Friendships, relationships, and community are important. If there’s anything worth learning more about, I think that’s one of them. I’ve discovered that there are many more podcasts than I expected discussing friendship, when you look for them, so this series might continue for longer than I originally planned. I want to make a note of the words of wisdom spoken by these many different people – to aid my own memory if nothing else. It’s encouraging to hear so many different people speaking about this, and I want to learn what I can. Friendships are a vital aspect in life that oftentimes seem to be overlooked and not designated the same significance as other types of relationships.
#6: The Science of Friendships, Science Journalist Lydia Denworth – Health Psychology and Human Nature
‘And what we have found, just in the last twenty years really, is that the strength of social bonds is one of the most important predictors of how long individuals live and of their reproductive success. And that is measured in monkeys and apes because there you can measure it, but in humans we don’t measure the reproductive success but the longevity we do, and we have found that the people with the strongest social bonds live the longest and are the healthiest. They’re also happiest. So there is just this fundamental need to belong that we all have and one of the ways that we can satisfy it is through having really good, strong friendships.’
Lydia Denworth
‘One of the things I think is really interesting is that all of this new science of friendship that’s out there now shows that friendship can be something of a template for all other relationships. It’s an example of how we ought to do it. If you think of your best friends and how you are with them, that is the kind of relationship that you need.’
Lydia Denworth
‘And that is one of the fundamental definitions of friendship, is, is this someone that you could call if you needed help or if you needed support… So if you look at in evolution, what happens is that the tendency, the traits and behaviours that help us us survive and have babies are the things that tend to continue and get passed along. So the theory here is that it’s something like a survival of the friendliest, is what has happened.’
Lydia Denworth
‘Back with early man but also with animals, you see the same patterns. So that ability, as we started to hang out with larger groups of individuals, we needed to be able to navigate that and we needed to know who we count on. And that is still what friendship is today: who can you count on?’
Lydia Denworth
‘You can’t just put people together in a room and say “ok, now be friends.” It doesn’t work that way. If you bring them together around a project that everyone believes in and is a shared passion, those relationships, those friendships are much more likely to happen naturally.’
Lydia Denworth
‘We need to be thinking about friendship and social connection all through our lives. And it’s very much like, when you’re 65, it’s like smoking. If you stop smoking at 65 it’s still better than continuing to smoke, but damage will have been done. Friendships and relationships are the same. You need to be building them and working on them all through your life. If you only start really focusing on it when you retire, say, or when your kids are grown, that’s better than never focusing on it at all, but some damage will have been done.’
Lisa Burke
‘We model for our kids what matters, what we think matters in life. And if all we’re modelling is the importance of achievement and hard work and all of that, and if that’s all we’re pushing them to do and we’re not pushing them to be good friends and spend time with their friends and work on their relationships, then we’re not sending the right message entirely.’
Lydia Denworth
274: Quality Friendships = Quality Life – The Simple Sophisticate, Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
‘As we’re growing up, when we’re in our childhood home up until puberty, our parents are our buffer to life stress often and they help us navigate as best as we can. We’re not out and about as much as kids, as far as away from parents. But then after puberty, she’s found in studies, our parents no longer will buffer or be able to buffer stress from their children. So friends take on that role, and that’s where quality friendships make a tremendous difference.’
Shannon Ables
‘Social bonds have the power to shape the trajectories of our lives, and that means friendship is not a choice or a luxury. It’s a necessity that is critical to our ability to succeed and thrive. It can even be a model against which other relationships should be measured.’
Lydia Denworth
Feminine Finishing School 