The social network
New research shows that social bonds strengthen immune systems and help us sleep better, writes Jenni Russell.
When BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour devoted an entire programme to loneliness this week, its inbox was flooded, and a website discussed on air, the Chatty Cafe Scheme, crashed under the strain.
The United Kingdom has a minister for loneliness, a London Is Lonely website, and innumerable local initiatives to bring people together, and yet people still feel haunted by their lack of meaningful connections. On the programme were retired people, students, carers, those in new jobs in new cities, and working mothers, with friends, husbands, children and siblings close by. The range of those who confessed to feeling frequently anguished or empty was astounding.
Some had very few social contacts at all, like the isolated woman caring for her husband, who longed for her neighbours to ask how she was, or to invite themselves to tea. Some were caught in the trap of messaging multiple friends on social media but having none physically present in real life.
Some had old friends they had neglected, like the newly retired single mother who had focused on her children and her job. Now, despite bravely going out to art galleries or local towns, she felt the terrible aching gulf several times a week of inhabiting a desert of a day in which she saw and spoke to nobody who knew or cared who she was.
Most felt shame and embarrassment about admitting what was missing in their lives, as if it was an inadequacy in them or a need they should be able to ignore. The single mother hadn’t told her adult children about her desperation; she didn’t want to be a burden or to make them feel they should call more often than every couple of weeks.
They were in fact expressing their hunger for one of the basic necessities of a healthy, contented life: strong social bonds.
American science journalist Lydia Denworth highlights the latest research on how vital these bonds are in her new book, Friendship. They do more than make us passingly happy. They strengthen our hearts, immune systems and sleep patterns, too.
Animal biologists interviewed by Denworth had discovered that even among baboons and monkeys, friendship was critical to survival. The scientists had expected to find that the animals who had the most babies, whose babies survived longest, and who lived longest themselves would be those with the highest social status in a group. They were wrong. It was the animals who had regular and positive interactions with others who did best. Friendship is not a frothy extra in the corners of our lives.
This makes the question of how we make good relationships a crucial one. The classic advice, as on Woman’s Hour, is that if your friendships are lacking, make new ones. Join clubs or groups, talk to strangers, tell your neighbours you need them.
Those basic connections are a starting point if you have none. They are, though, just social interactions, valuable in their own way, but some distance from reciprocal, trusting relationships.
Nobody is going to return from a walking group with a new best friend, as you might bring home a favourite new coat. Friendships aren’t ready-made. They’re not found but created, yet we’re rarely taught how. Which is why writer and speaker Shasta Nelson recommends a different approach.
Nelson’s book Frientimacy is a fascinating deconstruction of our consumer model of friendship, in which we too readily discard or overlook the friendships we have, in the expectation that we deserve or should be able to find better ones.
Sometimes, of course, friendships become terminally dull, or are detached by geography or changed workplaces. Sometimes, though, we’re not
Even among baboons and monkeys, friendship is critical to survival. Scientists found it was the animals who had regular and positive interactions with others who did best, not those with the highest social status in the group.
developing the ones we have, because too often we expect friendships to simply be, without examining why and how we might be mutually disappointing, and how to enrich them.
Nelson’s book is a guide both to building new friendships and deepening old ones. Most of us need not more friendships but stronger ones. She is realistic: there are no short circuits. She says it takes her a year to make a friend, and another to confidently rely on them.
Our friends are not the people we like the most, but those we have the time, proximity and willingness to develop with. The base for friendships is positivity – enjoying time together. To flourish, they need, as marriages do, at least five rewarding interactions for each stressful or negative one – raising a resentment, complaining bitterly about a divorce.
To grow, they also need consistency – showing up first for the small things, then the big ones – and vulnerability. Vulnerability does not mean, however, offloading your life story on a stranger. That, Nelson points out, is just a car crash with witnesses. Instead, it’s a mutual openness to seeing, supporting and understanding each other: flaws, shining qualities, miseries, triumphs and all. But that must proceed cautiously and reciprocally, and in tandem with consistency and trust.
Many friendships will reach a natural point where intimacy gets no further. That’s fine. We only need a handful of truly close friends. Others will be joyful work or social companions. Nelson is offering the skills to make the most of whatever relationships we have.
The statistics show how many of us muddle along more disconnected than we wish to be, puzzled by why some of the bonds we crave fray. Insights like Nelson’s are vital if this increasingly lonely society is to move from the platitudes and urgings about meeting people to a practical understanding of how to create rich, rewarding bonds.