“How Friendships Change in Adulthood,” Julie Beck (2015)

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 professor of communication 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, like marriages and romantic
relationships, they lack a formal structure. You wouldn’t go months without speaking to
or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without
contacting a friend.

Still, 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 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.

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, young adults often spend between 10 and 25 hours a week with friends,
and the 2014 American Time Use Survey found that people between 20 and 24 years
old spent the most time per day socializing on average of any age group.

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, like 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 professor of communication studies
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.”

***

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.”

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.

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 five, 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 each other 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 talked 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 at what you had.
The same goes for friends you only see 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.”

Beck, Julie. “How Friendships Change in Adulthood.” The Atlantic. 22 Aug. 2015.