Is friendship a happiness drug?

Lately, I’ve pondered the benefits of friendships and what they offer to a community. An angel sat on my shoulder and nudged me to write this today. Angels know that support is always welcome. We need only ask. People often show up to support us when we least expect them. Friends or not, knowing we’re cared about matters.

Do we need friendships? Can we thrive without friends? What kind of friends do we need? Are we too structured in how we think of friendships?

I haven’t spent time studying friendships from a scientific perspective. It seems few people have. Bruce Alexander‘s study with rats, considered social animals, suggests that when we have a community of closeness, we’re less likely to have addictive behavior (unless we consider friendship addictive). So, I did a little exploring outside of my own bias because I believe there is a significant difference between an acquaintance and a friend. I put a very high value on friendship.  As Isabelle Allende has said,

“True friendship withstands time, distance, and silence.”

Silence is a key ingredient in how we treat friendship because often, when we don’t hear from someone, our minds overrule our hearts and come up with reasons why we haven’t heard from our friends. Maybe they don’t like us anymore? Was it something we said? True friendship suggests we pick up the phone and begin chatting as if we just spoke yesterday. As my mother would say, “Don’t stand on ceremony”. Reach out. People need people to care.

Until she passed at the age of nearly 84, my mother had a best friend from first grade. It met all the criteria of time, distance, and silence. Wars came and went. Marriages happened, and widowhood, too. They lost track of each other for a few years, and yet, when my mother’s friend Florence read of my father’s passing, she took a chance at the address in the obituary and reached out. It was as though the years fell away, and they picked up where they had left off. They were the female versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer as children. What naughtiness one didn’t think of, the other one did. If they got caught, they took turns taking the blame. Now that is the test of friendship — being there for each other in good times and bad.

Growing up, I thought success was having many friends because my parents had many true friends who were there in the best and worst times. Some traveled hundreds of miles to visit and share a cocktail or cup of tea. I have a few people whom I consider “true blue friends”. I have friends who I consider family. I have friends.

We have friends for different seasons—those folks who get us through one season safely into another. When we look at friendships this way, we can be grateful they existed and allow our hearts to let them move on. Some come back. Some don’t. Those who don’t come back didn’t survive the Elisabeth Foley test, which says,

“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.”

These two ideas are true whether we define people as friends or acquaintances. The road to one who needs us is never long, and there is nothing better than to have someone say,

“Hello. I was thinking of you. Are you okay?”