Friends can help you celebrate good times and provide support during bad times. Friends prevent loneliness and give you a chance to offer needed companionship, too. Friends can also:. Friends also play a significant role in promoting your overall health. Adults with strong social support have a reduced risk of many significant health problems, including depression, high blood pressure and an unhealthy body mass index BMI.
Studies have even found that older adults with a rich social life are likely to live longer than their peers with fewer connections. Many adults find it hard to develop new friendships or keep up existing friendships. Friendships may take a back seat to other priorities, such as work or caring for children or aging parents.
You and your friends may have grown apart due to changes in your lives or interests. Or maybe you've moved to a new community and haven't yet found a way to meet people. Developing and maintaining good friendships takes effort. The enjoyment and comfort friendship can provide, however, makes the investment worthwhile.
Quality counts more than quantity. While it's good to cultivate a diverse network of friends and acquaintances, you also want to nurture a few truly close friends who will be there for you through thick and thin. It's possible that you've overlooked potential friends who are already in your social network. Think through people you've interacted with — even very casually — who made a positive impression.
If anyone stands out in your memory as someone you'd like to know better, reach out. Ask mutual friends or acquaintances to share the person's contact information, or — even better — to reintroduce the two of you with a text, email or in-person visit.
Extend an invitation to coffee or lunch. To meet new people who might become your friends, you have to go to places where others are gathered. Don't limit yourself to one strategy for meeting people.
The broader your efforts, the greater your likelihood of success. Persistence also matters. Take the initiative rather than waiting for invitations to come your way, and keep trying. You may need to suggest plans a few times before you can tell if your interest in a new friend is mutual.
Above all, stay positive. As they always say, communication is key… for both romantic relationships and friendships.
For real though, have you ever had a friend who rarely spoke to you and, overtime, the two of you just slowly drifted apart? To keep a friendship alive and well, honest and real communication needs to be there. All it takes is sending a short text asking about him or her once in a while.
Friends who lift each other up when one is down are friends who stick together. Some fun. While the other four things above are a bit more serious, every friendship needs some fun. The researchers found that we appear to have different needs at different ages, in laying the groundwork for future well-being.
But the formula was different as participants entered their 30s: at that point, it seems, it was more beneficial to go deep and cultivate higher quality friendships. In other words, the best outcomes in your 50s were associated with having had lots of social activity in your undergraduate years, and then focusing on some good, close friends as you started to reach your 30s.
Why different aspects of friendship may be more important at one point in time than another may be due to how developmental goals change with age, says Carmichael. But, as you enter your 30s, your goals for intimacy change, and this seems to call for less quantity and more quality social interaction. Emiliana Simon-Thomas explains how exceptional relationships make us happier. Even in the absence of everything else, time alone has some power to bond people.
After we've known someone for long enough, provided we don't totally hate them, we can't help but see the relationship as stronger e. Similarly, if someone is in our social circle for a while, but we were never especially close to them, we still tend to see them as a member of the tribe.
The main way to spend enough time with someone is to try to hang out with them fairly often. As I said, often we'll be in a situation where we'll automatically put in those hours. If not, you should take the initiative to propose get togethers and continue seeing them. Several other articles on the site discuss making plans. Some of them are:. Also, another thing that I was saying earlier, is that this process will play out at different speeds depending on the friend.
With some you'll quickly fall into a routine of hanging out all the time. With others you may only be able to get together every three weeks for a quick bite to eat. This step is ongoing. It's not about coordinating a hang out with someone once. It's about putting in the effort to keep seeing them continuously over months and months.
Some people have trouble with this step, for several reasons: They're just a bit too busy or lazy, and don't put in the work to see with their new friends regularly.
They're shy and reluctant to invite someone to hang out, because they fear they'll be rejected. This most often comes up during the first few invites, but may more subtly affect their actions later on as well. They're insecure, and prone to thinking they're not worth hanging around, and that their new friends probably don't actually like them.
At any point they may give up and stop trying, based on what they "know". They don't have the highest need to socialize, which is fine , but it causes them to not initiate get togethers as often as is needed to keep the new friendship going.
There are plenty of ways people can get to know each other and bond in a group setting. That's a lot better than nothing, but often the real opportunities to connect come up when it's just you and the other person talking.
Also, if you haven't experienced that you can hang out with someone one on one, how good of friends can you really consider yourselves? Some people will have known someone mainly through group outings, but saw a different side of them when they started hanging out with just the two of them, and will point to that as when their friendship really started to develop.
Most obviously, one-on-one time could consist of arranging to do something with your friend separately. It could also consist of having time to break off with them from a larger group. For example, at a party you and they may be able to retreat to the backyard to catch up.
I mentioned earlier about how people can feel anxious at first when they hang out with new friends. For some, this goes double when it comes to one-on-one outings. They feel more pressured and on the spot. There are many options for addressing this anxiety, from learning some simple relaxation techniques, to gradually facing your fear of the situation and getting used to it.
There are still lots of ways to connect with people when you're seeing them through regular, scheduled meetings. However, this can sometimes lead to a kind of complacency, and a false sense that the relationships are stronger than they are, when they're really just being held in place by the routine of it all.
Making an effort to hang out with people outside of the regular meeting times takes the friendship to another level. You start to see each other has having a real relationship, and not just as them being someone you have a nice time chatting to at that place you'd go to anyway. On the link below you'll find a training series focused on how to feel at ease socially, even if you tend to overthink today.
It also covers how to avoid awkward silence, attract amazing friends, and why you don't need an "interesting life" to make interesting conversation. Click here to go to the free training. One thing that separates closer friends from more casual ones is how much they stay in contact outside of when they meet in person. Good friends keep in touch. More casual buddies think more along the lines of, "I'll be happy to see them when we run into each other in person, but I don't need to keep up with them otherwise.
More casual ones might joke around or talk about movies at a party, but may not know a ton about what the other is up to day to day. Especially if you're not hanging out with them all the time, keep up with your new friends in between get togethers.
Send them a text making a joke, or asking if they saw the latest episode of a show you both watch, or ask them how their week went. Interact with them on social media. Maybe give them a call to catch up. You may be wondering how often you should try to keep in touch, and thinking that you don't want to overdo it and be needy. Take their response rate, and their own contacts to you, as a gauge to how often you should drop them a line. Some people are chatty and are happy to text back and forth with you all day.
Others are more of a weekly text type. Of course, once you've established a certain level of friendship, you can often get away with going weeks at a time without talking, and always pick up where you left off.
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