physical health. If we have none or have poor-quality, social support in our friendships there’s a mortality-risk and equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Friendships boost your immune system, improve your prognosis with various chronic health conditions, and lower your blood pressure to mention a few physical benefits. Emotionally, friends help reduce the risk of disorders from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder to anxiety disorders and substance abuse. Clearly, we need to incorporate our close friends that we can have fun with in our lives as much as our physical activities to enhance our health. We need to embrace quality and not quantity of friends.
We know intuitively that our live face-to-face friends provide much emotional health and acknowledge, and that the 500 Facebook friends do not provide much emotional sustenance at all. Research actually shows us that we are lonelier now despite having more “friends” than before our internet friends. This has to change.
Not only is it harder to make new friends when you no longer have the automatic proximity you had to peers in your school days, but it is common (and natural) to lose friendships when life transitions shift the relationship from a geographical move, to a change in job, to marriage, kids, retirement, health issues, divorce, or death.
Many of us are bereft after a life transition, feeling ashamed of the fact that we seemingly don’t have many friends anymore and yet it is quite a normal problem to have. It has nothing to do with who you are as a person, and everyone goes through it at some point. Those that emerge better off than before are the ones who take it as a logistical challenge to overcome, not as something to be embarrassed about.
Friendship is not just about a one-on-one relationship, but it can also entail the good feelings you get from being part of something bigger than you. Traditional communities involve neighborhoods, workplaces, and places of worship, but new ones can be built in any way you desire.
Think of interests you have that you might have some time to devote to. Interests from volunteering with homeless, to cheering on your team at a pub, from a neighborhood listserv to just teleworking from the same coffee shop at the same time each week, will facilitate becoming part of a community, will expose you to like-minded people, and give you an important sense of belonging that helps in developing new friendships.
In summary, if you are willing and able, you can develop friendships that help you thrive in ways you never thought possible and develop our wellness and happiness. What better way to Add Life to Years?
