Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

We live among strangers. In part, that is because, instead of our friends and family being clustered around us in the village as they once were, they are now dispersed all over the country, sometimes a whole continent.

They are also the ones that are most difficult to reconcile, precisely because they end with such an acrimonious rupture.

our choice of friends is heavily dictated by trying to find like-minded people, people we feel comfortable with in casual company, people we don’t have to explain the joke to every time, people who think like us and whose behaviour we don’t have to work hard at trying to understand, people with whom conversations have a natural and effortless flow

men’s friendships are more casual, and hence do not provide the emotional support that women’s friendships with other women provide in these circumstances.

real work comes in the way you think through the relationships you have with others and the relationships that these in turn have with each other:

when we looked at the patterns of contact before and after a change in friendships, they were almost identical. It seems that when we replace someone in our social network with a new friend, we slot the new friend into exactly the same position as that previously occupied by the old friend in terms of the frequency we contact them.

Part of the problem is that we are all busy people, with our own social networks to worry about. If you force me to devote a disproportionate amount of time to you, it means I have less time to devote to my other friends

However, we tend not to have big bust-ups with people we don’t see very often, so, not surprisingly, most of the breakdowns were with people in the innermost friendship circles.

having the same language (or dialect) • growing up in the same location • having had the same educational and career experiences (notoriously, medical people gravitate together, and lawyers do the same) • having the same hobbies and interests • having the same world view (an amalgam of moral views, religious views, and political views) • having the

Women’s conversations have a distinctively cooperative character, with frequent use of ‘back-channel’ comments (‘Yes!’, ‘Uh-huh!’, ‘You’re so right!’) given over the speaker’s statements, combined with frequent use of simultaneous endings where the listener repeats the last phrase as the speaker utters it.