Making Friends

The importance of rebuilding your social circle

BY CAITLIN MANNER

If you are looking around you and wondering, “Where did my friends go?” you’re not alone. Perhaps you’re an empty nester, a retiree, or recently bereaved or divorced. Whatever the reason, you feel like you finally have some free time, but the circle of people who used to surround you is shrinking.

In our younger years, making friends just seemed, to some extent, to happen without thinking. We met people on the sides of the soccer fields or at PTA meetings or around the office cooler. Now, without those moments or at least fewer of them finding new friendships can feel a bit impossible. Making friends can feel a bit like trying to date again after ending a long relationship: You’re out of practice, the pool of potential friends seems minuscule, and it just feels weird to hang out where you used to meet new people. However, having strong, close friendships is essential to staying happy and healthy, so you need to get back out there.

The importance of friendship

Aside from the obvious merits of friendship, a growing body of evidence shows that friendships greatly impact your health, especially as you age. Isolation and loneliness are major factors in depression and can negatively affect our mental, physical, and cognitive health. Brian McCabe, a retired social worker from Guilderland, says that loneliness is one of the main complaints he dealt with as a social worker. “I often worked with people struggling with anxiety or depression,” he says, “but once I got to know them, a lot of the time the underlying issue was loneliness.”

McCabe says many of his patients made an effort to develop intimate relationships when they were younger, but for a variety of reasons those friendships broke down over time. “By the time they get into their 60s and they’re struggling with depression and loneliness, they weren’t really motivated to seek out new friends,” he says, “or they had friendships, but they didn’t meet their [emotional] needs.”

If you’re over 50, you might have reached the point where the friends you made while you were schlepping your kids from activity to activity are no longer the people you rely on for social interaction. And that’s fine. But it’s not a good idea to just shrug and accept social isolation as your fate. Even if you still adore your spouse, it can be problematic to rely on them for all your friendship needs. Now is the time to either fortify the friendships you value, or seek out new friends, which isn’t as hard as you think.

The difference between male and female friendships

Perhaps unsurprisingly, men and women handle relationships quite differently starting at a very early age. Friendships between young girls are generally conversation-based and emotionally intense, while boys’ friendships are more casual. One Oxford psychologist, Robin Dunbar, put it this way: “[Boys/men] depend much more not on who you are, but the fact that you belong to my club. Doesn’t matter what defines the club … it could be just the guys who go drinking on a Friday night together, or play soccer.” Dunbar notes that even Facebook profile pictures corroborate this evidence, as men are more likely to show pictures of themselves among a group of people, whereas women’s photos are usually with a best friend or spouse.

McCabe’s clients often adhered to these generalities as well. “It’s almost stereotypical with men: They kid each other, tell jokes and funny stories, which is all fine and well I do that with my friends but it doesn’t meet your needs really deeply if that’s as far as it goes,” he says. “With men, that tendency to be a jokester doesn’t really produce the outcome that you need. It doesn’t increase the pool of people you can connect with in an intimate way.”

As a corollary to this issue, McCabe saw many more men self-medicating with alcohol and other substances. He said it’s like a cycle of lone- liness, because the male instinct is to self-isolate and “circle the wagons,” but then they would turn to self-medication and that would only further isolate them. The other side of the coin is that when married, women tend to do more of the emotional upkeep required to maintain long-term friendships. Sometimes this means that by the time a man has become middle-aged, he has been absorbed into his spouse’s social circle, and his friends are merely the other husbands who belong to his wife’s friends. More often than not, that is a recipe for men to feel lonely later on in life.

Women, on the other hand, do a better job of maintaining their social support structure. They are more inclined to desire regular communication and more intimate conversations with a broader circle. One theory for the difference has to do with the so-called “love potion” hormone: oxytocin. Studies have shown that when women are stressed, instead of having a fight-or-flight response (as most men do), women, at least hormonally, experience a “tend and befriend” reaction. When oxytocin is released as part of a stress response, women are more inclined to gather loved ones around them, which in turn releases more oxytocin, which further counters the stress and produces a calming effect. The long-term effect of the different stress responses is that women are more likely to develop strong, enduring friendships with a few other women, while the fight-or-flight response could hinder the same relationships for men.

In McCabe’s experience women suffer from loneliness too, but they tend to cope differently. He says that instead of turning inward, women rely heavily on family, particularly grown children. “[The women] would be very dependent on [their children] but also upset with them,” he says of these clients, “because they couldn’t give them what they fully needed.” It wasn’t that the children didn’t care, but they were busy with their own families and couldn’t provide the intense emotional support their mothers needed.