Recent surveys have suggested that Americans today are both interested in having more strong, non-romantic, non-familial relationships, and less likely to have such relationships.
Many potential reasons for this desire-reality mismatch have been proposed, including that young people are more mobile and less likely to be married, today, than at any point in history: two trends that correlate with self-reported feelings of loneliness.
Work is also thought to play a role, as Americans are generally working longer hours and spending more time traveling and commuting for work than was the case for previous generations, which significantly reduces free time that might otherwise be spent sparking and developing of friendships.
There’s also some indication that today’s parents are spending more time with their kids, which provides some benefits, but which could also be taking up time and attention that would otherwise be invested in non-kinship-based relationships (for both the kids and the parents).
Typically, we develop friendships with people we choose or with people who happen to be around us: friendships based on proximity.
In the former case, we tend to judge people based on their looks, their social skills, and how well their behaviors, mannerisms, and beliefs seem to match up to ours.
In the latter case, we develop friendships with people we sit next to at school or work, people with whom we spend time, overcome obstacles, and people with whom we share some kind of activity-related enthusiasm (playing the same sport, enjoying the same kind of food, etc).
In both cases, friendships then mature based on shared experiences (especially memorable and difficult ones), the amount of time spent together, and quite often the flexibility of those involved: their capacity for conflict resolution, their ability to bend on preferences and look past flaws in each other, and their willingness and ability to grow along compatible paths in terms of thinking, morality, lifestyle, and behavior.
Having friends has been shown to impact a person’s psychological wellbeing, including their self-reported levels of happiness and fulfillment, and their capacity to cope with health issues and other sorts of trauma.
This is thought to be associated with the emotional and social support offered by most friendships (to some degree or another), but there’s also some evidence that simply knowing one has friendships (of a certain depth and/or a certain number of them) can correlate with a sense of emotional stability and confidence; we know we have friends if we need them, and that knowledge may provide some of the same benefits we glean from actually leaning on our friends.
Some research has suggested that friendships may be especially valuable in the modern world in part because they step into a space that was previously filled by kinship bonds: those that would have been occupied by large family and tribal relationships in previous eras, but which today are either vacant or loosely populated by smaller family groups or lightweight religious, political, professional, or ideological bonds.
This could be part of why such connections—even digital versions of them, experienced through social networks and avatars—with people we only know through text messages and YouTube videos can feel so strong, despite being parasocial in nature.
We don’t know the people (or in some cases, fictional characters) with whom we’re connecting (or we don’t know them in the same way we would know a good friend), but we feel a strong bond with them, nonetheless, because we are subconsciously filling the ranks of a relationship-base that, in fairly recent history, would have been occupied by people in our larger family units and tribes, and after that by a (relatively) large group of (mostly geographically adjacent) friends.
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