A friend is a person who you can depend on, who is also a person you like and enjoy being with.
Generally, friends share similar interests and have common opinions but they also enjoy open debates.
Friends provide the alternate reality to your experiences and memories of what happened over the years.
Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between two or more people. Friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association. Friendship has been studied in academic fields such as sociology, social psychology,anthropology, and philosophy. Various academic theories of friendship have been proposed, including social exchange theory, equity theory, relational dialectics, and attachment styles. A World Happiness Database study found that people with close friendships are happier.
Although there are many forms of friendship, some of which may vary from place to place, certain characteristics are present in many types of friendship. Such characteristics include affection, sympathy, empathy, honesty, altruism, mutualunderstanding and compassion, enjoyment of each other’s company, trust, and the ability to be oneself, express one’s feelings, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the friend.
While there is no practical limit on what types of people can form a friendship, friends tend to share common backgrounds, occupations, or interests, and have similar demographics.
Developmental psychology
In the typical sequence of an individual’s emotional development, friendships come after parental bonding and before pair bonding. In the intervening period between the end of early childhood and the onset of full adulthood, friendships are often the most important relationships in the emotional life of the adolescent, and are often more intense than relationships later in life. The absence of friends can be emotionally damaging.
The evolutionary psychology approach to human development has led to the theory of Dunbar’s number, proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He theorized that there is a limit of approximately 150 people with whom a human can maintain stable social relationships.
Childhood
In a 1975 study, Bigelow and La Gaipa found that expectations for a “best friend” become increasingly complex as a child gets older. The study investigated such criteria in a sample of 480 children between the ages of six and fourteen. Their findings highlighted three stages of development in friendship expectations. In the first stage, children emphasized shared activities and the importance of geographical closeness. In the second, they emphasized sharing, loyalty and commitment. In the final stage, they increasingly desired similar attitudes, values and interests.
According to Berndt, children prize friendships that are high in prosocial behavior, intimacy, and other positive features; they are troubled by friendships that are high in conflict, dominance, rivalry, and other negative features. High-quality friendships have often been assumed to have positive effects on many aspects of children’s social development. Perceived benefits from such friendships include enhanced social success, but they apparently do not include an effect on children’s general self-esteem. Numerous studies with adults suggest that friendships and other supportive relationships do enhance self-esteem (Berndt, 2002).full|date=March 2013
Adolescence
A study examined over 9,000 American adolescents to determine how their engagement in problem behavior (such as stealing, fighting, truancy) was related to their friendships. Findings indicated that adolescents were less likely to engage in problem behavior when their friends did well in school, participated in school activities, avoided drinking, and had good mental health. The opposite was found regarding adolescents who did engage in more problem behavior. Whether adolescents were influenced by their friends to engage in problem behavior depended on how much they were exposed to those friends, and whether they and their friendship groups “fit in” at school (Crosnoe, R., & Needham, B., 2004).
A study by researchers from Purdue University found that friendships formed during post-secondary education last longer than friendships formed earlier.
Adulthood
Life events such as marriage, parenthood, and accelerated career development can complicate friendships in the transition from young adulthood to middle adulthood. After marriage, both women and men report having fewer friends of the opposite sex (Friendships, 2012).[full citation needed]
Adults may find it particularly difficult to maintain meaningful friendships in the workplace. “The workplace can crackle with competition, so people learn to hide vulnerabilities and quirks from colleagues. Work friendships often take on a transactional feel; it is difficult to say where networking ends and real friendship begins.” Most adults value the financial security of their jobs more than friendship.
The majority of adults have an average of two close friends.
Old age
As family responsibilities and vocational pressures become less, friendships become more important. Among the elderly, friendships can provide links to the larger community; especially for people who cannot go out as often, interactions with friends allow for continued societal interaction. Additionally, older adults in declining health who remain in contact with friends show improved psychological well-being.
Although older adults prefer familiar and established relationships over new ones, friendship formation can continue in old age. With age, elders report that the friends they feel closest to are fewer in number and live in the same community. They tend to choose friends whose age, sex, race, ethnicity, and values are like their own. Compared with younger people, fewer older people report other-sex friendships. Older women, in particular, have more secondary friends—people who are not intimates, but with whom they spend time occasionally, such as in groups that meets for lunch or bridge.
Life cycle
Making a friend
Three significant factors make the formation of a friendship possible:
- proximity, which means being near enough to see each other or do things together;
- repeatedly encountering the person informally and without making special plans to see each other; and
- opportunities to share ideas and personal feelings with each other.
Ending a friendship
Friendships end for many different reasons. Sometimes friends move away from each other and are forced to move on due to the distance. Sometimes divorce causes an end to friendships, as people drop one or both of the divorcing people. At a younger age friendships may end as a result of acceptance into new social groups. (Friendships, 2009) (Berry, 2012)
Friendships may end by fading quietly away or may end suddenly. How and whether to talk about the end of a friendship is a matter of etiquette that depends on the circumstances.
All good relationships depend on respect and trust. In order to have a chance to evaluate these qualities takes awhile and also can change over time. All relationships have an ‘it’ dynamic or spark, if both sides keep it alive it will survive.
Even if a relationship ends, as they say, “when one door closes, another door opens” the universe has a way of filling things when they are empty and vice versa!
If you are looking for dating or an even a more serious relationship, sometimes meeting online is an option to check out: www.pof.com/
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