Let's Be Friends

How to make lasting connections that lift you up

- Caitlin Walsh Miller

If you feel that making friends as an adult isn't easy, you're right. "As kids, we have recess and gym class. We can let our guard down," says Marisa G. Franco, a Washington, D.C.-based professor and the author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help Us Make and Keep Friends.

According to sociologists, these repeated, unplanned interactions and opportunities for vulnerability are necessary for creating the bonds of friendship. Given today's work-from-home reality, those options are fewer than ever. "And even those of us who see our colleagues every day aren't letting our guard down," adds Franco.

A 2021 survey by the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank, found that the number of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, going from three percent to 12 percent. "We've never been more disconnected," says Canadian psychologist and author Jody Carrington. "And the greatest predictor for overall well-being isn't how much you drink or smoke, or what you eat. It's social engagement."

Research by Brigham Young University psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad has shown that loneliness is a major threat to longevity, on par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. People who are lonely or socially isolated have a higher risk of impaired immune function, depression, dementia and cardiac death.

On the flip side, healthy friendships can help us age better, cope better with stress, and live happier, longer lives. Plus, happiness is contagious-it spreads through your social network. Harvard researchers found that when an individual becomes happy, their friends who live in a one-mile radius have a 25 percent higher change of getting a boost in happiness, too.

The researchers concluded, "People's happiness extends up to thre degrees of separation; for example, to the friends of one's friends' friends."