Posted on: September 12, 2007
Friends Forever?
Researchers distill the qualities that keep friends on good terms
By Deborah Douglas
CTW Features
Image courtesy iStock Photo
Quick, list your friends who have “refrigerator rights” in your home? Whoever is listed, it likely is a true-blue friend, because people don’t let just anybody go rummaging through their refrigerators, says Em Griffin, a communications professor at Wheaton College.
Refrigerator rights are a measure of intimacy that proved key in Griffin’s 19-year study on forecasting who among college students would be “friends forever.” Fellow researchers Andrew Ledbetter at Ohio University and Glenn Sparks at Purdue University co-authored the study published in the journal Personal Relationships.
That example is instructive, Griffin says, because, “I think Americans get the knock from people on the continent or Australia for being friendly but having few deep friendships.”
The trio studied 32 pairs of same-sex friendships and 13 pairs of mixed-gender friendships from 1983 to 2002. Their levels of closeness were measured in how well they played a game of understanding and communication. Participants moved an average of six times during the study period. Some got married, some divorced and others had children.
Researchers asked participants the following questions:
• Whether they expected to be close friends in the future.
• How many friends they had that they considered to be closer than their target friend.
• How frequently they communicated with the friend face-to-face, on the phone, across postal and across e-mail.
• Whether they had performed specific behaviors that are associated with friendship closeness, such as standing up for the friend in his or her absence.
The study found that similarity, not in personality, but in attitudes and values, tipped the scales in favor of friendships withstanding the test of time. Distance didn’t seem to matter to the friends in the study. Whether they talked on the phone, e-mailed one another or visited across long distances, the friendships and closeness remained intact.
And new life could be breathed into lapsed friendships when time and distance have kept good friends apart.
“The long-term friendships that showed up in this study provide a sense of shared history that can be a rarity in today’s changing environment,” Sparks says. “Friends from our youth anchor us in this age of constant mobility.”
Why focus on friendship? Over the past 30 years, the quality of friendships has declined under the pressures of career, family circumstances and geographic distance. Yet, friendships offer a huge health and psychological bonus.
“Having a strong friendship network mitigates against the possibility of illness, and some studies even show links between friendship availability and longevity,” Ledbetter offers as examples.
“We accept each other without being judgmental. That’s the most important thing for us.”— Christine Stepp
For Christine Stepp, refrigerator rights go to her four best friends since childhood. The 48-year-old Indianapolis native has traversed the U.S., working as a financial analyst, promotions manager and producer from San Francisco and Chicago to Atlanta. They’ve never lost touch, even visiting Stepp on the Pacific Coast 10 years ago to on a “Sex and the City” style road trip along the ocean.
How do they make it work? Like those studied, Stepp and her three BFF’s (best friends forever) communicated to make sense of the world. That type of mutual understanding solidified friendships over time and helped kick-start lapsed friendship, the study says.
“We accept each other without being judgmental,” Stepp says. “That’s the most important thing for us.”
What’s remarkable in Stepp’s case, as those studied, is that these relationships remained intact despite the lack of societal support to keep them that way. Unlike marriage, friendship is the most voluntary friendship, the researchers say. We expect that we’ll stay in touch with family members, but those same expectations don’t always apply to friendships, even close ones.
“We’re born into a family. Get married, voluntarily, of course, but that institution has societal props, some legal requirements,” Griffin says. “Society sanctions what a married person does. [But] outside of a long-term satisfying love relationship, friendship can make us pretty happy.”
How can you keep your friendship fires burning?
Communicate
When researchers went back to study participants, many were often ashamed that they hadn’t reached out to college friends. It doesn’t matter who reaches out or whether the same person who tends to do so, as long as someone does, Griffin says.
“Our data suggest that it doesn’t matter so much how you communicate as it does that you do communicate,” Ledbetter says. “If you want to reinvigorate an old friendship, get to the phone or to your e-mail in-box and send a message!”
Understand
“When you communicate,” Ledbetter says, “try to really understand how the other person sees the world. Investing time in really understanding the person builds the friendship’s strength, and makes it more likely that you’ll both work to maintain it in the future.”
Keep them close Should you ever fire your friend? Ledbetter believes a friendship that has reached that critical point may signal that the relationship needs work and attention, not severance.
“Our study didn’t look at phasing out friendships, but I’m biased toward thinking that one should carefully evaluate before strategically phasing out a friendship,” Ledbetter says. “Close friendships are valuable, and valuably contribute to happiness and well-being.
You never know when you might want to rekindle that connection, and burning a bridge might make that impossible.”
Bank on it Making and keeping friends is like a bank account. “You must make investments,” Sparks says, “and it is never too early to start.”
