Friendfluence
The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are
by Carlin Flora
Doubleday
Like most habits, it has its pleasing qualities but also notable disadvantages. In a poll, two-thirds of respondents cite it as one of the leading causes of stress in their lives. Over a quarter say it is the number one cause of arguments with family members or spouses. And over three-quarters say they need to cut down on it.
Drinking? Smoking? Chainsaw juggling? No, friendship.
In her book, “Friendfluence,” former Psychology Today editor Carlin Flora notes that more people live alone now, especially in advanced Western societies such as our own, than at any other time in history. Some 100 million Americans (roughly half of all adults) are unmarried, and the ratio of only children has doubled to 20% in 50 years. In a singles culture one’s circle of friends becomes a surrogate family.
Friendship can be almost miraculously beneficial — one study found that, among women with breast cancer, those who had no close friends had mortality rates four times as high as those with at least 10 friends.
But it comes with a price.
If a friend starts smoking, your chances of taking up the habit increase by 36%, according to a study by professors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, experts on the science of social networks. If your pal is a heavy drinker, you’re 50% more likely to be one.
Nor is all this merely a high-school habit of the insecure. One Scottish study cited by Flora found that, among 35 to 50 year olds, friends find it more difficult than teenagers do to resist when friends push them to drink.
Then there’s the frenemy problem. In one experiment, subjects were required to wear blood-pressure monitors all day while recording their personal interactions with others. Blood pressure tended to subside when the participants were in the presence of people they liked, but it spiked during exposure to friends about whom the subjects had mixed feelings — even more so than it did among people the subjects actively disliked.
Researchers supposed that it was the unpredictable nature of “ambivalent friends” that led to a heightened sense of vigilance, whereas in the presence of people you don’t like, you simply dismiss what they say without getting stressed. The more of these ambivalent friendships you have, the higher your risk of depression and cardiovascular problems, concluded the study by BYU psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad.
A major problem with friends is that you can’t help but compare and compete. Who’s got more money? Who landed the better-looking spouse? Who has a cooler job? Who’s winning? (As Gore Vidal put it, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”)
At UCLA, subjects who were asked to keep diaries were found to have more cellular cytokine proteins, which are linked to inflammation, when they had more negative and psychologically competitive interactions with others. (Physical competition — playing sports — had no effect on inflammation.) Chronic inflammation can lead to cardiovascular disease, arthritis and depression. “I need you like I need a hole in the head” may be a slight exaggeration, but a stressful friendship can be as much fun as a bad back.
Which may be why Oscar Wilde said, “A true friend stabs you in the front.” Friendships in which both parties strain to find agreement on everything lead to what one researcher calls “the mirror trap.” If the relationship is built on shared assumptions, you may find yourself hiding your true opinions in order to be more agreeable. “In a million little ways,” notes Mark Vernon, author of “The Philosophy of Friendship,” “friendship is often a matter of nothing less than faking it.”
What Flora calls “the dark side of friendship” is, she says, mostly associated with females. A self-selecting survey for the book “The Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships” by Kelly Valen found that 84% of women reported “palpable emotional wounding at the hands of other females,” with 76% saying they’d been hurt by “episodes of jealousy and competition” and over half admitting they’d been “nasty and indelicate with other females.” (As Pascal once put it, “If everyone knew what one said of the other there would not be four friends in the world.”)
“Relationships are so totalizing for women,” Marymount Manhattan College gender studies professor Susan Shapiro Barash told Flora. “For men, the bar isn’t held as high, the expectations aren’t as great and the friendships aren’t as significant.”
When women friends meet for a drink, Barash points out, both might feel as if they’re losing the competition: The singleton might be longing to get married and move to the suburbs, while the happily married mom might secretly be jealous of her friend’s freedom. This doesn’t happen among guys, of course: Married men inspire only pity in their single friends.
Still, for all their irritations and traumas, there can be no question that we must muddle on with our friendships. They may give you arthritis, but you never know when cancer is coming and you may need some pals. Their support may help you survive them (proving that you’re better than they are).
In his book-length essay “Friendship: An Exposé,” Joseph Epstein writes that the only way to make friendship work is by adhering to a strict code: “Practice a subtle and persistent reciprocity. Everyone must try to make of friendship his own utopian country in which no inequalities exist, where the coin of the realm is imaginative sympathy, all competition and rivalrous feelings are strictly outlawed, the oxygen is considerate talk and the blood circulates best when stimulated by the constant exercise of thoughtfulness, generous impulse and kindness.
The earnest practice of friendship, in short, requires us to be rather better than most of the time we really are.”