Research shows that friends do help us become the person we want to be. Photo / Thinkstock
Research shows that friends do help us become the person we want to be. Photo / Thinkstock
The world’s most admired writers and poets have long extolled its virtues. Here, Yvonne van Dongen explains why she’d take friendship - old and new - over romance any day.
Recently I met a friend for coffee who told me she'd been online dating for the past year. She said she wasn't lonely or needy as such but she'd decided she didn't want to grow old alone.
"I mean," she said, leaning forward and fixing me with her gaze, "do you really want to spend the next 20 to 30 years on your own?"
Put like that, of course I don't. Images of one-bar heaters, one pot meals and dying alone with the cat come to mind. But I've been thinking about her question a lot since then and I want to say to her "go ahead, knock yourself out, enjoy dating and I hope you find what you're looking for", But, please, don't think that a romantic relationship is the only option for a bright old age.
Because it's not. In fact, I believe her assertion is based on a false premise: that a romantic relationship is the ne plus ultra of companionship, insurance against loneliness and the only way to live a meaningful life.
It's an understandable default setting, though, given the supremacy of the romantic love myth in the Western world. By that I mean that all too often when we buy into the romantic love story we are buying into some of the myths attached to it - that love conquers all, there is one soulmate for each of us, love has the power to change someone, romantic love is forever ...
You would think that divorce stats alone should be enough to dispel some of these fantasies but if television and movies are anything to go by, we are still in love with being in love. In fact, some commentators would argue that through the media we've been programmed to respond when someone triggers our romantic illusions.
But there is an alternative. One that's been around for millennia and has sustained us all in times of trouble. Friendship.
Long acknowledged but little examined, friendship came under the academic microscope in a book called Friendship: A History, edited by Professor Barbara Caine (University of Sydney), 2009. The book's writers examine friendship's long evolutionary past and social and cultural history beginning with Aristotle and Cicero, taking us all the way to the 20th century with television programmes like Friends and the emergence of Facebook.
And my how things have changed. Friendship: A History reveals how our requirements and expectations of friendship have changed. For instance, classical scholars Aristotle and Cicero argued that friends should be equals, sharing ethical commitments. For Aristotle, particularly, friendship was the pre-eminent human experience. A fifth of his account of human ethical conduct is dedicated to friendship; romantic love is almost a footnote.
But for both scholars friendship of the highest order was available only to men, that is cultured, elite men, not the hoi polloi. Women, as lesser beings, were thought incapable of manifesting the lofty moral and ethical virtues required of this ideal.
Christianity, on the other hand, preached universal love and charity rather than exclusive friendship. Human relationships should serve God first and foremost. In medieval society, friendship, regarded as useful for cementing ties and outlining obligations between unequal parties, became the glue of feudalism. Even so, some friendships were so close, friends chose to be buried together. During the Renaissance a new culture of friendship emerged in double portraits, letters and gift-giving for both men and women. Men, especially, enjoyed intense emotional relationships, the kind we'd probably describe as bromances now, conceived as a kind of marriage. Male and female friends could even share beds with the same sex without being accused of homosexuality because, so the argument went, the soul has no sex.
Later, shifting notions of class and the birth of Protestantism also impacted on the idea of friendship. The Quakers and their vision of an egalitarian society of friends epitomised this. Middle-class reformers, hoping to bridge class differences with the poor, took to "friendly visiting" and "befriending". The notion that friendship can be improving gave rise to societies such as Oddfellows and Freemasons.
But friendship can also be corrupting. A poor choice of friends can lead you astray. Even now we worry about children mixing with the wrong crowd.
Indeed, friendship comes in many guises.
For instance, there's man's best friend, partners in crime, and war chums (chum is apparently a contraction of "chamber fellow", who was a 17th century university room mate). Books can be friends, toys can be friends, there are best friends forever, friends with benefits, frenemies, wingmen and brothers from another mother.
In the 20th century, friendship even became an ingredient of material success. Its utilitarian values were lauded by writer and developer of self-improvement courses such as Dale Carnegie in his best-seller, How To Win Friends And Influence People.
Man's best friend. Photo / 123RF
Nevertheless, the classical view that only men were capable of worthwhile friendships persisted right up until the 19th century. How astonishing, then, that just 200 years later this attitude has undergone a total about-face. These days only women - and gay men - are thought to have a special talent for friendship. Heterosexual men, those formerly high-minded beings, have become big emotional duffers, able to communicate only at the most basic level.
Friendship: A History suggests Freud is to blame. As fears of homosexuality evolved, men's relationships changed dramatically, so much so that men were relegated to the sidelines of friendship while women took centre-stage. In fact, it's fair to say that the 20th century has been the century of female friendship. For feminists especially, female friendship has acted as a bulwark against male oppression and acted as a crucial foundation for personal and collective liberation.
Yet modern friendship has remained gender-specific. Gay men and women can be friends (think TV's Will and Grace) but heterosexual men and women cannot. Platonic relationships between the opposite sex are, often as not, tripped up by desire, as the When Harry Met Sally storyline would attest.
But how many friends can any one person have? The BBC's excellent 2014 radio series, Five Hundred Years Of Friendship, traces the development of friendship from the 16th century when most British people lived in enclaves of up to 150 people, no more than a few miles apart. Interestingly, 140 is said to be the average number of Facebook friends most people have acquired these days, while evolutionary psychology tells us that 150 is also the maximum number of friends with whom human beings can have meaningful relationships, the size being governed by the size of the human brain. The same evolutionary theory states that primates have big brains precisely because they live in complex groups, requiring relationships of reciprocity and trust. Such relationships are cognitively demanding. Fancy that - friendship has made us brainy.
For centuries, family, friends and neighbours intermingled in socially complex if geographically limited ways. Since then the meaning of friendship has contracted (we choose our friends and they don't always include family and neighbours) but the reach has extended.
More recently, science has come out in favour of friendship. Research reveals that friendship is good for us. So good, in fact, it can save your life. A now-classic study at Duke University, North Carolina, found that isolated individuals (unmarried or without a confidant) are three times more likely to die of coronary artery disease within five years. Science also informs us that the ability to make and keep friends in childhood and adolescence has been tied to success in early adulthood.
Scientists call this skill social capital. The higher the level of social capital, or the depth of relationship, the greater the health and well-being benefits of friendship. A recent longitudinal study in Australia, tracking more than 800 individuals from early childhood to age 32, found that social connectedness in adolescence was strongly linked to adult wellbeing and happiness. At the other end of life, researchers in the field of gerontology have shown that friendship staves off mental decline in our later years.
Friendship is also good for productivity. Those with a close friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their job while those with at least three close friends at work are 96 per cent more likely to be extremely satisfied with their life. In fact, research shows friendship has a positive impact on our health in many ways, most particularly on blood flow, breathing and mood. And we were right to worry about our children's friends. Research shows that friends do help us become the person we want to be.
A city would be a big lonely place without friends. And in the 21st century nothing champions friendship more than the global success of Facebook. Friendship has come to be regarded as a crucial component of a good life and the social glue of modernity.
Friendship is also where we find our tribe, a boon for those less ordinary. Comedian and writer Michele A'Court discusses this in her new book, Stuff I Forgot to Tell My Daughter. She says that for fringe-dwellers, belonging to a group of like-minded souls is a lifesaver since it allows them to feel that, for once, they are not the exception, but the norm. She herself meets regularly with a group of women called The Coven, who, she says, have more in common than they have differences.
Perhaps writers have always understood this. Ralph Waldo Emerson considered friendship the supreme fruit of trust and tenderness. C.S. Lewis described it as "one of those things which give value to survival", while poet and philosopher David Whyte says all friendships are based on a continued and mutual forgiveness. And surely no one knew more about friendship than A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. "I don't feel very much like Pooh today," said Pooh. "There there," said Piglet. "I'll bring you tea and honey until you do."
So, in the end, what I'd say to my friend looking for romantic love is good luck. Truly. But if it doesn't work out, don't fret, your friends will always be there for you. With tenderness, forgiveness and, most of all, tea and honey.
