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• Friendship , Lifestyle

17 Reasons to Keep Old Friends in Your Life

• By Sarah Barkley
• Published on September 27, 2022
• Last modified May 21, 2023

Some of your best memories include old friends. The memories might come to mind unexpectedly, leaving you wondering how that old friend is doing now. Keeping friendships in your life allows you to stay in touch and create new memories.

Life isn’t as exciting or fulfilling without friends, with the friends who knew you the longest being around for all of it. They teach you about how people work outside of your immediate family. Many of them are there for you when life gets overwhelming, guiding and supporting you through every hardship.

As you age, you may lose touch with some of your friends. You’ll create new social relationships, and others will fizzle without a cause or reason. However, you should foster those friendships and stay in touch as often as possible.

You might not be able to see old friends often, but you can find ways to reconnect. Even if you’re each on entirely different life paths, you can stay in touch and influence one another.

Seventeen Reasons to Keep Old Friends in Your Life

1 – Old Freinds can give another perspective

If your old friends aren’t in your usual social group, they can offer another perspective. It’s good to have friends that offer their opinion because they can give you an unbiased thought or solution. When you’re in the middle of a problem, it can be hard for you to see a logical answer.

2 – Friendship is one more good reason to go on vacation

If the person lives far from you, keeping in touch can give you a reason to go on vacation. While this reason is superficial, it offers a nice escape to spend time together.

You’ll make memories with your friend during your trip, allowing your friendship to last forever. These trips will be experiences you’ll never regret.

3 – Friendship improves your mental health and makes your friend happy

Connecting with old friends can improve your mental health. It also boosts your friend’s mental health, making it helpful for both of you. Your old friend will appreciate it every time you reach out to them.

4 – You don’t have to impress old friends

Lifelong friends know you as no one else does. You’ll never have to impress them or feel like you must put on a show. These are friends you can go to when you’re at your worst because you know they’ll accept you as you are.

You’ll be that person for them, too, because they know they can let their guard down. It’s a powerful connection, and you can both appreciate the benefits. These relationships can be hard to come by, so don’t let go if you find one.

5 – Nostalgia

When you spend time with old friends, you’ll experience nostalgia as it brings a feeling of youthfulness. Memories will come rushing back, making you feel comfortable and safe. You can spend time remembering how things were before, basking in the joy of your memories.

6 – Friendship eases loneliness

Connection eases loneliness and symptoms of mental health conditions. People supporting you can make you feel good and find meaning.

You can continue staying in contact if your old friend lives far away. Studies show that electronic interaction is beneficial and can decrease the risk of depression and loneliness.

7 – Old friends understand your past

When you’ve known someone for a while, they understand your past. They’ll know how your family functions and what causes stress. These friends make good people vent to when you experience family problems because they’ll understand you and offer helpful advice.

Your old friends will also know what makes you tick and how you approach conflict. They know the little details others might not recognize, showing how much they understand who you are.

8 – Remind you of imagination and innocence

Childhood friends can help you remember the feeling of imagination and innocence. You knew them when life seemed simple and it was about playing together. If you still have a friend from early childhood, it’s a blessing you shouldn’t let dismiss.

9 – Provides comfort

A friend who knew you in older periods of life can give you comfort that you can’t find elsewhere. It’s an opportunity to talk about intimate details and heartache after a tragedy. You might not feel comfortable voicing these details in other social relationships but can feel safe with an old friend.

10 – Honesty

Your old friends will likely be honest with you because they’ve known you for so long. They’ll speak up when necessary and won’t tell you what you want to hear unless it’s the truth. While you must make your own decisions, you can trust their opinion on essential topics.

11 – Old friends influenced your social network

Your high school friends helped shape your social behavior and ability to connect. They taught you that it’s essential to have support from someone other than your family. Your friendship with these people impacts how you interact as an adult, and they can continue to help you grow.

12 – Seeing how your paths connect as adults

The people you were close to in the past might lead a completely different life now. However, you might have some similarities you hadn’t considered before. Spending time with them helps you see how you’re alike later in life .

You grew together for a while, and while you branch out, you still hold a connection nothing can take away. Everyone goes on to live separate lives, and it’s always fun to catch up and reconnect with the people that knew you so well.

13 – Old friends encourage growth

Staying in touch with someone you knew from the past can encourage you to keep growing. You’ll remember how much you’ve grown since then, and it’ll push you to keep going. Or you might realize that you haven’t grown as much as you’d hoped, and you’ll get motivated.

14 – Helps you remember your journey

Your old friends can help you remember where you came from and all the obstacles you overcame. They can also help you remember all your fun and memories. You’ll see how you have evolved while you embrace the past and remember your journey.

15 – Old friends know how to make you happy

Your oldest friends know what it takes to cheer you up and make you happy. They can sense if something’s wrong and start working on brightening your spirits before you even say anything. Old friends remember the things that cheer you up and won’t hesitate to make it happen.

16 – You can see how much you’ve changed

Your relationship helps you see how much you’ve changed if you have friends you only see occasionally. These friends know you at all points in your life, reminding you of your progress. They can also help you experience gratitude for where you are now.

Seeing how much you changed can help you remember where you began. It can also push you to keep growing because you see how far you’ve already come.

17 – Intellectual conversation

Experts indicate that college friends offer academic and social support involving intellectual conversation. You likely shared enlightening moments with these friends, including voicing concerns about the future and questioning everything.

College friends also saw you in intimate moments when you let loose and had fun. They may have helped you through rough nights and been there for you during your first experience away from home. These friends will support you and challenge your thoughts or ideas as you grow.

How to Reach Out to an Old Friend When You Haven’t Spoken for a While

Many people lose touch with old friends and feel awkward about reconnecting. However, there’s nothing to worry about because they’ll likely be happy to hear from you. Either way, it’s worth the attempt.

You can call the old friend, send a text message, or reach out another way. Tell them you’ve been thinking of them and ask how they’re doing. Depending on the conversation, ask if they’d like to get coffee and catch up.

When You Shouldn’t Reconnect with Old Friends

While keeping old friends in your life can be beneficial and enjoyable, there are some instances when you should avoid them. Only reach out if you can recall positive interactions with the person. Reaching out to harmful or toxic people can be detrimental to your well-being.

Consider a few things before you reconnect with an old friend, including:

• if it could be harmful to either of you
• what you want from the reconnection
• if you’re thinking of your best interests
• whether you’re willing to share details of your life
• if you feel comfortable with them

Avoid reaching out to someone if your relationship with them is unhealthy or abusive. Taking the time to understand why you want to reach out can help determine if you’re doing it for the right reasons.

Final Thoughts on Reasons to Keep Old Friends in Your Life

Old friends are treasures that you should keep in your life. They know you in ways no one else does and can bring positivity to your life.

If you’ve lost touch with old friends, reach out to them to reconnect. You’ll be glad you did, but make sure you’re not rekindling unhealthy friendships.

These reasons to keep old friends in your life can motivate you to reconnect. Don’t be afraid to invite them somewhere to catch up. Remember that they might be as happy as you are.

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About the Author

Sarah Barkley

Sarah Barkley is a lifestyle blogger and freelance writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature from Baker College.

She is experienced in all things related to parenting, marriage, and life as a millennial parent, but loves to learn new things. She enjoys the research that goes into a strong article, and no topic is off-limits to Sarah.

When she isn’t writing, she is immersed in a book or watching Gilmore Girls. Sarah loves reading classic novels but also enjoys a good thriller.

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When an Old Friendship Needs to Change, or End

The role you're playing in the friendship is no longer who you are. now what.

Posted October 31, 2021 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Nothing stays the same, including us. We change and grow over our lifetimes—thankfully. And often, our longest and dearest friendships need to change too, to keep up with who we are. The process of changing a long-term friendship isn’t usually an easy one, however, and sometimes, the friendship doesn’t survive. Sometimes the friendship can only be what it was when we were, or were willing to be, someone else.

Liza met Callie when they were college freshman and they quickly became best friends. After graduation, they both got jobs in New York City and lived as roommates for the majority of their twenties. Eventually, they both married and built families, and ended up living in different cities, but the friendship remained strong. After 38 years, they had a lifetime of shared history, and Liza considered Callie one of her most important and dearest friends.

But then something changed. An incident occurred that made Liza aware of an unspoken dynamic in the friendship that she had been participating in for decades. What became clear too, was that Liza wasn’t willing to engage in this pattern and to play this role any longer.

The incident was triggered because, in a rare moment, Liza was honest with Callie—about her experience with her. She told her dear friend that something Callie was doing in the relationship was painful for her. Furthermore, she asked Callie if she would consider a different way of doing things.

But what Liza’s honesty instigated in her oldest friend was exactly what Liza now understood had always been underlying and, to some degree, controlling the friendship, or at least her role in it. Callie’s response to hearing Liza’s experience was to go silent; she pulled away from the friendship without explanation. As Liza put it, it was "radio silence, with a distinct aroma of punishment .” When Liza then requested that they talk about what had happened, she was pummeled with a litany of things she had done to Callie over the years that Callie had not been okay with, but never said anything about. Liza’s inbox was soon filled with long, well-documented lists of her aggressions and issues, evidence for why she was a bad friend, guilty and deserving of Callie’s rage.

In fact, there had been numerous episodes in the friendship when Callie had unexplainably disappeared and stopped responding—once for several years. There had been a number of times too when Liza had said something minor, or misunderstood something Callie said, with no malintent, and had later come to find out that Callie had been enraged about the comment, stewing in it and building the case in her head against Liza.

But in this most recent episode, Liza became acutely aware of the rules of the bond with Callie, the role she had been playing to keep the friendship intact. Simultaneously, she became aware of her own truth, the fact that she had always walked on eggshells, and always had to work hard to get it right with Callie and not misstep. She realized that she had been living in fear of Callie’s anger for decades, and of her disappearing because of something “bad” Liza had done. The unspoken rules were that Liza behaved as Callie wanted her to behave. So too, Liza knew at a visceral level that she was not allowed to say anything about how Callie’s behavior affected her, and how she felt about Callie.

What the two old friends shared was a belief that Liza was guilty, responsible for whatever had ever gone wrong in the friendship. And that she needed to be what Callie deemed okay, so as to keep the friendship and not reaffirm her own guilt . Ultimately, Liza became aware of the role she had unconsciously agreed to play in the friendship.

But Liza also recognized how her friendship with Callie, which formed when they were just 18 and fresh out of their childhood homes, was a carbon copy of the relationship she had with her own mother. Like Callie, her mother had been emotionally erratic and would periodically withdraw her love because of something Liza had said or done. The narrative on Liza in her relationship with her mother was similarly that she was guilty, a selfish daughter who deprived her mother of the kind of love she deserved. At the same time, there was an understanding that she was never to bring up her mother’s behavior, or call her mother out on how she was affecting Liza. And most certainly, not what Liza herself might need from her mother—as a daughter. Not surprisingly, the role she played in her longest friendship was precisely as it was in her childhood home, where the nature of love and attachment is born.

In this relationship with her best friend, Liza had been playing the same role of the guilty one, the one who wasn’t allowed to have her own experience. Now aware of it, she knew this dynamic was over. The friendship couldn’t exist as it had existed; she wasn’t willing to walk on eggshells anymore, to behave so as not to be judged. Ultimately, she wasn't willing to abandon herself to maintain the bond.

We all do this: We form relationships that mirror our early experience, that keep us in the same roles we played with our early caretakers or other important people. We are, until we become aware of it, acting from underlying assumptions about what an intimate relationship demands, and who we have to be to feel loved. As a result, we end up in long-term friendships that are often unsatisfying at the deepest level, and keep us stuck in old patterns, not getting what we really need.

Start paying attention to the roles you play in your long-term friendships and who you have to be to maintain them, to keep being loved. Consider if this version of you is an outdated or limited one. Then, with compassion for yourself, consider who you are now, who you want to be in relationships at this point in your life, who you are willing to be—and who you are not willing to be.

The truth is, we are not who we were when some of our oldest friendships began, and yet we behave as if we still are, often at our own expense. Some friendships can survive our authenticity and evolution and some cannot. But if not, it makes one wonder if they are worth saving. It takes courage to unpack the rules of the bond, the unspoken agreements about who we are and are supposed to be in our longest friendships. But ultimately, this process sets us free from our old patterns, and allows us to experience new and more real and satisfying friendships. Bringing light to a relationship always includes risk, but in this case, it's worth it.

Nancy Colier, LCSW, Rev., is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, and the author of The Emotionally Exhausted Woman, Can’t Stop Thinking , The Power of Off, and Inviting a Monkey to Tea .

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It's Been Too Long: 7 Reasons Why You Should Reconnect With Old Friends

Life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, exciting or emotional without friends along for the ride. Friends are there to teach us about how other people work – they are our window to the world outside ourselves and our family life.

They introduce us to the diversity of human nature as well as teach us how difficult it can be to get along.

Friends serve a very important role in our development as individuals. They also function as a support team when life gets a bit overwhelming – which, at one point or another, it always does. As we grow older, we create new friendships and allow older ones to die out.

There are, however, several reasons we should reconnect with our roots and reach out to those who once were a fundamental part of our lives. Here are seven of them:

1. At the very least, you’ll experience a hint of nostalgia – everybody loves nostalgia.

Meeting up with old friends brings an air of youth along with it. It brings memories rushing to the forefront of our minds, allowing us to bask in the warmth.

Nostalgia is a beautiful feeling. It reminds us of the way things once were, the happiness that we experienced growing up, and all the wonder. If you have no other reason to contact any of your old friends, then do it for the sake of the smile it’ll bring to your face.

2. It’s fascinating to see how our roads diverge over time, taking those that were once close to us to opposite sides of the world.

Each of us writes his or her own story and although many stories have similar beginnings, the middle and the end will differ greatly. As humans, we often only rely on our own perspectives, paying attention to the way our own stories play out.

Reconnecting with past friends will allow you to see the world in a new light. It will show you how funny and weird life can really be. You were a part of their lives at one point and they a part of yours.

Maybe you influenced each other more than you know.

3. They’ll remind you of the person you once were and will allow you to better judge the person you have become.

Life seems to become more complicated and more difficult with age. Life’s daunting questions weigh heavier upon us year after year. With all that goes on, it’s easy to lose sight of ourselves.

To lose sight of the dreams we once had and the people we hoped to one day become. Life may not have been simpler back then, but to us it was.

We had a simpler way of thinking – more black and white, with much fewer greys. Getting in touch with your old friends will remind you of the person you used to be. Maybe you lost track. Maybe you’ve grown wiser. Either way, it’s good to know.

4. It may convince you that you knew how to find real friends better when you were younger than you do now.

Friends, generally speaking, aren’t easy to make – especially when you get older. The older we get, the more independent we become. Frankly, the older we get, the less we need friends. Or, rather, the less we believe that we need friends.

As adults, most of the people in our lives are mere acquaintances. However, we don’t always recognize them as such. We sometimes get lost in the illusion that the acquaintances in our lives are actual friends.

While most people become better judges of character with age, they also get lonelier and more desperate with age. You may have awful friends right now and not even know it.

5. On the other hand, you may realize that your judgment has improved significantly with time.

You may meet your old friends and decide that you were crazy thinking that these people should have stayed in your life. You may even remember why you cut them off in the first place.

A reminder of what friends shouldn’t be is just as good as a reminder of what friends ought to be.

6. It’s not unthinkable that you may reconnect and continue the friendship.

I feel that all the excitement of growing up, of going to high school, then college, then finding a job, makes us lose a lot of valuable connections. We lose touch with a lot of people due to geographical reasons.

We also lose touch with many friends because we get overly excited about making new ones. Maybe it’s time to rekindle the friendship.

7. Friends are a fundamental part of our lives – there should be a reason for either letting them go or keeping them around.

We shouldn’t simply leave things to chance and allow them to either dwindle or carry on simply because. But that’s what often happens. Friendship breakups don’t have the pizazz that relationship breakups do; they usually fade away as if they were never there to begin with.

This says nothing more about us other than the fact that we are egocentric and lazy creatures. You could have made an effort to stay friends, but you didn’t.

That’s not a very good reason not to keep a good person in your life. Good people are hard to come by.

Photo Courtesy: Tumblr

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Essays About Friendships: Top 6 Examples and 8 Prompts

Friendships are one of life’s greatest gifts. To write a friendship essay, make this guide your best friend with its essays about friendships plus prompts.

Every lasting relationship starts with a profound friendship. The foundations that keep meaningful friendships intact are mutual respect, love, laughter, and great conversations. Our most important friendships can support us in our most trying times. They can also influence our life for the better or, the worse, depending on the kind of friends we choose to keep. 

As such, at an early age, we are encouraged to choose friends who can promote a healthy, happy and productive life. However, preserving our treasured friendships is a lifelong process that requires investments in time and effort.

6 Informative Essay Examples

1. the limits of friendships by maria konnikova, 2. friendship by ralph waldo emerson, 3. don’t confuse friendships and business relationships by jerry acuff, 4. a 40-year friendship forged by the challenges of busing by thomas maffai, 5. how people with autism forge friendships by lydia denworth, 6.  friendships are facing new challenges thanks to the crazy cost of living by habiba katsha , 1. the importance of friendship in early childhood development, 2. what makes a healthy friendship, 3. friendships that turn into romance, 4. long-distance friendship with social media, 5. dealing with a toxic friendship, 6. friendship in the workplace, 7. greatest friendships in literature, 8. friendships according to aristotle .

…”[W]ithout investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones.”

Social media is challenging the Dunbar number, proving that our number of casual friends runs to an average of 150. But as we expand our social base through social media, experts raise concerns about its effect on our social skills, which effectively develop through physical interaction.

“Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.”

The influential American essayist Emerson unravels the mysteries behind the divine affinity that binds a friendship while laying down the rules and requirements needed to preserve the fellowship. To Emerson, friendship should allow a certain balance between agreement and disagreement. You might also be interested in these articles about best friends .

“Being friendly in business is necessary but friendships in business aren’t. That’s an important concept. We can have a valuable business relationship without friendship. Unfortunately, many mistakenly believe that the first step to building a business relationship is to develop a friendship.”

This essay differentiates friends from business partners. Using an anecdote, the essay warns against investing too much emotion and time in building friendships with business partners or customers, as such an approach may be futile in increasing sales.

“As racial tensions mounted around them, Drummer and Linehan developed a close connection—one that bridged their own racial differences and has endured more than four decades of evolving racial dynamics within Boston’s schools. Their friendship als­o served as a public symbol of racial solidarity at a time when their students desperately needed one.”

At a time when racial discrimination is at its highest, the author highlights a friendship they built and strengthened at the height of tensions during racial desegregation. This friendship proves that powerful interracial friendships can still be forged and separate from the politics of race.

“…15-year-old Massina Commesso worries a lot about friendship and feeling included. For much of her childhood, Massina had a neurotypical best friend… But as they entered high school, the other friend pulled away, apparently out of embarrassment over some of Massina’s behavior.”

Research debunks the myth that people with autism naturally detest interaction — evidence suggests the opposite. Now, research is shedding more light on the unique social skills of people with autism, enabling society to find ways to help them find true friendships. 

“The cost of living crisis is affecting nearly everyone, with petrol, food and electricity prices all rising. So understandably, it’s having an impact on our friendships too.”

People are now more reluctant to dine out with friends due to the rapidly rising living costs. Friendships are being tested as friends need to adjust to these new financial realities and be more creative in cultivating friendships through lower-cost get-togethers.

8 Topic Prompts on Essays About Friendships

More than giving a sense of belonging, friendships help children learn to share and resolve conflicts. First, find existing research linking the capability to make and keep friends to one’s social, intellectual, and emotional development. 

Then, write down what schools and households can do to reinforce children’s people skills. Here, you can also tackle how they can help children with learning, communication, or behavioral difficulties build friendships, given how their conditions interfere with their capabilities and interactions. 

As with plants, healthy friendships thrive on fertile soil. In this essay, list the qualities that make “fertile soil” and explain how these can grow the seeds of healthy friendships. Some examples include mutual respect and the setting of boundaries. 

Then, write down how you should water and tend to your dearest friendships to ensure that it thrives in your garden of life. You can also discuss your healthy friendships and detail how these have unlocked the best version of yourself. 

Marrying your best friend is a romance story that makes everyone fall in love. However, opening up about your feelings for your best friend is risky. For this prompt, collate stories of people who boldly made the first step in taking their friendship to a new level.

Hold interviews to gather data and ask them the biggest lesson they learned and what they can share to help others struggling with their emotions for their best friend. Also, don’t forget to cite relevant data, such as this study that shows several romantic relationships started as friendships. 

It’s challenging to sustain a long-distance friendship. But many believe that social media has narrowed that distance through an online connection. In your essay, explain the benefits social media has offered in reinforcing long-distance friendships. 

Determine if these virtual connections suffice to keep the depth of friendships. Make sure to use studies to support your argument. You can also cite studies with contrasting findings to give readers a holistic view of the situation.

It could be heartbreaking to feel that your friend is gradually becoming a foe. In this essay, help your readers through this complicated situation with their frenemies by pointing out red flags that signal the need to sever ties with a friend. Help them assess when they should try saving the friendship and when they should walk away. Add a trivial touch to your essay by briefly explaining the origins of the term “frenemies” and what events reinforced its use. 

We all know that there is inevitable competition in the workplace. Added to this are the tensions between managers and employees. So can genuine friendships thrive in a workplace? To answer this, turn to the wealth of experience and insights of long-time managers and human resource experts. 

First, describe the benefits of fostering friendships in the workplace, such as a deeper connection in working toward shared goals, as well as the impediments, such as inherent competition among colleagues. Then, dig for case studies that prove or disprove the relevance and possibility of having real friends at work.

Whether it be the destructive duo like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or the hardworking pair of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, focus on a literary friendship that you believe is the ultimate model of friendship goals. 

Narrate how the characters met and the progression of their interactions toward becoming a friendship. Then, describe the nature of the friendship and what factors keep it together. 

In Book VIII of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes about three kinds of friendships: pleasure, utility, and virtue. Dive deeper into the Greek philosopher’s mind and attempt to differentiate his three types of friendships. 

Point out ideas he articulated most accurately about friendship and parts you disagree with. For one, Aristotle refutes the concept that friendships are necessarily built on likeness alone, hence his classification of friendships. Do you share his sentiments? 

Read our Grammarly review before you submit your essay to make sure it is error-free! Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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How to Maintain Friendships

By Anna Goldfarb

• Jan. 18, 2018

Age and time have a funny relationship: Sure, they both move in the same direction, but the older we get, the more inverse that relationship can feel. And as work and family commitments take up a drastically outsize portion of that time, it’s the treasured friendships in our life that often fade.

A recent study found that the maximum number of social connections for both men and women occurs around the age of 25. But as young adults settle into careers and prioritize romantic relationships, those social circles rapidly shrink and friendships tend to take a back seat.

The impact of that loss can be both social and physiological, as research shows that bonds of friendship are critical to maintaining both physical and emotional health. Not only do strong social ties boost the immune system and increase longevity, but they also decrease the risk of contracting certain chronic illnesses and increase the ability to deal with chronic pain, according to a 2010 report in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

“In terms of mortality, loneliness is a killer,” said Andrea Bonior , the author of “ The Friendship Fix .”

We don’t have to go out and spend every minute of every day with a rotating cast of friends, Dr. Bonior said. Rather, “It’s about feeling like you are supported in the ways that you want to be supported,” she added, and believing that the connections you do have are nourishing and strong.

An estimated 42.6 million Americans over the age of 45 suffer from chronic loneliness, which significantly raises their risk for premature death, according to a study by AARP. One researcher called the loneliness epidemic a greater health threat than obesity.

Most people aren’t aware that friendships are so beneficial: “They think of it as a luxury rather than the fact that it can actually add years to their life,” Dr. Bonior said.

The good news is that keeping cherished friendships afloat doesn’t need to be a huge time commitment. There are several things you can do to keep a bond strong even when your to-do list is a mile long.

Communicate expectations

Miriam Kirmayer , a therapist and friendship researcher, suggests being clear about your limits when you’re feeling frenzied.

“If there are certain days or weeks where you are going to be less available, giving your friend a heads up can go a long way toward minimizing misunderstandings or conflicts where somebody feels left out or like they’re being ignored,” she said.

Tell your friends how long you expect to be off the radar, how to communicate with you best during this time (“I’m drowning in emails; texts are better!”), and when your schedule is expected to go back to normal.

Nix ‘I’m too busy’ …

You might be booked from dusk until dawn, but without giving your friend context, that phrase “I’m too busy” can feel like a blowoff.

“When we hear somebody say, ‘I’m too busy,’ we don’t actually know if that is true for just their lives at this time, or if that’s their way of not really valuing us or wanting to spend time with us,” said Shasta Nelson , the author of “ Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness .”

“Therefore, the friendship often just dies, not from lack of anything wrong or anybody even necessarily wanting it to die, but just simply chaotic lives and a lot of distance gets put in there,” she said.

Instead of offering vague, blanket statements about your bustling schedule, qualify your busyness: “I’m busy for the rest of the month,” or “I’m tied up until the end of the year.” Then make a counter offer. If you can’t meet face-to-face anytime soon, suggest a phone date, Skype session, or other way to connect so your friend doesn’t feel abandoned.

… Then examine your busyness

If you find yourself telling longtime pals you’re too snowed under to connect, it’s time to look at how you truly spend your time.

“If you can find the time to binge-watch TV shows and check Facebook a million times a day,” said Carlin Flora , the author of “ Friendfluence: The Surprising Way Friends Make Us Who We Are ,” “you can make time for your friends.”

Dr. Bonior agrees: “When you feel like you can’t squeeze in a book club or brunch or happy hour, pedicures or whatever it is, maybe assess a little bit more. Like, ‘O.K., well, how am I spending my time, and might there be a window in some of that time that actually allows for a real phone call or a walk around the block at lunch with one of my co-workers that I really like or whatever it might be?”

The author Laura Vanderkam credits tracking her time for helping her banish her “I’m too busy” mind-set. In making detailed notes on how she allotted her energy for a year, she found that “the stories I told myself about where my time went weren’t always true.” She suggests using an Excel spreadsheet with half-hour increments to track the day and using the Toggl app, for starters.

Once a clearer picture emerges of how one chooses to spend their time, it becomes possible to make positive, thoughtful changes.

Personal, small gestures are the way to go

Tailored, thoughtful text messages are a low-effort way to keep up connections when you’re short on time. The key is to share little bits of information about your day that your friend couldn’t glean from your Instagram feed or Snapchat story.

Ms. Kirmayer suggests making messages as personal as possible to show somebody you’re thinking about them.

“So remembering obviously big life events — things like birthdays are a given — but also maybe smaller things like: They had a doctor’s appointment coming up or you know they were going to have a stressful day at work and kind of checking in to see how it went,” she said. “Even a quick text message can go a long way.”

Ask questions that invite reveals (“How was your vacation? How’s your new job going?”) and avoid statements (“I hope you’re having a great day!” or “You’re in my thoughts”), which don’t tend to prompt meaningful back-and-forth exchanges.

Cultivate routines

Having a regular hang with your closest confidants can take the guesswork out of scheduling quality time.

“It might sound like you’re not aiming very high if you’re only going to see certain friends once a year, but if you have an annual barbecue or Memorial Day party or something, where it’s kind of a guarantee you’ll see certain friends,” Ms. Flora said, “that’s actually much better than kind of leaving it up to two people haggling over schedules.”

Another idea is multitask to combine your errands with some valuable BFF facetime. Ask a friend to come to your favorite spin class, join your book club or accompany you to a volunteer gig.

“The more things you can do together, potentially the more often you’ll be able to see each other,” Ms. Kirmayer said. “These repeated interactions are so important for keeping a friendship going.”

Come through when it counts

Another way to cement longstanding friendships when things are hectic is to go out of your way to attend any milestone events — fly in for the baby shower, attend the 40th birthday party, make an appearance at the retirement party. Just show up. There aren’t too many chances to make an impact in someone’s life, but if you move mountains and carve out time for your friend’s event, it’ll sustain a friendship for a long time.

“Once in a while, do a big gesture to those friends who you really, really care about and then that will kind of power the friendship for a while, even if you’re too busy to see each other,” Ms. Flora said. Being that person who comes through will “make that person feel loved and taken care of even if you’re not in constant contact.”

Ms. Nelson also suggests being aware of the three areas to measure and evaluate a functional friendship. The first area is positivity: laughter, affirmation, gratitude and any acts of service. The second is consistency, or having interactions on a continual basis, which makes people feel safe and close to each other. The third is vulnerability, which is the revealing and the sharing of our lives.

“Any relationship that doesn’t have those three things isn’t a healthy friendship,” Ms. Nelson said. If you’re noticing a cooling with a friend, usually one of these areas needs special consideration.

Knowing what makes a friendship tick is important because it allows us to be more effective, especially when time is in short supply. “Obviously we wouldn’t want a friendship to live on text messages, but it can certainly survive hectic times if we know where to put our energy,” Ms. Nelson said.

Acknowledge efforts made

While the energy expended to keep contact going may not always be equal, it’s important to be mindful of the attempts your friends make to connect. Reach out to nip resentment in the bud.

“If one person is consistently or chronically putting in more effort, issues can come up,” Ms. Kirmayer said. “Let your friend know that it means so much to you that they’re checking in so often and that you really appreciate it.”

She also recommends piping up if the balance feels off: “If you want them to kind of tone it down a little bit because you’re not able to respond all the time, you can say you feel really bad that you’re not able to get back to them all the time.” Addressing friends’ bids for attention can mean the difference between having a dear friendship flourish or fade during a frantic time.

“Most people just want to know they’re loved and thought of,” Ms. Nelson said. “If we can, like, give that validation and affirmation rather than just dismissing and saying we’re too busy, if we can kind of combine those things, most people understand and will still feel loved during that time.”

Anna Goldfarb is a freelance writer and author of the humor memoir, “ Clearly, I Didn’t Think This Through .”

A Guide to Building and Nurturing Friendships

Friendships are an essential ingredient in a happy life. here’s how to give them the care and attention they deserve..

How does one make meaningful friendships as an adult? Here are some suggestions ,  useful tools  and tips from an expert .

If you are an introvert, it can be hard to reconcile the need for close connections with the urge to cancel social plans. Here is how to find your comfort zone .

A friendship with a sibling can be a lifelong gift. Whether you’ve always been close, or wish you got along better, here’s how to bolster your connection .

All relationships require some work. For your friendships to thrive , focus on your listening skills, compassion and communication. And make sure to spend time together .

American men are in a “friendship recession,” but experts say a few simple strategies can help. One tip? Practice being more vulnerable with your pals .

It’s quite common for people to feel jealousy or envy toward their friends. Luckily, there are ways to turn those emotions into an opportunity  for growth.

Being a good friend means offering your support in times of need. Just remember: Sometimes less is better than more .

How Friendships Change in Adulthood

“We need to catch up soon!”

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children—all these come first.

This is true in life, and in science, where relationship research tends to focus on couples and families. When Emily Langan, an associate communication professor at Wheaton College, goes to conferences for the International Association of Relationship Researchers, she says, “friendship is the smallest cluster there. Sometimes it’s a panel, if that.”

Friendships are unique relationships because unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, such as marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure. You wouldn’t go months without speaking with or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without contacting a friend.

Still, survey upon survey upon survey shows how important people’s friends are to their happiness. And though friendships tend to change as people age, there is some consistency in what people want from them.

“I’ve listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about their close friends, and [there are] three expectations of a close friend that I hear people describing and valuing across the entire life course,” says William Rawlins, the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University. “Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy. These expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which they’re accomplished change.”

The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life’s whims in a way that more formal relationships aren’t. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. You’re stuck with your family, and you’ll prioritize your spouse. But where once you could run over to Jonny’s house at a moment’s notice and see if he could come out to play, now you have to ask Jonny if he has a couple hours to get a drink in two weeks.

The beautiful, special thing about friendship, that friends are friends because they want to be, that they choose each other, is “a double agent,” Langan says, “because I can choose to get in, and I can choose to get out.”

Throughout life, from grade school to the retirement home, friendship continues to confer health benefits, both mental and physical . But as life accelerates, people’s priorities and responsibilities shift, and friendships are affected, for better or, often, sadly, for worse.

The saga of adult friendship starts off well enough. “I think young adulthood is the golden age for forming friendships,” Rawlins says. “Especially for people who have the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to college.”

During young adulthood, friendships become more complex and meaningful. In childhood, friends are mostly other kids who are fun to play with; in adolescence, there’s a lot more self-disclosure and support between friends, but adolescents are still discovering their identity, and learning what it means to be intimate. Their friendships help them do that.

But “in adolescence, people have a really tractable self,” Rawlins says. “They’ll change.” How many band T-shirts from Hot Topic end up sadly crumpled at the bottom of dresser drawers because the owners’ friends said the band was lame? The world may never know. By young adulthood, people are usually a little more secure in themselves, more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the important things, and let the little things be.

To go along with their newly sophisticated approach to friendship, young adults also have time to devote to their friends. According to the Encyclopedia of Human Relationships , many young adults spend 10 to 25 hours a week with friends, and the 2014 American Time Use Survey found that people ages 20 to 24 spent the most time per day socializing on average of any age group.

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College is an environment that facilitates this, with keggers and close quarters, but even young adults who don’t go to college are less likely to have some of the responsibilities that can take away from time with friends, such as marriage, or caring for children or older parents.

Friendship networks are naturally denser, too, in youth, when most of the people you meet go to your school or live in your town. As people move for school, work, and family, networks spread out. Moving out of town for college gives some people their first taste of this distancing. In a longitudinal study that followed pairs of best friends over 19 years, a team led by Andrew Ledbetter, an associate communications-studies professor at Texas Christian University, found that participants had moved an average of 5.8 times during that period.

“I think that’s just kind of a part of life in the very mobile and high-level transportation- and communication-technology society that we have,” Ledbetter says. “We don’t think about how that’s damaging the social fabric of our lives.”

We aren’t obligated to our friends the way we are to our romantic partners, our jobs, and our families. We’ll be sad to go, but go we will. This is one of the inherent tensions of friendships, which Rawlins calls “the freedom to be independent and the freedom to be dependent.”

“Where are you situated?” Rawlins asks me, in the course of explaining this tension. “Washington, D.C.,” I tell him.

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Okay, so you’re in Chicago, and you have close friends there. You say ‘Ah, I’ve got this great opportunity in Washington …’ and [your friend] goes, ‘Julie, you gotta take that!’ [She’s] essentially saying, ‘You’re free to go. Go there, do that, but if you need me, I’ll be here for you.’”

I wish he wouldn’t use me as an example. It makes me sad.

As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip. The ideal of people’s expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives, Rawlins says.

“The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for figuring out who you are and what’s next,” Rawlins says. “And you find at the end of young adulthood, now you don’t have time for the very people who helped you make all these decisions.”

The time is poured, largely, into jobs and families. Not everyone gets married or has kids, of course, but even those who stay single are likely to see their friendships affected by others’ couplings. “The largest drop-off in friends in the life course occurs when people get married,” Rawlins says. “And that’s kind of ironic, because at the [wedding], people invite both of their sets of friends, so it’s kind of this last wonderful and dramatic gathering of both people’s friends, but then it drops off.”

In a set of interviews he did in 1994 with middle-aged Americans about their friendships, Rawlins wrote that “an almost tangible irony permeated these [adults’] discussions of close or ‘real’ friendship.” They defined friendship as “being there” for one another, but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends, whether because of circumstances, or the age-old problem of good intentions and bad follow-through: “Friends who lived within striking distance of each other found that … scheduling opportunities to spend or share some time together was essential,” Rawlins writes. “Several mentioned, however, that these occasions often were talked about more than they were accomplished.”

As they move through life, people make and keep friends in different ways. Some are independent, make friends wherever they go, and may have more friendly acquaintances than deep friendships. Others are discerning, meaning they have a few best friends they stay close with over the years, but the deep investment means that the loss of one of those friends would be devastating. The most flexible are the acquisitive—people who stay in touch with old friends, but continue to make new ones as they move through the world.

Rawlins says that any new friends people might make in middle age are likely to be grafted onto other kinds of relationships—as with co-workers, or parents of their children’s friends—because it’s easier for time-strapped adults to make friends when they already have an excuse to spend time together. As a result, the “making friends” skill can atrophy. “[In a study we did,] we asked people to tell us the story of the last person they became friends with, how they transitioned from acquaintance to friend,” Langan says. “It was interesting that people kind of struggled.”

But if you plot busyness across the life course, it makes a parabola. The tasks that take up our time taper in old age. Once people retire and their kids have grown up, there seems to be more time for the shared-living kind of friendship again. People tend to reconnect with old friends whom they’ve lost touch with. And it seems more urgent to spend time with them—according to socio-emotional selectivity theory, toward the end of life, people begin prioritizing experiences that will make them happiest in the moment, including spending time with close friends and family.

And some people do manage to stay friends for life, or at least for a sizable chunk of life. But what predicts who will last through the maelstrom of middle age and be there for the silver age of friendship?

Whether people hold onto their old friends or grow apart seems to come down to dedication and communication. In Ledbetter’s longitudinal study of best friends, the number of months that friends reported being close in 1983 predicted whether they were still close in 2002, suggesting that the more you’ve invested in a friendship already, the more likely you are to keep it going. Other research has found that people need to feel like they are getting as much out of the friendship as they are putting in, and that that equity can predict a friendship’s continued success.

Hanging out with a set of lifelong best friends can be annoying, because the years of inside jokes and references often make their communication unintelligible to outsiders. But this sort of shared language is part of what makes friendships last. In the longitudinal study, the researchers were also able to predict friends’ future closeness by how well they performed on a word-guessing game in 1983. (The game was similar to Taboo, in that one partner gave clues about a word without actually saying it, while the other guessed.)

“Such communication skill and mutual understanding may help friends successfully transition through life changes that threaten friendship stability,” the study reads. Friends don’t necessarily need to communicate often, or intricately, just similarly.

Of course, people can communicate with friends in more ways than ever, and media multiplexity theory suggests that the more platforms through which friends communicate—texting and emailing, sending each other funny Snapchats and links on Facebook, and seeing each other in person—the stronger their friendship is. “If we only have the Facebook tie, that’s probably a friendship that’s in greater jeopardy of not surviving into the future,” Ledbetter says.

Though you would think we would all know better by now than to draw a hard line between online relationships and “real” relationships, Langan says her students still use “real” to mean “in-person.”

There are four main levels of maintaining a relationship, and digital communication works better for some than for others. The first is just keeping a relationship alive at all, just to keep it in existence. Saying “Happy birthday” on Facebook, liking a friend’s tweet—these are the life-support machines of friendship. They keep it breathing, but mechanically.

Next is keeping a relationship at a stable level of closeness. “I think you can do that online too,” Langan says. “Because the platforms are broad enough in terms of being able to write a message, being able to send some support comments if necessary.” It’s sometimes possible to repair a relationship online too (another maintenance level), depending on how badly it was broken—getting back in touch with someone, or sending a heartfelt apology email.

“But then when you get to the next level, which is: Can I make it a satisfying relationship? That’s I think where the line starts to break down,” Langan says. “Because what happens often is people think of satisfying relationships as being more than an online presence.”

Social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would (and maybe should) otherwise have died out.

“The fact that Tommy, who I knew when I was 5, is still on my Facebook feed is bizarre to me,” Langan says. “I don’t have any connection to Tommy’s current life, and going back 25 years ago, I wouldn’t. Tommy would be a memory to me. Like, I seriously have not seen Tommy in 35 years. Why would I care that Tommy’s son just got accepted to Notre Dame? Yay for him! He’s relatively a stranger to me. But in the current era of mediated relationships, those relationships never have to time out.”

By middle age, people have likely accumulated many friends from different jobs, different cities, and different activities, who don’t know one another at all. These friendships fall into three categories: active, dormant, and commemorative. Friendships are active if you are in touch regularly; you could call on them for emotional support and it wouldn’t be weird; if you pretty much know what’s going on with their lives at this moment. A dormant friendship has history; maybe you haven’t spoken in a while, but you still think of that person as a friend. You’d be happy to hear from them, and if you were in their city, you’d definitely meet up.

A commemorative friend is not someone you expect to hear from, or see, maybe ever again. But they were important to you at an earlier time in your life, and you think of them fondly for that reason, and still consider them a friend.

Facebook makes things weird by keeping these friends continually in your peripheral vision. It violates what I’ll call the camp-friend rule of commemorative friendships: No matter how close you were with your best friend from summer camp, it is always awkward to try to stay in touch when school starts again. Because your camp self is not your school self, and it dilutes the magic of the memory a little to try to attempt a pale imitation of what you had.

The same goes for friends you see only online. If you never see your friends in person, you’re not really sharing experiences so much as just keeping each other updated on your separate lives. It becomes a relationship based on storytelling rather than shared living—not bad, just not the same.

“This is one thing I really want to tell you,” Rawlins says. “Friendships are always susceptible to circumstances. If you think of all the things we have to do—we have to work, we have to take care of our kids, or our parents—friends choose to do things for each other, so we can put them off. They fall through the cracks.”

After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside of the relationship itself. One of the findings from Langan’s “friendship rules” study was that “adults feel the need to be more polite in their friendships,” she says. “We don’t feel like, in adulthood, we can demand very much of our friends. It’s unfair; they’ve got other stuff going on. So we stop expecting as much, which to me is kind of a sad thing, that we walk away from that.” For the sake of being polite.

But the things that make friendship fragile also make it flexible. Rawlins’s interviewees tended to think of their friendships as continuous, even if they went through long periods in which they were out of touch. This is a fairly sunny view—you wouldn’t assume you were still on good terms with your parents if you hadn’t heard from them in months. But the default assumption with friends is that you’re still friends.

“That is how friendships continue, because people are living up to each other’s expectations. And if we have relaxed expectations for each other, or we’ve even suspended expectations, there’s a sense in which we realize that,” Rawlins says. “A summer when you’re 10, three months is one-thirtieth of your life. When you’re 30, what is it? It feels like the blink of an eye.”

Perhaps friends are more willing to forgive long lapses in communication because they’re feeling life’s velocity acutely too. It’s sad, sure, that we stop relying on our friends as much when we grow up, but it allows for a different kind of relationship, based on a mutual understanding of each other’s human limitations. It’s not ideal, but it’s real, as Rawlins might say. Friendship is a relationship with no strings attached except the ones you choose to tie, one that’s just about being there, as best as you can.

127 Friendship Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

When you have a good friendship topic, essay writing becomes as easy as it gets. We have some for you!

📝 Friendship Essay Structure

🏆 best friendship topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 good essay topics on friendship, 🎓 simple & easy friendship essay titles, 📌 most interesting friendship topics to write about, ❓ research questions about friendship.

Describing a friend, talking about your relationship and life experiences can be quite fun! So, take a look at our topics on friendship in the list below. Our experts have gathered numerous ideas that can be extremely helpful for you. And don’t forget to check our friendship essay examples via the links.

Writing a friendship essay is an excellent way to reflect on your relationships with other people, show your appreciation for your friends, and explore what friendship means to you. What you include in your paper is entirely up to you, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t structure it properly. Here is our advice on structuring an essay on friendship:

• Begin by selecting the right topic. It should be focused and creative so that you can earn a high mark. Think about what friendship means to you and write down your thoughts. Reflect on your relationship with your best friend and see if you can write an essay that incorporates these themes. If these steps didn’t help – don’t worry! Fortunately, there are many web resources that can help you choose. Browse samples of friendship essays online to see if there are any topics that interest you.
• Create a title that reflects your focus. Paper titles are important because they grasp the reader’s attention and make them want to read further. However, many people find it challenging to name their work, so you can search for friendship essay titles online if you need to.
• Once you get the first two steps right, you can start developing the structure of your essay. An outline is a great tool because it presents your ideas in a clear and concise manner and ensures that there are no gaps or irrelevant points. The most basic essay outline has three components: introduction, body, and conclusion. Type these out and move to the next step. Compose an introduction. Your introduction should include a hook, some background information, and a thesis. A friendship essay hook is the first sentence in the introduction, where you draw the reader’s attention. For instance, if you are creating an essay on value of friendship, include a brief description of a situation where your friends helped you or something else that comes to mind. A hook should make the reader want to read the rest of the essay. After the hook, include some background information on your chosen theme and write down a thesis. A thesis statement is the final sentence of the first paragraph that consists of your main argument.
• Write well-structured body paragraphs. Each body paragraph should start with one key point, which is then developed through examples, references to resources, or other content. Make sure that each of the key points relates to your thesis. It might be useful to write out all of your key points first before you write the main body of the paper. This will help you to see if any of them are irrelevant or need to be swapped to establish a logical sequence. If you are composing an essay on the importance of friendship, each point should show how a good friend can make life better and more enjoyable. End each paragraph with a concluding sentence that links it to the next part of the paper.
• Finally, compose a conclusion. A friendship essay conclusion should tie together all your points and show how they support your thesis. For this purpose, you should restate your thesis statement at the beginning of the final paragraph. This will offer your reader a nice, well-balanced closure, leaving a good impression of your work.

We hope that this post has assisted you in understanding the basic structure of a friendship paper. Don’t forget to browse our website for sample papers, essay titles, and other resources!

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• Analysis of Internet Friendship Issues Despite the correlation that develops on the internet, the question of whether social media can facilitate and guarantee the establishment of a real friend has remained a key area of discussion.
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• Educator-Student Relationships: Friendship or Authority? Ford and Sassi present the view that the combination of authority and the establishment of interpersonal relations should become the way to improve the performance of learners.
• Friendship in the Film “The Breakfast Club” The main themes which can be identified in the storyline are crisis as a cause and catalyst of friendship, friendship and belonging, and disclosure and intimacy in friendship.
• Friendship Police Department Organizational Change The one that is going to challenge the efforts, which will be aimed at rectifying the situation, is the lack of trust that the employees have for the new leader who they expect to become […]
• Friendship in the Analects and Zhuangzi Texts The author of “The Analects of Confucius” uses the word friend in the first section of the text to emphasize the importance of friendship.
• Is There Friendship Between Women? In conclusion, comparing my idea of women’s friendship discussed in my proposal to the theoretic materials of the course I came to a conclusion that strong friendship between women exists, and this is proved in […]
• Online Friendship Formationby in Mesch’s View The modern world tends to the situation when people develop the greatest empathy towards their online friends because it seems that the ratio and the deepness of these relationships can be controlled; written and posted […]
• Canadian-American Diefenbaker-Eisenhower Friendship In particular, the paper investigates the Mandatory Oil Import Program and the exemption of Canada from this initiative as well as the historical treaty that was officially appended by the two leaders in regard to […]
• Friendship from a Sociological Perspective For example Brazilians studying in Europe and United States were met with the stereotypes that Brazilians are warm people and are easy to establish friendships.
• Friendship Influencing Decisions When on Duty The main stakeholders are the local community, the judge, and the offenders. The right of the society is to receive objective and impartial treatment of its members.
• “Understanding Others, and Individual Differences in Friendship Interaction in Young Children”: Article Analysis The aspect of socio-cognitive abilities of small children in the process of interaction was disclosed with the help of psychological theories.
• Friendship: Sociological Term Review But one is not aware of that type of friendship; it is necessary to study it. Friendship is a matter of consciousness; love is absolutely unconscious.
• The Significance of Friendship in Yeonam The paper examines the depth and extent to which Yeonam was ready to go and if he was bound by the norms of the human friendship and association of his era.
• Cicero and Plutarch’s Views on Friendship He believed that befriending a man for sensual pleasures is the ideal of brute beasts; that is weak and uncertain with caprice as its foundation than wisdom. It is this that makes such carelessness in […]
• Friendship: The Meaning and Relevance Although the basic definition of a friendship falls under the category of somebody whom we feel a level of affection and trust for or perhaps a favored companion, the truth of the matter is that […]
• Gender and Cultural Studies: Intimacy, Love and Friendship Regardless of the driving force, intimacy and sexual connections are common in many happy relationships. Of significance is monogamy whose definition among the heterosexuals and lesbians remains a challenge.
• Fate of Friendship and Contemporary Ethics Is friendship possible in the modern world dominated by pragmatism and will it exist in the future? For instance, Cicero takes the point of view of the social entity, in other words, he defines friendship […]
• Feminism and Modern Friendship While criticizing these individuals, Marilyn asserts that the omission of sex and gender implies that these individuals wanted to affirm that social attachment such as societies, families, and nationalities contribute to identity rather than sex […]
• Creating a Friendship Culture This family will ensure every church member and youth is part of the youth ministry. I will always help every newcomer in the ministry.
• Friendship is in Everyone’s Life Though, different books were written in different times, the descriptions of a friendship have the same essence and estimate that one cannot be completely satisfied with his/her life if one does not have a friend.
• Intimacy, Love and Friendship and how they translate to employability The use of love and its conventions in the NAB campaigns is an illustration of how love as a concept can be used to translate to employability.
• Intimacy, Love and Friendship In the past, women in Australia led a life characterized by a lot of hardships because of the harsh traditions that they were supposed to follow.
• Contemporary Understanding of Intimacy and Friendship The Social Network film discusses how Facebook was developed and the challenges of developing the giant social site. Many people are of the view that Facebook has the effect of enslaving them by making their […]
• Interpretation of Friendship among Confucian and Neo-Confucian writers In his article “The Fifth Relationship; Dangerous Friendships in the Confucian Context”, Norman Kutcher explores the friendship as outlined under the Confucian system. The above writers have different interpretations of friendship of the under the […]
• Why International Students Find It Hard to Make Friends On the other hand, in societies that promote a high power distance, less powerful individuals accept their position in the chain of command and acknowledge the strengths of their superiors in the hierarchy.
• Gender Stereotyping and Friendship: Women Relationships The most interesting about this article is its ending which states that” the core of a friendship has to have more in-person interactions and experience”.
• The Impact of Friendship in the Epic of Gilgamesh The elusive coalition between Enkidu and Gilgamesh, their fateful destinies and eventual epiphanies broaden the societal apprehension of the elements/value of friendship as expounded in the next discussion.
• Woman Intimacy and Friendship with the Appearance of Social Media The anonymity provided by the social media makes this medium very appealing to both women and men as they are able to “reconstruct” themselves to a level they deem “cool” enough to garner more desired […]
• Childhood Friendship and Psychology Based on their research, they have founded a theory, according to which it is assumed that the children consider close relationship, appraisals, and sharing common interests as something very important to them and on the […]
• Aristotle’s Ideas on Civic Relationships: Happiness, the Virtues, Deliberation, Justice, and Friendship On building trust at work, employers are required to give minimum supervision to the employees in an effort to make the latter feel a sense of belonging and responsibility.
• Gender Role Development and Friendship As far as the conflict goes, the boy’s main problem is that he is unwilling to change his behavior towards a socially accepted one under the pretext that girls are more beautiful and, therefore, it […]
• Article Study on the Friendship Concept In the critical review article, the views of Norman Kutcher on the formation of friendships are discussed in detail. In this article, the views of other scholars are discussed in order to strengthen the works […]
• Henry Thoreau: The Concept of the Friendship Not every person is able to understand the essence of nature, its uniqueness, and importance. To my mind, his close connection to nature and a kind of isolation from people helped him to understand deeper […]
• Why Honesty Is Important In A Friendship
• The Truth and Friendship in the Movie Camelot
• A Discussion About the Value of Friendship as Portrayed in Damon and Pythias
• What Is the Meaning of True Friendship
• A Literary Analysis of Friendship in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
• Factors Contributing to the Ups and Downs of Friendship in Knowles’ A Separate Peace
• Friendship and Love in the Little Prince
• Confidantes, Marriage, and Friendship in Pride and Prejudice
• What Makes A Successful Friendship
• Understanding Friendship Through The Staircase Model
• An Analysis of Friendship and Rejection in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• A Discussion on the Different Types of Friendship
• An Analysis of Friendship in Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• A Literary Analysis of Friendship in a Separate Peace by John Knowles
• An Analysis of the Concept of Friendship in A Separate Piece by John Knowles
• A Separate Peace and Of Mice and Men – Real Friendship
• The Theme of True Friendship in the Book of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• The Value of Friendship in Great Expectations
• What Makes A Good Friendship
• The Theme of Friendship in Separate Ways by Higuchi Ichiyo and Uncanny Stories by SongLing
• Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism
• The Waltz Of Sociability : Intimacy, Dislocation And Friendship
• The True Meaning of the Word Friendship
• A Description of Impartiality, Beneficence and Friendship According to Lawrence Blum
• Aristotle ‘s Views On Friendship
• Friendship and Courage in The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• An Analysis of Friendship and Loyalty in the Film The Deer Hunter
• Turning Away from True Friendship
• Different Types of Friendship and The Need for Friends
• An Analysis of the Dangers of Friendship
• The Victorian Female Friendship and Homosexual References in Emily Dickinson’s Work
• What Is Friendship And How Is God Man ‘s Best Friend?
• The Venerable Kassapa Thera: A Living Symbol of Dedication, Courage, Altruism and Intimate Friendship
• “The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds” by Michael Lewis
• Building from Happiness to Friendship
• What Do You Think Steinbeck Says About the Theme of Friendship in of Mice and Men
• Distributive Justice and the Problem of Friendship
• How Does Shakespeare Demonstrate That Love and Friendship Can Overcome Greed in the Merchant of Venice?
• Does Borrowing Money From Friends Harm Friendship?
• Can Friendship Be Defined by Any Scientific Criteria?
• How Can Enduring Happiness Arise From Friendship?
• Does Campus Diversity Promote Friendship Diversity?
• Is There Any Objection to the Teacher Establishing a Friendship Relationship With the Students?
• How Do Children Cope With Friendship and Death After Reading Charlottes Web?
• Does Ragging Develop Friendship?
• How Does Shakespeare Create Friendship?
• Should Becoming Friends With Benefits Ruin Your Friendship?
• How Does the Nature of Children’s Friendship Change With Age?
• Do Friendships Vary Across Countries?
• What Are Friends for and How Can a Friendship Be Tested?
• How Does the Theme of Loneliness Affect the Friendship and Relationships in “Of Mice and Men”?
• What Are the Elements That Build a Strong Friendship?
• How Does Friendship Help Students Succeed in the University?
• What Does Friendship Mean?
• How Does Friendship Help With Your Mental Health?
• What Does True Friendship Require?
• How Do Friendship Network Characteristics Influence Subjective Well-Being?
• What Was Aristotle’s Thought on Friendship?
• How Do Friendship Networks Work in Online P2P Lending Markets?
• Why Is Friendship Important?
• How Has Friendship Changed Because of the Spread of Social Networking?
• Why Does Friendship End?
• How Do Society and Culture Affect Friendship?
• Can Everything Be Bought for Money?
• How Do Gamers Take the Gaming Experience, Elements Such as Friendships Outside the Game Context?
• Do Friends Generally Have Similar Educational Interests?
• What Individual and Country-Level Factors Might Interact With Friendship Importance to Predict Health and Well-Being?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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8 reasons why your oldest friends are utterly irreplaceable

We discuss the glory of lifelong friendship

The Christmas season is here, and many of us will be heading back to our respect motherlands to see family and, in between that strange space between Christmas and New Year, we might catch up with old friends.

When I say ‘old friends’, maybe it’s best to start with what they’re not. It isn’t someone you’ve known for a while that you catch up with in stilted sentences when you visit your hometown. It’s not someone you feel obliged to see because you’ve known each other for a long time. It’s not someone where conversation is only solely limited to updating each other on how your job is and whether or not your have a partner. They certainly don’t make you feel inadequate about your life choices, whether intentional or not. Those people are acquaintances, not friends. It’s a misconception that the word acquaintance is only applied to someone you’ve only recently met or whom you have never been close to.

If a friendship can survive in spite of good and bad feelings, through changing circumstances and geography, through maybe long-term absences, and regardless of differing interests… if its existence remains fixed despite all of that, then that’s precious. If you have an appreciation for who someone was as well as the person they’ve become, then surely that’s the full monty, the full fat, top dollar version of friendship.

1. They remind us of who we are

Old friends might ask you about your job or boyfriend, but they’re also the ones you’ll riff with, the ones who within an hour you’ll be uncontrollably laughing with, the ones you feel relaxed and calm with, the ones that remind us of who we are – even parts that we might have forgotten because they were there at that family party, they remember the heartbreak you felt when you broke up with your first love and how it changed you. They have a better understanding of who you are now because they understand and know you were and where you’re from.

2. They offer the ease of family without the pressure

Not everyone has these friends and that’s what makes them as precious as the last page in your favourite book. We live in a world where it’s never been easier to communicate, and yet maintaining old friendships still feels difficult. We’re busy people and, for a lot of us, the idea of sustaining a relationship beyond a decade with someone whom they’re not related to feels nigh on impossible. But that’s where the lines blur slightly – true old friends are the closest it gets to family. But, unlike with some family members, there is absolutely no keeping up with appearances. They don’t mind that you haven’t been promoted yet or that you haven’t met the love of your life – that’s not why they’re friends with you.

3. They know everything about you and love you anyway (and this makes you feel totally comfortable)

Old friends know everything about you – they are aware of your flaws, that you can be a bit self-involved or that you tend to be a bit gobby when drunk or that you will resist confrontation no matter what, and they love you anyway. They accept you for who you are. Over the course of our teenage years and twenties, we change a lot, our values, our interests, our jobs. Your old friends know all this and they’ve decided to stick with you.

4. They know immediately how to make you feel good

They have a deep understanding of how to make you feel good or sad because they’ve had years of watching your reactions to certain situations. They know that you have a tendency to bury your head in the sand in times of conflict; that a certain type of man is your kryptonite or the spirit you can’t handle despite your most ardent protests. They’re not surprised when you tell them out of the blue that you’re quitting your job and moving to India because they remember you mentioning it to them when you were 15.

5. You don’t need to like the same stuff to get on

The bond between old friends goes beyond common interests – it’s a link far stronger than the music you like or whether you work in different fields or where you like hanging out. It’s true that as we grow older we meet more likeminded people because we have a better sense of self, of what we like and what our interests are. Those friendships are important and nourishing, but they aren’t a replacement for friends who have a greater insight into our past or whom we’ve shared a hundred experiences with. Those connections take years to build, weathering disagreements and conflicts. It’s a deep, almost defining bond. You compliment each other rather than replicate one another.

6. They’re often the people who are most likely to be truly honest with you

There’s a quote by someone somewhere that compares old friends to putting an old, comfy pair of boots. I’m inclined to argue against – being old friends with someone isn’t always comfortable; it can be awkward actually. They’re likely to be the people who tell you not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear – that your boyfriend isn’t worthy or that you’re behaving like an unreasonable idiot on a night out – because they know the deepest crevices of who you are, where you’re from, what you’re worth and capable of. They’ll do all this and will still come back for more. Your oldest friends are often the mirror to ourselves. They know the essence of you and there’s nothing more comforting and happiness-inducing than the ability to be completely yourself with someone. Of course, this feeling isn’t something that’s exclusive to old friends, but it helps.

7. They hold the nostalgia card

There aren’t many more enjoyable evenings as the ones you spend with people you’ve known forever, where every question starts with ‘remember when’. You might be a high-flying banker or CEO now, but remember when you fell over on the bus and face-planted in front of everyone? Or the time you had such a good night out on holiday that you narrowly missed your flight home? Those memories are grounding and humbling. They also make us happy because they remind of us a time when we were happy.

8. They understand the nuances of your family, which is gratifying

They know everything about your family, for better or for worse, and still hold them in high regard because they understand the nuances of your relationships. They’ve put in the time to find out. They’ll nod soothingly when you moan about family members, but they won’t say anything negative outright as they appreciate the complexities. In fact, much to your irritation, these are the friends your family always stick up for when you fall out.

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Friendship in Later Life: A Research Agenda

Rosemary blieszner.

1 Center for Gerontology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg

Aaron M Ogletree

2 American Institutes for Research, Rockville, Maryland

Rebecca G Adams

3 Gerontology Program, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Friendship is a relationship that can endure across the entire lifespan, serving a vital role for sustaining social connectedness in late life when other relationships may become unavailable. This article begins with a description of the importance of studying friendship in late life and the benefits of friendship for older adults, pointing to the value of additional research for enhancing knowledge about this crucial bond. Next is discussion of theoretical approaches for conceptualizing friendship research, followed by identification of emerging areas of late-life friendship research and novel questions that investigators could explore fruitfully. We include a presentation of innovative research methods and existing national and international data sets that can advance late-life friendship research using large samples and cross-national comparisons. The final section advocates for development and assessment of interventions aimed at improving friendship and reducing social isolation among older adults.

Translational Significance

Social isolation places older adults in jeopardy for both poor health and low psychological well-being. Detailed research findings on crucial elements of friendship in late life can inform the design of social interventions aimed at enhancing personal skills and strategies for making and keeping friends, planning of community programs to foster friend interactions and advocacy for policies that promote rather than interfere with late-life friendship.

Why Is It Important to Study Friendship in Late Life?

What are the benefits of friendship to old people.

Friendship is a relationship that can endure across the entire life span, serving a vital role for sustaining social connectedness in late life when other relationships, such as with coworkers and organization members, may be relinquished. Although gaining new kin is common at earlier ages, in the later years the possibility of making new friends is greater than the likelihood of enlarging the kin network, at least in one’s own generation.

Friend ties have been revered as vital relationships since ancient times, when Confucius and Aristotle extolled the benefits of associating with those who encourage moral virtue, complement one’s own limitations, and provide cherished companionship. Aristotle, in particular, highlighted emotional and reciprocal aspects of friendship that are deemed important now ( Mullis, 2010 ), as contemporary adults focus on affection, trust, commitment, respect, reciprocity, and the like when defining friendship ( Blieszner & Adams, 1992 ; Dunbar, 2018 ; Felmlee & Muraco, 2009 ). At the same time, diversity in perceptions of important elements of friendship occurs across life cycle stage, gender, marital and parental status, geographic location and cultural context, and historical eras ( Adams, Blieszner, & de Vries, 2000 ; Blieszner & Adams, 1992 ; Gillespie, Lever, Frederick, & Royce, 2015 ). Early empirical studies of social relationships, including those in late adulthood, generally did not focus on friendship per se, so this nuanced awareness of friendship is a recent phenomenon.

Although it is clear that friendship has long been an important part of social life and important to well-being, this close relationship has not received nearly as much attention historically as family ties. In fact, in 1950s and 1960s when sociologists and family scientists examined close relationships, they tended to investigate marital and kin bonds, but typically did not include friends in their studies. Not until 1970s and 1980s did scholars begin to probe friendship as a social role in its own right, separate from ties with colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances, and other nonkin, and to study friendship as a relationship rather than friendliness as an individual attribute. They uncovered a range of friendship forms and functions and identified both unique aspects of friendship as distinct from other ties as well as similarities between friendship and other informal and close relationships ( Blieszner & Adams, 1992 ).

Studies consistently show that friend relationships are as important as family ties in predicting psychological well-being in adulthood and old age ( Chen & Feeley, 2014 ; Dunbar, 2018 ; Santini, Koyanagi, Tyrovolas, Mason, & Haro, 2015 ). Of course, the closeness of both relatives and friends varies, so studies examining specific relationships as opposed to global categories are especially helpful for understanding the relative impact of family members versus friends on well-being in the later years. For example, analyses by Lee and Szinovacz (2016) of 6,418 participants in the 2008 Health and Retirement study showed that although relationships with spouses tended to have the strongest association with mental health, ties with friends showed stronger associations with mental health than those with other relatives. Results such as these suggest the merits of investigations specifically addressing friendship and specifically focusing on old age.

Along with investigation of structural aspects of friendship, such as friend roles and interaction frequency, came awareness of the need to examine friendship in the context of social networks; to view friendship as evolving over the life course and proceeding through phases over time; and to assess cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes as dynamic aspects of friend interactions. This more nuanced approach to friendship research emerged from moving beyond laboratory experiments and broad surveys to using in-depth interviews, which fostered a focus on quality of friend interactions, not just quantity ( Adams & Blieszner, 1994 ; Blieszner & Adams, 1992 ) and recognition that friends and interactions with friends involve individual characteristics that evoke differential responses according to individual preferences ( Adams & Blieszner, 1995 ). As a result, research on friendship has flourished in recent decades, including studies of friendship in middle-age and beyond, yielding a wide-ranging literature on both traditional (e.g., emerging from face-to-face interactions) and innovative (e.g., formed via social media networking) aspects of friend ties in later life ( Blieszner & Ogletree, 2018 ).

Among the friendship and aging topics investigated, a prominent focus has been on the contributions of friends to psychological well-being ( Blieszner, 1995 ; Blieszner & Ogletree, 2018 ). Late-life adults report liking and caring about their friends, laughing together and having fun, feeling satisfied with their relationships, being able to confide in each other, and reminding each other to stay healthy ( Blieszner & Adams, 1992 ). Friend ties alleviate loneliness ( Chen & Feeley, 2014 ; Nicolaisen & Thorsen, 2017 ), offer emotional and instrumental support ( Felmlee & Muraco, 2009 ), and provide companionship through mutual interests and shared activities ( Huxhold, Miche, & Schüz, 2014 ). The feelings of connectedness that these aspects of friendship convey give meaning to older adults’ lives, which is important for well-being ( ten Bruggencate, Luijkx, & Sturm, 2018 ). Indeed, exchanging many forms of social support is one of the most important benefits of friendship in the second half of life.

The advantages of late adulthood friendship reach beyond psychological well-being. Research shows that relational closeness and social support are also important for maintaining cognitive functioning and physical health in old age ( Béland, Zunzunegui, Alvarado, Otero, & del Ser, 2005 ; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010 ). Moreover, old age poses unique challenges, including health changes that might require assistance or caregiving. Thus, it is particularly important to study old age friendships, especially for those without family members, without proximal family members, or without family members willing to care for them. Indeed, some friends do assume direct caregiving responsibilities ( de Vries, 2018 ), particularly among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults who might experience strain in their family relationships ( Muraco & Fredriksen-Goldsen, 2011 ).

Although we can point to extensive evidence on the importance and benefits of friendship, unexplored research questions about friendship across the adult years abound. Key purposes of this article are to provide a comprehensive yet flexible conceptual framework to guide research on late-life friendship, synthesize into one framework the multiple aspects of friendship and its predictors suggested by various theoretical approaches, point to unanswered questions and useful research methods, and suggest friendship-related interventions that could successfully enhance experiences of friend partners in their special bonds. Our goal is to encourage scholars to study this rich and fascinating dimension of aging and engage in relevant translational science to sustain and enhance the quality of life for all elders. We begin with an examination of theories for investigating friendship.

What Theories Can Guide Friendship Research Toward Answering Unresolved Questions?

Foundational theories.

Although many theories of interpersonal attraction and relationship development could inform late-life friendship research, relatively few have guided these investigations. Social network theory, which focuses on predictors of the structure of relationships rather than on their dynamics, is relevant to understanding friendship opportunities and constraints at any stage of life. Relatively little is known about structural features of friendship dyads and networks, though, because empirical studies guided by social network theory usually have not distinguished between friends and other close ties. Nevertheless, some research on structural features of late-life friendship exists. For example, Adams (1987) studied changes in the friend networks of old women over 3 years and found interesting patterns of both expansion and contraction (not only contraction) of the network membership and also intensification and weakening (not only weakening) of emotional bonds among friends in the network. These changes in network size and closeness varied by the women’s demographic characteristics, namely social and marital statuses. Looking at additional structural features of late-life close friend networks, such as similarity of gender, race, religion, age, and extent of influence on the friend, Adams and Torr (1998) found variation in friend networks of both older women and men based on characteristics of the social and cultural environments in which the networks were embedded. This finding shows that friend bonds are affected not only by personal choice, but also by external influences. Thus, investigations of structural features of friend networks reveal the range of similarities and differences across groups of older adults based on cultural contexts, personal characteristics, and situational features of interactions with current or potential friends.

Social exchange theory, the convoy model of relationships, and socioemotional selectivity theory have been the most common guides for research on the processes of friendship development and sustainment. Early studies of friendship dynamics in old age were grounded in social exchange theory (e.g., Roberto, 1989 ; Roberto & Scott, 1986 ), which posits that social interactions involve costs and benefits that participants assess as they establish and sustain relationships. The types of resources exchanged ( Blieszner, 1993 ; Shea, Thompson, & Blieszner, 1988 ) and the preferred and actual extent of equity and reciprocity in social exchanges ( Dunbar, 2018 ) are also considered in friendship research conducted from this perspective. Li, Fok, and Fung (2011) examined age group differences in the association between emotional and instrumental support balance in relation to support received from friends versus family, and the implications for life satisfaction. Friendships were evaluated by older and younger adults as more reciprocal than family ties, in keeping with the more voluntary nature of friendship. However, older adults reported higher life satisfaction when they felt emotionally (but not instrumentally) over-benefited in friendships, whereas younger adults’ life satisfaction was associated with reciprocity in emotional support exchanges with friends. The general assumption that equity in exchanges is preferable did not apply to the older adults in this study, reflecting the premises of socioemotional selectivity theory, discussed later.

The convoy model of relationships ( Antonucci & Akiyama, 1987 ) provides another approach to analyzing old age friendship and support interactions, connecting both interactive and structural aspects of relationships. It focuses on differences in perceived level of closeness, allowing for comparisons across types and functions of friendships as well as across stages of the life span ( Antonucci & Akiyama, 1995 ). Using the convoy model, Piercy and Cheek (2004) investigated friendships among middle-aged and older women who belonged to quilting bees and guilds. They found evidence of strong and supportive friend convoys with interaction patterns suggesting these friends would have enduring positive effects on the women’s well-being into oldest age. Levitt, Weber, and Guacci (1993) examined social support (e.g., confiding, reassurance and respect, assistance, advice) from friends versus relatives across the social network structures of family triad members from three generations. The mothers and grandmothers tended to report fewer friends than relatives in their networks and to receive less support from friends as compared with the youngest women. This pattern held across cultures, as both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking women reported similar network structures and sources of support. A recent meta-analysis by Wrzus, Hänel, Wagner, and Neyer (2013) confirmed these cross-generational differences in network structure (i.e., size) via a meta-analysis of data in 277 studies from 28 countries.

More recently, socioemotional selectivity theory ( Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles (1999) has underpinned research on friendship in the later years. This theory proposes changes in social interactions as older adults perceive their remaining lifetime becoming shorter. Specifically, old people adapt to their changing circumstances by reserving their emotional energy for their most important relationships, shedding those with less meaning and value. Sander, Schupp, and Richter (2017) found support for this theory in a study of German adults aged 17–85. Across age groups, the frequency of face-to-face contacts with relatives was similar, but such interactions with friends and others decreased in frequency. The study by Li and colleagues (2011) described previously also confirmed socioemotional selectivity theory, with findings suggesting that older persons in the study had higher life satisfaction in the context of nonreciprocal emotional support, probably because they prioritize emotionally meaningful exchanges over other interactions. These findings imply that very close friends can continue as central figures in older adults’ social networks even if the networks are shrinking, regardless, perhaps, of frequency of face-to-face contact.

An Integrative Conceptual Framework

Social network theory highlights the value of examining structural features of friendship, how they influence formation and retention of friendships, and whether those features change over time. Social exchange, convoy, and socioemotional selectivity theories share similar foci on availability and reciprocity of support in friendship and other close relationships. They point to numerous individual, interpersonal, and interactional characteristics that can have an impact on friend relationships and outcomes. Our conceptual framework for friendship research ( Adams & Blieszner, 1994 ; Adams, Hahmann, & Blieszner, 2017 ; Ueno & Adams, 2006 ) integrates the psychological and sociological perspectives highlighted in social exchange, convoy, socioemotional selectivity, social network, and other theories to provide a flexible and comprehensive guide for investigating many intersecting dimensions of friendship in old age. Propositions and hypotheses from the focal theory can be formulated around the concepts and variables identified in the friendship framework.

As shown in Figure 1 , the integrative friendship framework posits a series of reciprocal influences on friend partners that affect their typical modes of interacting and hence, their emergent and ongoing interaction patterns. The gray box and arrows signify that friendship patterns are dynamic and contextualized in time and space and across cultures; the dashed lines signify that individuals, friend dyads, and friend networks embedded in these contexts affect them and are affected by them. The left panel shows that friends bring their individual characteristics to the relationship, including both social structural positions and psychological dispositions, which are mutually influential through the social psychological interpretation and internalization processes described by Cooley and Mead ( Adams & Blieszner, 1994 ; Cooley, 1964 ; Mead, 1962 ). That is, propensities emerging from socialization experiences and personality affect how a person internalizes expectations associated with specific social locations, and social locations affect how a person interprets friendship-related opportunities and constraints. These personal characteristics lead to choices about where to spend time and how and when to interact with friends, as well as ways of thinking and feeling about friends and friendship, signified as interactive motifs and depicted in the middle of the figure. Cognitive, affective, and behavioral interactive motifs thus affect the friendship patterns (right panel) that occur between friend pairs and in larger friend networks in which the pairs are embedded. For either friend dyads or friend networks, internal structural features (homogeneity and hierarchy in dyads; size, density, homogeneity, and hierarchy in networks) facilitate and constrain interactive processes (cognitive, affective, behavioral), which in turn modify or sustain the internal structural features.

Integrative conceptual framework for friendship research. From Ueno and Adams (2006) , reprinted with permission from Routledge Publishing, Inc.

Friendships are not static, so Figure 2 demonstrates that the patterns exhibited in Figure 1 occur across the phases of friendship formation, sustainment, and dissolution. Friendships have a starting point, they can become closer or less close, and sometimes they end ( Adams & Blieszner, 1994 , 1998 ; Blieszner & Adams, 1992 , 1998 ). Use of the term phases avoids the notion of unidirectional stages of relationships, which does not apply well to friendship. Rather, movement across phases of friendship is fluid and potentially bidirectional. For example, an incipient friendship might wax and wane in the formation phase before becoming solidified as an ongoing friendship, or a dissolved friendship might be resumed later. Within any of the phases, closeness and other process aspects could increase, decrease, or remain stable. Finally, transitions across phases are influenced by internal structural features and interactive processes.

Friendship phases: changes over time in internal structure and interactive processes.

Studies Illustrating Elements of the Friendship Framework

The most common structural dimensions examined to date are friendship network size and frequency of contact (which is merely a proxy for interactive processes, revealing existence of connections, but nothing about the type or quality of the interactions). The typical interactive dimensions appearing in late-life friendship research are behavioral processes, such as provision of instrumental, emotional, and social support. Few investigators have examined the phases of friendship in late life intentionally and systematically.

Examples of research investigating structural aspects of friendship appear in the meta-analysis of social network size by Wrzus and colleagues (2013) described previously. They found reliable cross-cultural evidence that friendship networks decrease in size across the years of adulthood. Social structural position includes age group, and Wrzus and colleagues noted that both normative and nonnormative life events occurring at different ages have an impact on the friend network as needs, other relationships, and life circumstances modulate social interactions. Indeed, Litwin and Shiovitz-Ezra (2006) found that being embedded in friend-focused networks was a protective factor against mortality risk for older adults and de Vries, Utz, Caserta, and Lund (2014) found that friends were particularly helpful in providing social support and assistance in early widowhood.

Focusing on psychological disposition, Lecce and colleagues (2017) showed that individual differences in theory of mind skills (extent of awareness that thoughts, beliefs, and emotions affect social interactions) were associated with differences in friend but not family ties among older adults in Italy. Moreover, this theory of mind effect was moderated by social motivation (in this study, the importance of being liked by others), such that it occurred only for those who had a high or medium level of social motivation. Thus, understanding others and being motivated to use social skills to foster positive relationships influence friendship outcomes. Looking instead at the impact of one’s perceptions of aging on friendship outcomes and employing a longitudinal design, Menkin, Robles, Gruenewald, Tanner, and Seeman (2017) found that holding more positive expectations about aging to begin with was associated with greater perceived availability of social support from friends a year later and with having made more new friends, with more of them close, 2 years later. Thus, these findings showed that a personal attribute influenced cognitive, behavioral, and affective friendship processes, respectively over time.

Research on friendship phases as depicted in Figure 2 —how older adults form, sustain, and dissolve friendships—is scarce. Piercy and Cheek (2004) noted that quilting provided a context for older women to make new friends and Menkin and colleagues (2017) noted existence of new friends, but these researchers did not delve into aspects of interaction that contributed to older adults moving from being acquaintances to being friends. Insight into this phase transition comes from Blieszner (1989) and Shea and colleagues (1988) who reported on friendship initiation over 5 months among strangers who relocated simultaneously to a newly constructed retirement community. Key contributors to initiation phase transitions involved changes in feelings and activities. Spending time together in mutually appealing activities increased feelings of liking, loving, and commitment to the friendship. These affective processes built trust and promoted ongoing exchanges of social and instrumental support.

Blieszner (1989) and Shea and colleagues (1988) also found examples of older adults’ efforts to sustain both the new and previously existing friendships through expressing affection, disclosing personal information and feelings, helping one another, and engaging in activities together. Another example of activities and feelings that sustain friendship comes from a study of old male veterans by Elder and Clipp (1988) . They discovered that the process of veterans sharing memories of their intense combat experiences and losses with veteran friends served to perpetuate these very long-term friendships.

Finally, in a randomly selected sample of adults aged 55 and older ( n = 53) and data from face-to-face interviews, Blieszner and Adams (1998) inquired about dissolution-related phases of friendship. Some friendships were fading away (mentioned by 68% of participants), either because of circumstances unrelated to the dyad, such as relocation of one partner, or because one friend was intentionally letting the friendship drift apart due to a problem in the relationship. In addition, a small proportion of participants (25%) had ended a friendship intentionally, usually because of betrayal. As these research examples show, structural, cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of friendship interactions all came into play in the formation, sustainment, and dissolution phases of friendship.

The literature also contains studies relevant to the integrative friendship framework that address multiple dimensions simultaneously. Although we did not intend the friendship framework to be predictive, an early operationalization of one component shown in Figure 1 was conducted by Dugan and Kivett (1998) . Using a sample of 282 rural and urban adults aged 65–97 years, they sought to determine whether personal characteristics and behavioral motifs predicted interactive processes. Results of regression analyses showed that two personal characteristics (gender and education) predicted affective and behavioral processes; behavioral motif as indexed by social involvement in clubs, hobbies, and volunteerism, predicted behavioral processes but not affective or cognitive ones; and proximity predicted all three interactive processes. The effect of cultural context, assessed by rural or urban residence, was not significant in this sample. Although this research employed one part of the framework to predict other parts, the work of other investigators illustrates the application of framework components in studies of a diverse array of outcome variables.

Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, Kahn, McGill, and Bianchi (2011) addressed the intersections of individual characteristics (age and gender) with the friend and other nonkin behavioral interactions (providing assistance) over time. Women were more likely to provide emotional support and men were more likely to provide instrumental support. Both women and men with more resources (e.g., more education) were more likely to provide help, and after retirement or widowhood, men increased their help giving.

Dunbar (2018) provided an overview of research illustrating the intersection of friendship structure at the dyadic and network levels with cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes. Emotional closeness affects the likelihood of engaging in companionship and sharing the social and psychological support that typically define friendship. Because developing emotional closeness and trust requires a significant time investment, the number of people in one’s circle of closest friends is limited. Moreover, cognitive processes—assessing implicit social contracts related to assumptions of ongoing support, inhibiting some of one’s own preferences and behaviors to enable friends to satisfy theirs, and the perspective-taking that fosters understanding of friends’ needs and motives – are crucial for establishing and sustaining emotionally close and satisfying friendships.

As these examples of late-life friendship research show, the integrative conceptual framework supports examination of myriad intersecting dimensions of friendship and its outcomes in a systematic way. Combining this framework with relationship theory permits development of hypotheses to evaluate, and also can illuminate the more subtle influences on friendship that warrant investigation.

What Novel Aspects of Friendship Demand Scholarly Exploration?

Despite a breadth of research on social networks across the life course, friendship in the second half of life remains underexplored when compared with information about kin relationships. Moreover, the entrance of new cohorts into old age along with social and cultural change over time suggests the need to examine new dimensions of late-life friendship. This section provides a brief overview of research questions that remain unanswered and are now ripe for further exploration.

Friendship, Health, and Well-Being

Much contemporary research has focused on contributions of friends to health and psychological well-being among older adults. At the structural level of analysis, for example, Sander and colleagues (2017) documented a connection between social contact frequency and health across adulthood. Visits with nonfamily members declined over the study waves relative to family visits, with an indication that poorer health in old age explains the less frequent visiting with friends, neighbors, and acquaintances exhibited at that stage of life.

Provision of social support is the most common behavioral process examined in old age friendship research. A useful resource for data on the connection of social support from friends and others and health with well-being outcomes is the review article by ten Bruggencate and colleagues (2018) . These authors analyzed how having social needs satisfied is a protective influence on the health and well-being of old people. Unmet social needs can lead to loneliness and social isolation, which in turn can cause health to decline. In contrast, older adults with strong ties to family and friends are more likely to retain independence, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, and effective physical and psychological functioning longer. Thus, understanding the connection between friend support and psychological problems such as depression is important for promoting health and well-being among older adults.

A review of 51 studies (published between 2004 and 2014) of associations among social support, social networks, and depression from around the world by Santini and colleagues (2015) confirmed that perceived emotional support within large and diverse social networks is protective against depression, as is perceived instrumental support. More research is needed, however, particularly prospective studies, to tease out causality in the associations among social support, social networks, and depression. Are those with fewer depressive symptoms better able to secure large friend networks and receive support than persons exhibiting depression? Is greater availability of social support from a robust social network protective against the development of depressive symptoms?

Being engaged in a friend network can also buffer the effects of life events that may occur in old age. Marital status has traditionally been used as a benchmark for well-being, so comparing the associations of marital status, friendship, and well-being is one approach to understanding the role of friends in buffering the effects of negative life events. Studies in this domain contrast friendship effects among married old people, those who are formerly married, and those who never married, at least in the traditional sense. They also illuminate variation in friendship structure and processes across different subgroups of the older adult population.

Han, Kim, and Burr (2017) used longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the connection between friendship and depression among married couples. Partners who had more frequent social interactions with their friends reported fewer depressive symptoms than those with fewer friend interactions, particularly in the context of poorer marital quality. Moreover, dyadic growth curve models showed that one partner’s responses to friendship had implications for the well-being of the other one, demonstrating that the effects of friendship extend beyond the focal person.

Concerning older adults who are no longer married, both de Vries and colleagues (2014) and Bookwala, Marshall, and Manning (2014) studied friendship in the context of marital loss through widowhood. The findings from de Vries and colleagues showed that higher friendship satisfaction was associated with more positive self-evaluation and more positive affective responses in the first half year of widowhood, whereas Bookwalla and colleagues found that having a friend confidante helped mitigate depressive symptoms and promote better health as reported up to 12 years after spousal loss.

Examination of friendship among committed partners comes from the work of Kim, Fredriksen-Goldsen, Bryan, and Muraco (2017) who demonstrated the importance of large and diverse social networks, including the availability of friends, for mental health among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender older adults. Although these elders may not have as many family ties as others, having supportive social ties within friend networks are as essential for them as for anyone in preventing social isolation and reducing the likelihood of depressive symptoms.

However, marriage is not the only context in which friendship affects psychological well-being. Other structural factors besides marital status, such as cultural background, gender, racial ethnic status, and socioeconomic status, no doubt influence friendship opportunities and constraints that affect social integration or isolation and psychological well-being or depression. Research on the friendship patterns of such subgroups in the older adult population remains to be conducted. The integrative conceptual framework for friendship research offers guidance for investigating the effects of social locations and personality characteristics on friendship patterns.

Another perspective on the connection between friendship and well-being in old age is related to the notion that relational partners are interdependent; the actions of one affect the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the other ( Kelley & Thibaut, 1978 ). Thus, life events can have an impact not only on oneself, but also on one’s friends, leading to research questions such as whether someone’s misfortune rallies friendships or drives friends away. Indeed, Breckman et al. (2018) reported that family and friends who know about an older adult’s mistreatment also suffer distress, illustrating how friendship can have negative as well as positive impacts. However, this cross-sectional study did not follow the abuse victims and their social network members, so how the friends who knew about the abuse fared as time went on could not be assessed. What other personal events and circumstances that have not yet been examined for impact on others might interfere with friendship or be buffered by friendship support?

Friendship and Caregiving

Another crucial focus for contemporary friendship research is the contributions of friends to providing care for older adults. Given that offspring and other relatives may live a great distance away from loved ones who require assistance and caregiving, the potential for local friends to fill in when frailty emerges needs systematic examination. Questions about interest in helping one’s friends in this way and willingness to provide more than casual support, and questions about the efficacy of friend caregiving, remain largely unanswered.

Lilly, Richards, and Buckwalter (2003) found that some caregivers of loved ones with dementia mentioned the value of their friends in providing the caregivers with emotional support and social integration. No doubt, those helpful friends buoyed the family caregivers as they dealt with memory loss. Of course, friends are not always helpful, as Abel (1989) noted. In her interviews with adult daughters caring for frail elderly parents, some of the participants pointed out that friends (and relatives) often exacerbated caregiving stress instead of alleviating it, such as by trivializing the difficulties of caregiving. This type of research, however, does not focus directly on care provision by friends. In fact, most caregiving studies do not differentiate across family and friends when examining helpers for older adults. Our literature search on studies related to “friends and caregiving” uncovered 33 articles published since 2012, but all the analyses combined responses for relatives and friends. Therefore, whether it is practical for health care workers to involve friends in care planning, particularly when relatives do not live nearby, merits additional scholarly attention.

Friendship in the Digital Age

A clear avenue for innovative friend research is the inclusion of communication technology and social media as mechanisms for understanding how older adults establish and sustain friendships throughout adulthood. Current findings on Internet use and social media use through websites such as Facebook indicate that older people are less likely than their younger counterparts to be frequent users ( Barbosa Neves, Fonseca, Amaro, & Pasqualotti, 2018 ; Cotten, McCullouch, & Adams, 2011 ; Yu, Ellison, & Lampe, 2018 ). However, older people are adopting technology to sustain social relationships ( Tsai, Shilliar, & Cotten, 2017 ) and keep in contact with friends and relatives who may be geographically distant ( Tsai, Shilliar, Cotten, Winstead, & Yost, 2015 ). Internet use, for example, is associated lower rates of depression and loneliness ( Cotten, Ford, Ford, & Hale, 2012 ) and greater levels of social capital (e.g., quality and quantity of social ties) when compared with adults who did not use the Internet at all or who used it less frequently ( Barbosa Neves et al., 2018 ).

Additional research shows that older Facebook users have smaller numbers of online “friends” but a greater proportion of actual friends than younger Facebook users ( Chang, Choi, Bazarova, & Lockenhoff, 2015 ; Yu et al., 2018 ), a finding consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory ( Carstensen et al., 1999 ). Given the prevalence of social media, it is important that future work examines the extent to which virtual social networks complement actual friend networks and the types of support exchanged with both types of friends. Will friend networks become increasingly more diverse, including friends both in-person and online, proximal and distal? Will friendships last longer, reducing relationship dissolution, due to the ease of connection among long-distance older persons? Will social media influence the ways in which old people engage in friendship? Will completely virtual friendships interactions differ from past patterns in which friendships typically began with face-to-face interactions even if they were sustained over long distances via mail and telephone? Research on social media use among older adults is still in its infancy and will be a burgeoning area of research as digital natives age into midlife and beyond.

Friendship in the Age of the Brain

An additional area of innovation for friend research is the association between friendship and cognitive functioning. Our review of the literature yielded few studies that explicitly explored this topic, which contrasts with the preponderance of research on general social resources and cognitive functioning in old age ( Kuiper et al., 2016 ). The longitudinal study by Béland and colleagues (2005) showed that having friends was associated with slower cognitive decline in women but not men over the course of 7 years. Béland and colleagues argued that this finding might be due to women’s gender-based social roles that necessitated greater social integration over the years. A more recent study by La Fleur and Salthouse (2017) found that contact with friends, but not family, was positively associated with general intelligence. However, this finding approached nonsignificance after examining the effects of education, suggesting that individuals who are better educated spend more leisure time with friends.

These studies illuminate a path forward for friend research and lead to the following questions: How might cognition and, specifically, problem-solving skills and inhibitory control relate to the quality of interactions between older adult friends? For example, research demonstrates that inhibitory control is negatively associated with impulsivity ( Logan, Schachar, & Tannock, 1997 ), while additional research documents that impulsivity is related to negative interpersonal encounters in young adults ( aan het Rot, Moskowitz, & Young, 2015 ). Are older adults with poorer inhibitory control more likely to report negative interactions with friends? Conversely, are those with better inhibitory control more likely to report positive interactions with friends? Similarly, problem-solving skills are associated with memory, reasoning, processing, and global mental status; each of these domains is related to everyday functioning among older adults and translates to performance on common instrumental activities of daily living ( Gross, Rebok, Unverzagt, Willis, & Brandt, 2011 ). If a key domain of adult friendship is the exchange of instrumental and emotional support, then more research is needed to document the implications of cognition in late-life behavioral friendship processes.

Friendship as a Unique Relationship

Innovative findings on late-life friendship might also be uncovered through the intentional inclusion of friend-related variables as separate from family and neighbor relationships. For example, research on social relationships among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) older adults has focused on the importance of friendship in aging, commonly using language such as “chosen families” ( de Vries & Megathlin, 2009 ). The same attention to the value of friendship in aging has not been applied in non-LGBT research. This gap in the literature implies that scholars presume the presence and supremacy of biological kin networks in old age, thus ignoring the value of non-biological relationships. Investigators have used the ambiguous grouping of friend relationships into categories, such as “friends/neighbors,” “friends or other relatives,” and “social resources,” with the latter going so far as to subsume all social relationships into one undifferentiated group. Yet research clearly shows that friends, neighbors, and kin relationships provide varying levels and types of support. For example, LaPierre and Keating (2013) found that among 324 nonkin caregivers, friends provided help with personal care, bills, banking, and transportation whereas neighbors were more likely to help with less personal tasks such as home maintenance. Further, friends were more involved in providing care for nonkin than neighbors were and assisted care recipients with a greater number of tasks for more hours per week. Such research indicates that friends are unique voluntary relationships that are more intimate than more emotionally distal ties that might occur with neighbors. Moreover, friends often contribute more positively to psychological well-being than family relationships do ( Huxhold et al., 2014 ). Thus, it is imperative that future research on older persons’ social network members focus specifically on friendship as a unique relationship and distinguish differential structures, functions, processes, and phases across types of relationships in great detail.

What Innovative Designs and Technologies Would Reveal Untapped Elements of Friendship and Its Value?

We identified three main ways in which friendship research might be advanced, thus revealing untapped elements of friend relationships and their value. First, more research is needed that goes beyond the structure of friendship (“How many close friends do you have?”) to explore interactive processes that convey deeper perceptions of, feelings about, and activities within older adult friendships—their cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. Second, studies of friendship have been conducted in regional and cultural silos that were not being translated across disciplines and cultural boundaries. Third, most studies of friendship have incorporated cross-sectional designs, inhibiting understanding of changes and stability in friendship over the adult lifespan.

These three current limitations point to the value of linking Adams and Blieszner’s (1994) integrative conceptual framework for friendship with data harmonization techniques that permit combining regional, national, and international data sources. For example, Hofer and Piccinin (2010) described the potential for integrating multiple levels of analysis, theories, and designs to enable synthesis of results across multiple data sets, including longitudinal studies of aging, to broaden the scope of research on a given topic; Survey Research Center (2016) provided detailed guidelines for such work. Existing longitudinal data sets could be exploited for secondary analyses using Adams and Blieszner’s framework for guidance on the variable selection, thus enabling scholars to uncover prevailing trends in friendship as well as idiosyncrasies across data sources and across cultures and time.

To prompt this new kind of friendship research, we offer an analysis of the potential for finding structural, cognitive, affective, and behavioral variables as enumerated in the Adams and Blieszner (1994) conceptual framework within regional, national, and international data sets. First, we used the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research to conduct a search of studies that included middle-aged and older adults. We then examined each data source for friendship variables and, for those that included friend variables, reviewed their list of publications for studies with friends as a focal topic. We also searched the major gerontological and relationship journals for articles related to older adult friendship and reviewed their data sources. This process yielded 11 large-scale longitudinal data sets suitable for pursuing cross-national and longitudinal research on adult friendship. The data sets are (1) Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL); (2) The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA); (3) Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA); (4) Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSG); (5) Swedish Adoption/Twin Study on Aging (SATSA); (6) Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS); (7) National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP); (8) Health and Retirement Study (HRS); (9) Midlife in the United States (MIDUS); (10) Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE); and (11) German Ageing Survey (DEAS).

Next, we classified each data source’s friend-related questions and variables according to the Adams and Blieszner (1994) integrative conceptual framework, as shown in Table 1 . For reference, we also included the Adams and Blieszner Andrus Study of Older Adult Friendship ( Adams & Blieszner, 1993a ), which guided the formulation of the integrative conceptual framework for friendship and provides examples of structural, cognitive, affective, behavioral, and phase questions. Note that the information presented in this table is not exhaustive of each data source’s friend-related questions; rather, it highlights questions corresponding to the integrated conceptual framework for friendship. The variables derived from these questions could be addressed by data harmonization processes to enlarge the size of samples and scope of variables available for analysis of cognitive, affective, and behavioral friendship processes and phases over time and across cultures.

Friendship Variables in Regional, National, and International Data Sets

Note. Dates in italic font indicate verified availability of friend variables at that wave. Dates in roman font indicate either no verified friend variables or the questionnaire was not available in English.

a https://www.isr.umich.edu/acl/

b https://tilda.tcd.ie/

c https://www.lasa-vu.nl/index.htm

d https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACDA/studies/22100

e https://ki.se/en/meb/satsa-the-swedish-adoptiontwin-study-of-aging

f https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/

g http://www.norc.org/Research/Projects/Pages/national-social-life-health-and-aging-project.aspx

h http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/

i http://midus.wisc.edu/

j http://www.share-project.org/

k https://www.dza.de/en/research/deas.html

Review of these longitudinal data sources demonstrates that, indeed, there is immense potential for the future of older adult friend research using data harmonization techniques. Almost all the data sources included questions about structural components of friendship, including number of friends or close friends. Descriptive analyses might reveal similarities or differences in the size and composition of friend networks across multiple countries and regions and changes in networks across stages of adulthood. For cognitive processes, most (7 out of 11) data sources included reflective or comparative questions in reference to friends. For example, three studies (TILDA, HRS, MIDUS) asked, “How much do [friends] really understand the way you feel about things?” Affective processes were assessed in 7 of the 11 studies, as well. Four studies (TILDA, HRS, MIDUS, DEAS) tapped negative dimensions of friend relationships, inquiring whether friends “get on [their] nerves” or were “causing worry.” Two studies (LSG, SATSA) evaluated satisfaction with friends, a positive feeling. Finally, most studies (9 out of 11) included questions that assessed behavioral processes, such as support exchanged, frequency of contact, and availability of support from friends. Two studies (WLS, NSHAP) asked the question, “How much/often do [friends] criticize you?” Conversely, four studies (TILDA, LASA, MIDUS, SHARE) evaluated actual support exchanged between friends.

Exploring these structural elements and cognitive, affective, and behavioral friendship processes across large cross-national data sources could reveal novel insights regarding friends and aging. Are there cultural differences in support exchanges or in the size, composition, and closeness of friend networks? What groups of older adults are more likely to experience negative interactions with friends and might these exchanges have implications for health over time by affecting the availability of supportive resources? Further, how do friendship processes change over time and across places? There are many paths forward for the future of friend research, but we believe that more robust use of existing data sources is a feasible next step. Moreover, newly launched studies should incorporate friend variables that assess nuanced dimensions of friendship processes and phases rather than focusing solely on structural components.

What Interventions Can Be Employed to Increase Satisfaction With Friend Relationships and Improve Friend Interactions?

In 1992, Blieszner and Adams described how programs affecting the friendship patterns depicted in Figures 1 and ​ and2, 2 , and thus individual outcomes, could be implemented at the individual, dyadic, network, immediate environment, community, or societal levels. Although in a subsequent article Adams and Blieszner (1993b , p. 173) stated clearly that they did not “necessarily intend to advocate friendship intervention,” they conservatively cautioned policymakers, program planners, and human service providers not to design and implement interventions that would inadvertently undermine existing social relationships. The reasons for not fully endorsing friendship interventions at the time were twofold. First, research on friendship was not robust enough to suggest details of what sorts of interventions might be most needed, efficient, and effective. Second was recognition that friendships were culturally defined as voluntary and, though they are much more structurally constrained than many friends realize, some would find such interventions uncomfortable or inappropriate.

Although the friendship research literature is now more robust, the literature assessing the effectiveness of interventions is still scarce. Increased public focus on the consequences of loneliness and isolation is leading to more recognition of the necessity of promoting friendship, but systematic interventions into all aspects of friendship patterns described in the previous sections have not been introduced. That is, just as most research on friendship has focused on behavioral processes such as social support to the relative neglect of examining other behavioral processes as well as cognitive and affective processes, so too friendship intervention programs have emphasized behavioral strategies such as skill enhancement as approaches to developing friendships, with little attention to addressing the impact of thoughts and feelings on friendship interactions. Now that more recent research has demonstrated the importance of friendships to well-being, health, and longevity, it seems prudent to begin designing, intentionally implementing and assessing a broad range of friendship interventions among older adults. First, we present examples of research assessing intervention programs that address various parts of the integrative conceptual framework and levels of intervention, then cite literature pointing to other possibilities for enhancing friendship among older adults. This section ends with suggestions for enacting and assessing such friendship interventions.

Examples of Friendship Intervention Research

Stevens and colleagues in The Netherlands have been investigating intervention strategies for enhancing friendship at the individual level of analysis. For example, Stevens, Martina, & Westerhof (2006) showed that participating in a 12-week program designed to promote self-esteem (individual characteristic) and relational competence, social skills, and friendship formation skills (behavioral processes) enabled older women to establish new friendships and improve existing ones, thus reducing loneliness and improving well-being. These outcomes endured for at least a year. Building on that work, Martina, Stevens, and Westerhof (2012) used self-management of well-being theory to probe mechanisms underlying friendship-related improvements. Interview data from the intervention participants and control group members revealed that compared with control group members, women who completed the friendship enrichment program showed greater increases in behaviors related to taking the initiative and engaging in actions aimed at developing and improving friendships (behavioral processes). Extending the in-person friendship intervention approach to an online one, Bouwman, Aartsen, van Tilburg, and Stevens (2017) demonstrated the effectiveness of focusing on network development (structure), adapting personal standards for friendship, and reducing the salience of the discrepancy between actual and desired relationships (cognitive processes). Both follow-up studies showed continued promise for assisting old persons with honing friendship skills that can improve relationships and boost personal well-being. In related work, research by both Lecce and colleagues (2017) and Vargheese, Sripada, Masthoff, and Oren (2016) suggests interventions related to cognitive processes. The Lecce team focused on the importance of both increasing theory of mind skills, or the understanding of others’ mental states, and increasing social motivation to use those skills in friendship interactions, which could reduce loneliness and social isolation. The Vargheese group demonstrated that professionals can employ theoretically derived persuasive strategies to encourage older adults to participate in social activities.

Development and assessment of additional interventions addressing a broad range of affective, cognitive, and behavioral friendship patterns would offer more options for assisting lonely or isolated old people with improving their friendships. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of friendship, these programs should give attention to skills for initiating versus sustaining friendships, rejuvenation of faded friendships, and repair of problematic and conflictual ones.

Directions for New Friendship Interventions

Research on associations across older adults’ personal preferences for friendships and their social needs, health, and well-being point to many possibilities for friendship interventions related to the elements of the integrative conceptual framework for friendship research described previously. Earlier life experiences and current age-related life events can affect older adults’ social needs, their friend networks, and their friend-related cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes ( Blieszner & Ogletree, 2017 ; Wrzus et al., 2013 ). Older adults vary with respect to the number and types of friends they prefer to have, whether they desire only close or more peripheral relationships, the importance they place on various friendship interaction processes and forms of social support, and the amount of reciprocity they expect among their friendships—and those preferences can change over time ( Blieszner, 1995 ; ten Bruggencate et al., 2018 ). The contexts in which older adults are living, including the family versus friend composition of their social network, their residence (community-dwelling, assisted living, nursing home), and the presence or absence of socially isolating chronic health conditions, also affect their needs for friends and options available for interventions ( Blieszner & Ogletree, 2017 ; Litwin & Shiovitz-Ezra, 2006 ; Vargheese et al., 2016 ).

Taken together, these research findings indicate that different friendship-related intervention strategies are needed for different people and segments of late life. Developing interventions that are flexible and take the diversity of expectations and preferences among older adults into account is more likely to be successful than attending only to the practitioner’s perceptions of friendship or assuming a given intervention will be equally successful across all elders.

Enacting and Assessing Interventions

We suggest that gerontological researchers form partnerships with service providers interested in increasing the social connectedness of older adults to plan interventions and appropriate assessment components. Designing research-informed interventions aimed at addressing identified needs could lead to more nuanced, hence more effective, interventions. As shown by research findings described in this article, different groups of older adults would likely benefit from programs targeting specific aspects of friendship structure versus interactive processes and dyadic versus network outcomes. The results of such collaborations could also inform friendship research by increasing knowledge of the antecedents and consequences of friendship patterns and how these change across the life course.

This suggestion also is consonant with Cornwell, Laumann, and Schumm’s (2008) urging increased dialogue between social gerontological and social network researchers. The former researchers tend to have a more applied orientation and to have ties with those in direct contact with older adults, whereas the latter tend to have more appreciation for the complexity of friendships. Perhaps social gerontological researchers could act as bridges between professionals who work with older adults and social network researchers.

Gerontological practitioners are more likely to be interested in collaboration on friendship intervention design and evaluation now than in the past because today the importance of social connectedness for older adults is more widely recognized and the need for interventions is a subject of public dialogue. For example, in the introduction to an issue of the Public Policy & Aging Report , Hudson (2017 , p. 121) discussed isolation, loneliness, and a lack of social connection among older adults, noting that “[p]olicymakers, practitioners, and researchers have come to focus attention on this little-recognized and dangerous condition facing so many older people.” In the same issue, Ryerson (2017) described AARP’s Connect2Affect initiative ( https://connect2affect.org/ ), which is facilitating the type of collaboration between researchers and service providers we recommend. This collaborative effort with the Gerontological Society of America, Give an Hour, the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, and the UnitedHealth Group provides tools and resources designed to assess risk and help isolated older adults become more involved with their communities. The initiatives Ryerson described use technology to improve connectedness—development of a ride-hailing app to increase the use of public transportation, examination of whether the use of hands-free voice-controlled communication devices decreases isolation, and evaluation of the effectiveness of phone outreach in helping retirees feel more connected to others. Although these interventions were designed to increase connectedness in general rather than in friendships per se, it is promising that AARP is facilitating collaboration among service providers and researchers, evaluating the effectiveness of selected interventions, and producing results that could lead to the systematic implementation of programs at the community, state, or national levels.

The clear benefits of social engagement among old people and concern about lack of social connectedness point to the value of and need for continued collaboration among researchers and service providers. The framework for conceptualizing friendship structure, processes, and phases discussed previously and illustrated in Figures 1 and ​ and2 2 provides guidelines for identifying needs and designing tailored interventions targeted to addressing them. Accumulating evidence that such programs are effective in increasing connections among friends, improving friendship quality, and benefitting older adults’ health and well-being is essential prior to advocating for policies to support systematic implementation of programs across groups of older adults in need of better social integration.

Friendship is a relationship that can last longer over the life course than any other. The majority of adults participate in friendship, even as the end of life draws near. The likelihood of older adults continuing to enjoy and benefit from interactions with friends combined with the potential for social isolation in old age suggests the importance of investigating friendship in creative new ways to advance understanding of friendship structure, processes, and phases along with their implications for health and well-being. In turn, findings from research on friendship can inform strategies for enhancing friendship opportunities and interactions in order to prevent or alleviate loneliness, social isolation, and depression.

As this review of theories relevant to friendship research in old age and available literature on late-life friendship shows, many unanswered questions about the roles of friends in supporting psychological well-being and health of older adults exist. The integrative conceptual framework combined with theory pertinent to social relationships offers guidance for additional work.

Some structural elements of friendship, such as number of friends and frequency of contact, may not require further investigation—at least, in Western cultures, yet relatively less information is available on the effects of other structural features on friendship, such as gender, racial ethnic status, subcultural group, and the contexts in which older adults enact friendship. Likewise, many studies have explored various forms of social support, but much less is understood about other behavioral processes. Data on cognitive processes in late-life friendship are scarce, including how people think about and analyze their friend relationships or how perceptions of friends and friend interactions influence friendship initiation, stability, or loss. Similarly, few studies have examined the influence of emotions on friendship quality and phases. An implicit assumption seems to be that friend relations are positive and beneficial, which is generally true. After all, being friends with a particular person is optional. Nevertheless, evidence shows that older adults can be quite troubled by problems with friends yet do not necessarily wish to terminate the relationship ( Adams & Blieszner, 1998 ; Blieszner & Adams, 1998 ). We need to know more about any dark sides of friendship.

As shown in the section on interventions, most programs aimed at improving friendship opportunities and outcomes for older adults address behavioral processes useful in the phases of forming new ties and enhancing those that exist, in service of preventing or mitigating loneliness and social isolation. Certainly more programs like those are needed as the population of elders increases around the globe. Nevertheless, it also important for community practitioners to focus on problem-solving in friendships, not just in family relationships, to help elders sustain rewarding friend ties that may entail minor disagreements and annoyances, as well as to provide strategies for dissolving friendships that are not merely uncomfortable, but actually toxic.

Friendship intervention programs must also be assessed for suitability to friendship styles in late adulthood as well as programs’ effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes. To build on the intervention research described previously, we suggest that expanding research on friendship in old age will yield useful data on potential suitability and effectiveness of existing programs and might suggest different approaches to explore. It is difficult to plan better-targeted interventions without knowing more about friendship structure and processes. We need studies on the social and psychological costs of friendship, not just benefits, and on what interferes with friendship enactment and satisfaction, not just what promotes it. We need investigations of similarities and differences in friendship across cultural subgroups both domestically and internationally so interventions can vary by context as needed.

The deeper understanding of friendship in old age will also result from mining the data sets identified in Table 1 and exploring data harmonization techniques to conduct cross-national comparisons. In addition to the countries represented in Table 1 , we cited friendship research from Spanish-speaking individuals, participants from Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, and Norway, and residents of rural versus urban communities. The articles by ten Bruggencate and colleagues (2018) and Wrzus and colleagues (2013) included data from multiple countries. Though we might rightly assume that friendship is a universal role found in every country, the literature on friendship in late life lacks a comprehensive global perspective.

Initiating more longitudinal studies to track friendship transitions across stages of adulthood and changes in health would confirm or expand cross-sectional findings. Employing designs that tap perspectives of friend dyads and friend networks and using statistical procedures such as latent growth curve analysis and hierarchical linear modeling would permit identifying reciprocal effects of friends on one another and the reciprocal impact of friend networks on dyads and individuals. The results of all these recommendations would offer important and useful new insights about this crucial relationship in the advanced years of life.

None reported.

Conflict of Interest

Acknowledgments.

R. Blieszner conceived of the manuscript, drafted sections, and integrated sections written by coauthors. A. M. Ogletree conducted an extensive literature review, drafted sections, developed Table 1 , and helped to review the manuscript. R. G. Adams contributed to the literature review, drafted the interventions section, and helped to review the manuscript. R. G. Adams and R. Blieszner developed and revised Figures 1 and ​ and2 2 over the course of their research collaboration. We appreciate the assistance of Koji Ueno in suggesting the concept of cognitive and affective motifs and drafting Figure 2 .

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Is It Important to Keep Childhood Friends?

Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Daniella Amato is a biomedical scientist and fact-checker with expertise in pharmaceuticals and clinical research.

Verywell / Nez Riaz

Positive Aspects of Maintaining Childhood Friendships

When the bonds of childhood friendships are tested, negative aspects of having childhood friendships, childhood friends who are “keepers”.

Some people maintain friends from childhood, and this special bond affords many benefits. After all, you knew each other through all the growing pains and through those formative years. You both experienced classes, play, and sports activities together. This special friend therefore knows your integral character.

It’s a bonus if you maintained ties throughout adulthood while you forged your mature self. But there can be drawbacks to having lifelong friends from childhood, too. There may be situations in which those friendships don’t enhance our lives or our mental health. It’s important to keep those childhood friends, but also to know when to let them go.

There are mental health benefits to having friends who knew you before you became a successful adult. Your peers helped shape you. You might share memories together of the town pool, math class and graduation from high school.

These friends know when you’re elated and when you’re exhausted.

Maybe your buddy encouraged you to ask out the person you were crushing on. Maybe you helped your friend learn how to drive. These memories probably form a huge part of who you are as you both experienced happy times and sad times. You shared major life events together.

You might’ve even vowed to be friends forever, no matter what happened. A childhood friendship that lasts is great because your friend knows more about you than most people will.

Health Benefits of Retaining These Friendships

In a 2021 study of 323,200 individuals from 99 different countries around the world, valuing friendship was associated with better health, greater happiness and higher levels of subjective well being across cultures.

Also, according to findings published in  Psychological Science , boys who spent more time with friends as children tended to have lower blood pressure and lower BMI when they became men in their early thirties. So, time spent with friends in childhood is associated with physical health even in adulthood.

The teen years and young adulthood years are often a transformational time in our lives. With major changes, as you are remaking yourself, you may gravitate toward other people. You are testing the waters of who you want to become. Those long-term friendships might suffer the consequence.

Friends move for college and job opportunities. Then marriage and families. Sometimes you grow apart from your childhood friend or your friendship fades. You might lose touch, text and speak less often. You’re no longer sharing the everyday trials and tribulations as you used to.

Adult Friendships

A new kind of friendship, adult friendship, often takes the place of the childhood friendship. These newer confidants are experiencing your world right now—your work life, your neighborhood life, your social life, and new lifestyle. They know the adult side of you.

This can be a good thing. Now you’ve navigated your own path, perhaps in a new city. With it, you’ve found yourself a new circle to socialize with, maybe with interests more aligned with your adult self. You are making different choices. The friends you make as an adult know this adult side of you better than childhood friends from whom you may have drifted.

Sadly, life happens and sometimes old friends grow apart. What you had in common with them might’ve been getting in trouble, and you might feel it’s better to distance yourself from them. Or you might still respect that kid you've known since you were five, but you have both gone in different directions.

They Can Limit Our Growth

Sometimes these friends, knowingly or unknowingly, limit our growth. Let’s say you weren’t great at academics and hit it out of the park when it came to sports in elementary school. While your brother was called “the brains,” you were labeled “the athletic one.”

Your athletic ambitions didn’t result in your becoming a star sports figure. So, you pursued a career as a personal trainer at a local fitness center. But you really want to do something else now.

Childhood friends view us in a way that might be frozen in time. That perception might stop you from being independent and moving in a different direction. Those labels may restrict you and box you in.

Maybe you even internalized the label. You therefore struggle with the confidence and the high self-esteem necessary to move into a new field.

Loyalty to Them May Threaten Your Well-Being

Sometimes your devotion undermines your wellbeing. It’s hard to let go of a friend from childhood as that seems disloyal. Based on how long you’ve been friends and that history you have together, it may not feel like it’s even an option.

Sometimes holding tight to childhood friendships means making excuses for or overlooking a friend’s reckless or seriously negative behaviors. Be sure to think about a possibly misplaced loyalty if it's damaging to your health and wellbeing.

Behaviors that might prompt you to reconsider your friendships include:

• If your childhood friend is verbally abusive or bullying you, the friendship is no longer healthy. Blaming, gaslighting, or threatening are not acceptable behaviors from a friend.
• If you’re avoiding getting together with the old friend or they make you feel uncomfortable, maybe you really want to move on.
• Bullying: Is your friend placing unreasonable demands on you and showing you a lack of respect? If this lifelong friend is trying to control you and really doesn’t have your best interest as a priority, this devotion to your friendship should be questioned.
• If your friend vents nonstop and uses guilt and manipulation, think about the toll this friendship is having on you. This friend might be interfering with your time and mentally and emotionally draining you. If you’re feeling exhausted and are trying to avoid this friend, your friend isn’t just going through a temporary tough period. You can be empathetic, but know your limits.

Losing Childhood Friends Can Be Painful

Deciding to walk away from a long-term friend you grew up with can be a big challenge. Did they forget your birthday party or are acting in a way you don’t like with others? Your friend might be stressed out by a love relationship or job. If they’re drinking excessively or taking drugs, think about the role you’re playing in this relationship.

If they’re exhibiting behaviors you don’t want to be associated with, take pause. There are solutions for stress relief. Perhaps you can help them. Or if they are unwilling, decide if you need to cease your friendship . Sometimes knowing someone for decades isn’t enough of a reason to keep your friendship alive.

Letting go of a childhood friend is especially hard. Sometimes you lose them through no choice of your own. That person is a vestige of your past life and shared precious memories with you. It might feel like losing a part of your old self.

A childhood friendship that last through adulthood has stood the test of time. Lifelong friends that took root in childhood care about you even when you’re most vulnerable.

They are honest with you and don't tell you what you want to hear,  but what you need to hear. It’s heartening to know this kind of friend always has your back. That level of trust is priceless.

Cherish and keep the childhood friends who live a healthy, vibrant life and who support you in a positive and balanced manner.

Lu P, Oh J, Leahy KE, Chopik WJ. Friendship importance around the world: links to cultural factors, health, and well-being .  Front Psychol . 2021;11:570839. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.570839

Cundiff JM, Matthews KA. Friends With Health Benefits: The Long-Term Benefits of Early Peer Social Integration for Blood Pressure and Obesity in Midlife .  Psychological Science . 2018;29(5):814-823. doi:10.1177/0956797617746510

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

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Essay on Friendship

Here we have shared the Essay on Friendship in detail so you can use it in your exam or assignment of 150, 250, 400, 500, or 1000 words.

You can use this Essay on Friendship in any assignment or project whether you are in school (class 10th or 12th), college, or preparing for answer writing in competitive exams. 

Topics covered in this article.

Essay on Friendship in 150 words

Essay on friendship in 250-300 words, essay on friendship in 500-1000 words.

Friendship is a cherished bond that brings joy, support, and companionship into our lives. It is based on trust, understanding, and shared experiences. True friends offer comfort and a sense of belonging.

Friends play a significant role in our lives. They celebrate our successes, provide support during tough times, and make our journey more enjoyable. Through friendships, we learn, grow, and gain new perspectives. Friends inspire us and motivate us to become better versions of ourselves.

Maintaining friendships requires effort and commitment. It involves mutual respect, trust, and open communication. Quality time spent together strengthens the bond.

In a fast-paced world, friendships are invaluable. They offer love, acceptance, and understanding. True friends stand by us, providing support and making life more meaningful.

In conclusion, friendship is a precious gift that enriches our lives. It brings happiness, support, and a sense of belonging. Nurturing and cherishing friendships is essential for our well-being and happiness.

Friendship is a beautiful bond that brings joy, support, and companionship into our lives. It is a connection built on trust, mutual understanding, and shared experiences. True friendship goes beyond superficial interactions and offers a deep sense of comfort and belonging.

Friends play a significant role in our lives. They are there to celebrate our successes, lend a listening ear during challenging times, and provide a support system that helps us navigate the ups and downs of life. Friends bring laughter, happiness, and emotional support, making our journey more enjoyable and meaningful.

Friendship also allows us to learn and grow. Through our interactions with friends, we gain new perspectives, broaden our horizons, and develop important life skills such as empathy, communication, and compromise. Friends inspire us to be better versions of ourselves and provide a sense of motivation and encouragement.

Maintaining and nurturing friendships require effort and commitment. It involves mutual respect, trust, and open communication. Spending quality time together, sharing experiences, and being there for each other strengthens the bond of friendship.

In a fast-paced and often lonely world, friendships are invaluable. They provide a sense of belonging, happiness, and a support network that enriches our lives. True friends stand by us through thick and thin, offering love, acceptance, and understanding. They are the pillars of support who make life’s journey more meaningful and enjoyable.

In conclusion, friendship is a precious gift that adds immense value to our lives. It is a connection built on trust, understanding, and shared experiences. Friends offer support, laughter, and companionship, making our lives more fulfilling. Nurturing and cherishing friendships is essential for our well-being and happiness.

Title: Friendship – The Essence of True Connection

Introduction:

Friendship is a unique and valuable bond that enriches our lives with joy, support, and companionship. It is a connection that goes beyond mere acquaintanceship, rooted in trust, understanding, and shared experiences. This essay explores the significance of friendship, its qualities, the benefits it brings, and the ways to nurture and cherish these precious relationships.

The Meaning of Friendship

Friendship is a deep and meaningful relationship between individuals characterized by mutual affection, trust, and empathy. It is a bond that offers companionship, understanding, and support in both good times and bad. True friendship is built on honesty, respect, and genuine care for one another.

Qualities of True Friendship

True friendships possess several key qualities. Trust is paramount, as friends confide in each other without fear of judgment or betrayal. Mutual understanding allows friends to empathize and provide emotional support. Respect is essential, as friends accept and appreciate each other’s individuality. Loyalty ensures that friends stand by one another through thick and thin. Communication is vital for maintaining open and honest dialogue, fostering a strong and lasting connection.

Benefits of Friendship

Friendship brings numerous benefits to our lives. Emotional support from friends helps us cope with challenges, reduces stress, and boosts our mental well-being. Friends offer a safe space for sharing thoughts, feelings, and experiences, providing a sense of comfort and validation. They provide a support network during difficult times, lending a listening ear and offering guidance. Friends also bring joy, laughter, and fun into our lives, creating cherished memories and experiences.

Nurturing and Cherishing Friendships

To foster and maintain strong friendships, it is essential to invest time and effort. Regular communication and quality time spent together strengthen the bond. Active listening and empathy are crucial, allowing friends to truly understand and support one another. Celebrating each other’s successes and offering support during challenges cultivates a sense of solidarity. Honesty and transparency build trust, ensuring a foundation of authenticity in the relationship. Respecting boundaries and accepting differences helps sustain harmony within friendships.

The Role of Friendship in Personal Growth

Friendship plays a significant role in personal growth and development. Friends offer different perspectives, expanding our horizons and challenging our beliefs. They provide constructive feedback, helping us improve and grow as individuals. Through shared experiences, we learn valuable life lessons and acquire new skills. Friends inspire us to pursue our passions, push our boundaries, and achieve our goals. Their support and encouragement fuel our motivation and self-confidence.

Types of Friendship

Friendships come in various forms, ranging from childhood friends to work colleagues, from online companions to lifelong confidants. Each type of friendship brings unique dynamics and contributes to our personal growth and well-being.

Conclusion :

Friendship is a precious and invaluable connection that enhances our lives in countless ways. It offers companionship, support, and a sense of belonging. True friends stand by us through thick and thin, celebrating our successes and providing comfort during difficult times. Nurturing and cherishing friendships require effort, empathy, and open communication. By investing in these relationships, we create a support system that enriches our lives and helps us grow as individuals. Friendship is a gift that brings joy, love, and understanding, making life’s journey more meaningful and fulfilling.

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Meeting an Old Friend Essay

A person meets many people in life but there are only some who leave a lasting impression in our minds. There are people we can laugh with, cry with and depend on with an utmost degree of faith. Friends make is easier to go through hardships and struggles in life. They provide a shoulder for us to cry on.

A very close friend of mine named Asha left the cour when I was very young. She went away to the United States and thereafter I began to feel very lonely. She and I were inseparable in school. She was my partner in class and even in the evening she would come over to my house and we would spend most of our time playing together.

Then her parents decided to settle down in the States and she left. I remember how much I cried when I went to see her off at the airport. It was for a long time that I could not find any friends I could feel absolutely comfortable with. Most of my friends were boring company.

I began writing to Asha regularly. We exchanged letters every week and sometimes even called each other over the telephone. However, I always had the feeling of loss after she went away I wanted to meet her again and therefore asked my parents to arrange a trip for me to go to the U.S.

They found the idea ridiculous as they felt that was too expensive to go abroad. My spirits had been quite low once my parents turned down my wish to go and visit my friend. But they said whenever we wish for something hard enough it materializes.

And my prayers were answered when I got a call from Asha to say that her parents had decided to visit India to meet her relatives and that she would be accompanying them. My happiness knew no limit when I got the news.

I eagerly awaited the day of her arrival I went to receive her at the airport and that was the happiest night of my life. We hugged each other and had so much to share. We talked the whole night and till the day she left, we were inseparable again. Meeting an old friend after one’s life days of separation can be one of the most satisfying experiences

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question: Do you agree or disagree? Keeping old friends is more important than making new friends. Write your essay in examples and details.

It is arguable to me that keeping old friends is the priority of my social life, which means that keeping old friends is more important than making new ones. Undeniably, both old friends and new ones are essential to leading a harmony and healthy social life, yet keeping relationship with old friends outweighs that with the later ones. For the sake of time and efficiency, hanging out with old friends are more convinient as we are already familiar with each other. Thus has been saved a lot of time which may be wasted on introductions, small talks and awkwardness. Without all the risks we may burden when meeting new friends, we can just enjoy our time. When we are in a hectic period in life, time-saving and efficiency would be a great advantages. Moreover, all the time we spent with and all the things we've been through with old friends make them more trustworthy, which is a crucial virtue we seek in friends. Within such long a period of observation, we are assured of our friends' personality and credit. On the contray, new friends are less predictable as we just get to know them. Hence, keeping old friends is prior to meeting new ones. In essence, new friends are going to be old ones within the time flys. Thus keeping old friends is not merely a nostalgia or a fear of embracing new things, it is one of the traits that shows the others we value friendship no matter how situations have changed. It is exactly one of the characters that we are looking for when we make new friends-my friends won't leave just because there's some new ones appear. It is no doubt the basis of a friendship as people who keep their old friends are obviously trustworthy and loyal. Keep your old friendship as a priority, it is the thing that defines who we are and lays a solid foundation for new friendships.

TOEFL: It is more important to keep your old friends than it is to make new friends

sivian 1 / 1   Dec 15, 2013   #1 Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? It is more important to keep your old friends than it is to make new friends. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer In this essay, I will show, why I agree with the statement that keeping old friends is more important than making new friends. First of all this is a personal matter, being as such, I would like to start with an example that shades some light on the issue from my personal experience, I am a fairly sociable kind of guy and making new friends is relativly easy for me, but what I find is that I keep coming back to my old pals because they are the ones I know real good. In addition, friendship with people you know for a long time can go a long way, with such friends there is a much more profound relationship, friends that know about my history and my past and my secrets, know what are my weak points and know how to act with me in a various situations. Usually with new friends the relationship is shalower and I do not always sure how am I expected to act. Subsequently, there is much less "carefulnes" when we are in the company of our old friends, this sense of freedom and openess is appealing to my most high esteem, I never feel so truthful and free with new friends, there is always something you don't know about new friends, and that is a possibilty for ill comunication issues from one kind or another. Moreover, I grew in a Kibbutz, which is a very special life form, kind of a social village, so some of my best friends are virtually grown up with me since the cradle, we grew up together, and although I will be the first to admit that knowing some one so good have some problems as privacy and that they expect you to behave in a certain manner that goes hand in hand with their established image of you, still, it is kind of relaxing to know I can hangout with people, and at times get an friendly advice from someone I have been to so much through together already. Additionaly, that bring us to a major topic which can shed some light on the issue of why it so important to keep them old pals connections going, the topic of Expectations, old friends know what to expect from you, in if you surprise them for good or for bad, they can handle it; And you also, as a friend know what is expected. In that sense, the reltionship is much more stable. Yet another issue is my life experience, there is no replacement for an old time friend, and personally it makes me feel bad when I think about some old friends I have lost in time, for lacking the ability to maintain our friendship, new friendship were never a proper replacement for that. To conclude, from the above reasons, it is much more important to me to keep old friendship. Older friendships are an amazing reltionship which I wish for everyone. What do you find of this essay, what should be improved, how much does it worth for the TOEFL writing exam?

It is more important to keep your old friends

Some people may argue that making new friends is more important. But in my opinion, keeping old friends is more important. I think in this way because of three reasons.

First of all, old friends understand us better. They know about our past, so they can understand what is the motive of a seemingly weird behaviour of us. On the other hand, new friends may care for us, but they would feel lost when we are behaving in a way that is not usual to them. It takes time to understand a person. To understand a new friend, in most cases, you would have to be an old friend before you start to understand the friend properly. Otherwise it would be hard for someone to spend all of his time with new friends. When he feels down, he would have nowhere to go.

Second of all, one is comfortable around a person who knows one's past. If someone has financial problem, it would be inconsiderate to offer him to go to a fancy resturant. But someone has to spend a lot of time with another person to know whether this person has financial and persronal problems or not. For this reason, we are comfortable around people who know our past, family background, and financial difficulties, etc. Without these persons around, we may start to feel uncomfortable when offered to go somewhere, do something or meet someone.

The third reason I give more importance on keeping old friends is we may feel pathetic when we keep loosing old friends. If someone suddenly realises that he doesn't have contact with his high school best friend begining from the college, he might feel the friend was with him because one of them needed another. It may feel like it was a need based friendship, not love based. It may lead someone to overthinking and feel bad about oneself. This also may lead to stress and depression. So keeping old friends is more important for mental health too.

It is undeniable that making new friends in new environments is also important, but not with the expense of old friends. With all the above discussions, it is clear that we have to give more importance on keeping old friends rather than making new ones.

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Essay evaluations by e-grader

Grammar and spelling errors: Line 3, column 453, Rule ID: SENT_START_CONJUNCTIVE_LINKING_ADVERB_COMMA[1] Message: Did you forget a comma after a conjunctive/linking adverb? Suggestion: Otherwise, ...tart to understand the friend properly. Otherwise it would be hard for someone to spend a... ^^^^^^^^^ Line 5, column 61, Rule ID: ONES[1] Message: Did you mean 'one's'? Suggestion: one's ...s comfortable around a person who knows ones past. If someone has financial problem,... ^^^^ Line 7, column 159, Rule ID: EN_CONTRACTION_SPELLING Message: Possible spelling mistake found Suggestion: doesn't ...s. If someone suddenly realises that he doesnt have contact with his high school best ... ^^^^^^

Transition Words or Phrases used: also, but, first, if, may, second, so, third, as to, i think, first of all, in most cases, in my opinion, on the other hand

Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments

Performance on Part of Speech: To be verbs : 17.0 15.1003584229 113% => OK Auxiliary verbs: 15.0 9.8082437276 153% => OK Conjunction : 10.0 13.8261648746 72% => OK Relative clauses : 11.0 11.0286738351 100% => OK Pronoun: 48.0 43.0788530466 111% => OK Preposition: 54.0 52.1666666667 104% => OK Nominalization: 2.0 8.0752688172 25% => More nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.

Performance on vocabulary words: No of characters: 1743.0 1977.66487455 88% => OK No of words: 379.0 407.700716846 93% => More content wanted. Chars per words: 4.59894459103 4.8611393121 95% => OK Fourth root words length: 4.41224685777 4.48103885553 98% => OK Word Length SD: 2.54434565978 2.67179642975 95% => OK Unique words: 182.0 212.727598566 86% => More unique words wanted. Unique words percentage: 0.480211081794 0.524837075471 91% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted. syllable_count: 521.1 618.680645161 84% => OK avg_syllables_per_word: 1.4 1.51630824373 92% => OK

A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by: Pronoun: 14.0 9.59856630824 146% => OK Article: 1.0 3.08781362007 32% => OK Subordination: 3.0 3.51792114695 85% => OK Conjunction: 5.0 1.86738351254 268% => Less conjunction wanted as sentence beginning. Preposition: 5.0 4.94265232975 101% => OK

Performance on sentences: How many sentences: 23.0 20.6003584229 112% => OK Sentence length: 16.0 20.1344086022 79% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively short. Sentence length SD: 39.3444389606 48.9658058833 80% => OK Chars per sentence: 75.7826086957 100.406767564 75% => OK Words per sentence: 16.4782608696 20.6045352989 80% => OK Discourse Markers: 5.34782608696 5.45110844103 98% => OK Paragraphs: 5.0 4.53405017921 110% => OK Language errors: 3.0 5.5376344086 54% => OK Sentences with positive sentiment : 14.0 11.8709677419 118% => OK Sentences with negative sentiment : 6.0 3.85842293907 156% => OK Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.88709677419 61% => OK What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?

Coherence and Cohesion: Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.311647724319 0.236089414692 132% => OK Sentence topic coherence: 0.10896675844 0.076458572812 143% => OK Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.161259326491 0.0737576698707 219% => The coherence between sentences is low. Paragraph topic coherence: 0.216503779264 0.150856017488 144% => OK Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.132206860868 0.0645574589148 205% => More connections among paragraphs wanted.

Essay readability: automated_readability_index: 8.5 11.7677419355 72% => Automated_readability_index is low. flesch_reading_ease: 72.16 58.1214874552 124% => OK smog_index: 3.1 6.10430107527 51% => Smog_index is low. flesch_kincaid_grade: 7.2 10.1575268817 71% => OK coleman_liau_index: 9.1 10.9000537634 83% => OK dale_chall_readability_score: 6.85 8.01818996416 85% => OK difficult_words: 58.0 86.8835125448 67% => More difficult words wanted. linsear_write_formula: 5.0 10.002688172 50% => Linsear_write_formula is low. gunning_fog: 8.4 10.0537634409 84% => OK text_standard: 9.0 10.247311828 88% => OK What are above readability scores?

--------------------- Rates: 60.0 out of 100 Scores by essay e-grader: 18.0 Out of 30 --------------------- Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.

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Old friends vs. new friends.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

It is more important to keep old friends than to make new friends.

Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

SAMPLE ESSAY

Some of my friends only socialize with their long-time friends and never try meeting anyone new. I disagree with their approach. In fact, it is often better to make new friends than to keep old ones.

I love making new friends because of the possibilities that exist. New friends expose you to new ideas, actions, and opportunities. With old friends, people often do the same things as usual. But I like doing new and different things, and I can have the chance to do these things by- making new friends. Two weeks ago, I made a new friend. She loves watching movies like me, so we saw a couple of films together. We had a great time; in fact, it was the most fun I have had in a while. If I had been with my old friends, I could not have had such a fun time because they do not like movies.

Moreover, old friends often become boring as time goes by. One reason is that people tend to change as they age. When your interests change, it is natural that your friends will, too. As a child, I loved video games. My friends and I often met after school and played video games for hours. But, lately, I have lost interest in the games, so I have slowly started meeting these friends less often. Instead, I have been getting into sports, so most of my new friends like basketball or soccer. I do not feel bad about changing friends.

I love making new friends more than keeping old ones. If you make new friends, you can get more chances to do different activities. Also, you can sometimes become uninterested in meeting your old friends since you have lost common interests. Changing friends and making new ones can give excitement and vitality to your life.

(306 Words)

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An 82-year-old woman who runs half-marathons shares 3 simple habits that transformed her heart health

• A woman who started running half-marathons in her 70s said the exercise has improved her heart health.
• She walks 8 miles daily, and takes pictures along the way to share with family. 
• Her routine, including lifting weights and mobility exercise, is perfect for longevity, science suggests.

Getting older doesn't have to mean slowing down. Just ask Wilma King, who started running half-marathons in her 70s.

King completed her first race in 2014 alongside her daughter Andrea as well as her sister, brother-in-law, and their daughter, all of whom had run the event before.

"It just looked like they were having too much fun and I wanted to join in," she told Business Insider.

Now 82, King said she walks eight miles every morning to keep her heart healthy and to stay mentally sharp .

The walking, along with other habits like keeping in touch with family and working out to keep her joints healthy , has helped keep her energized and alert, though she can't imagine doing anything else.

"I don't have a secret," she said. "This seems normal and natural to me, and I just simply don't think about it."

Experts and research suggest you can improve your health by following her lead, even if you don't put in as many miles.

Walking every morning is part of her daily routine

King said she's always had a fairly active lifestyle and has enjoyed bicycling with her family as soon as her daughter was old enough to be brought along in a carrier seat.

In 2014, however, King was diagnosed with pericarditis (chest pain and irritation of the tissue surrounding the heart), pleurisy, and a valve problem. She was determined to do everything she could to stay healthy and took up a regular walking schedule, starting a little at a time.

"It was an effort basically to get out of the house and then to the corner," she said. "I wanted to get back to the way I had been before because those illnesses took a lot out of me."

King started by just walking down the block and back and gradually went further and further as her stamina increased .

"I don't even know why I started doing eight miles, but that's the routine," she said. "And then from the walking, I started running more."

Now, her main form of exercise is long daily walks, totaling 200 miles a month (although experts say most people can benefit from just an extra 500 to 1000 steps a day , especially at first).

"It's good as far as staying alert and certainly my heart function has improved. And then it's good for my mental health," she said.

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For her first half-marathon, she used a running plan (she doesn't remember which) to work her way up to longer distances.

She's completed the annual Rock 'n' Roll Washington DC half marathon every year since and has no plans to stop any time soon.

"I'm slower now than I was at one point, but I'm 82, so what can I say?" King said. "I'll do it as long as I can."

King said she suspects the family tradition is also a sneaky way for her daughter to check in on her health over time.

"I think for her it's almost like a cognitive test 'I want to see how mom is moving. I want to see if she's paying attention and things like that.' It's a nice one-on-one, but I think she's watching me to see exactly what I do and how I do it," she said.

And if finishing 12 miles isn't enough of a sign she's aging gracefully, her daughter is " too polite to tell me," King said with a laugh.

Sharing pictures of her walks with friends and family to stay social

King said her morning routine also involves connecting with loved ones as part of her daily stroll — she takes pictures along the route with her phone to pass along as a little check-in.

"I walk for heart health, plus I entertain myself. I have some daily contacts and I send like a 'hello, how are you message' along with the photograph," she said.

There's good science to suggest that King has the right idea since being social can boost both longevity and your motivation to keep exercising .

People in Blue Zones, areas of the world with high concentrations of people who live to 100 , are known for having strong habits of building social connections which is beneficial for both mental and physical health.

Weight lifting and mobility exercises to prevent injury

King doesn't just walk to stay active but does some stretching and mobility exercises like deep knee bends to help protect her joints. Being able to prevent injury by staying mobile is key to longevity , a personal trainer previously told BI.

King also taps into one of the best anti-aging exercises we know of just by working out from home.

"It's not much to talk about. I have some six-pound weights and I lift those up, down, side-to-side and swing them back and forth and all of that. Nothing real special," she said.

Even without any fancy weightlifting techniques, strength training is consistently linked to living a longer, healthier life.

For King, the combination of vibrant social life, long walks, and other workouts is paying off, as she's noticed more serious health declines among peers in her age group who don't have a similar routine.

"I think of myself as one of the lucky ones. So far so good," she said.

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