Friendship In Early Adults

Traditionally, young men and women preferred friends of their own sex and engaged in sex-specific activities with them. Male friendships centered on shared activities such as sports, cars, and contests (sometimes fighting with words, not weapons). Women’s friendships were more intimate and emotional, involving self-disclosing talk about health, romances, and relatives (p.437)

There are over six billion people on Earth today. Each of those people has countless relationships, which extend further into an immense network of relations among thousands of individuals. These relations can be romantic, professional, unconditional, mutual, or the strongest of all, friendship. Friendship is a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more beings. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis. Friends will welcome each other's company and exhibit loyalty towards each other, often to the point of altruism.

In the last ten to fifteen years accompanying the dawn of social media, means of communication among friends and strangers have been easier than ever. Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has grown into the largest social media site on the Internet with 30 million users and counting. The ability to catch up with former high school friends who are now across the country or see how an aunt in Pittsburgh has been doing since the birth of her son are now as simple as the click of a mouse. However, the amount of “friends” acquired on social media may not be an accurate reflection of how many close relationships one truly shares. In an article from Bigthink.com titled “Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends?”, Steven Mazie gathers research from Pew Research Center about statistics surrounding Facebook

Friendship is often underrated, considering the tremendous impact it has on our well being. Early-childhood friendship is something that is frequently overlooked as a positive developmental influence. Preschool friendships are helpful in developing social and emotional skills, increasing a sense of belonging and decreasing stress. People who feel lonely or socially isolated tend to be more depressed and have more health issues. Both boys and girls form strong attachments to others need social and emotional support. It is human nature to attach to certain people and to want closeness and support from others, regardless of gender. There is no one size fits all formula for friendship; people thrive socially in different ways. There are,

The article “Social Media as Community” “We no longer lose social ties over our lives; we have Facebook friends forever.” (Keith Hampton) Social media has created amazing apps that let us meet people that are exactly how we are ourselves. They have helped many students get relationships that they thought would never happen. “There is little evidence that social media is responsible for a trend of isolation, or a loss of intimacy and social support.” “Social Networking Sites and Our lives.” On the internet there is little evidence that social media has caused an isolation. The internet has made it where we can talk to people far from here that are just like us and usually people don’t lose friends that are exactly like

Often times women’s studies are overshadowed by topics pertaining to other matters. Because of this, Steve Duck of University of Iowa calls women’s studies “understudied relationships”. In his book, Under-Studied Relationships: Off the Beaten Track, Steve delves into the complicated world that is friendship between women. He reveals that even the best of friendships, more often than not, will dissolve due to geographical distance, especially during the transition from high school to college. However, Duck claims that this occurrence is more detrimental to male friendships than female friendships. According to Duck, “…men’s inability to maintain distal friends may be due to a lack of awareness about and skills to utilize effective strategies that maintain a [friendship]” (184). This argument implies that men simply do not put as much emotional value into friendships as women do. While distance may seem challenging for women to overcome, they put more effort into preserving their friendship. Duck further instills this concept by explaining that “women’s same-sex friendships tend to be based more on intimate and emotional discussions than men’s…” (186). Men, Duck argues, lack the depth in their friendships that women possess and for this reason have difficulty sustaining a friendship that is met with the strain of distance.

“‘...a misunderstanding of the very notion of friendship in an age when ‘friend’ is used as a verb...the authenticity of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on one’s health and well-being… ‘It’s easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental.’” Friendship in this day and age is automatic or online. Friendship should not be unauthentic in a way where it can impact a person’s well-being or health. The connection between two friends needs to be personal and not through a phone or tablet screen. In the 21st century, the word ‘friend’ is being used as a verb and not as a compliment or label.

With 50% of users logging on to Facebook everyday and more than 35 million users updating their status’s everyday (Facebook a, 2010), it posses the question what effect are social networking sites, mainly Facebook, having on our friendships? Are we extending our social networking and enriching them? Or are the effects of the ease and accessibility of a ‘friend’ demeaning our relationships?

Critical thinking note: Davis, K. (2012). Friendship 2.0: Adolescents’ experiences of belonging and self-disclosure online. Journal of Adolescence, 35(6), 1527–1536.

The friendships form because they lack care from other people in their lives and need the friendship to compensate their loss of emotion. Although two people in the friendship have different genders and ages, they have similar life experiences and living background so they can understand each other’s feelings.

Children used to actually talk to their real life friends. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cell phones texts, or through social networking sites like Face book. The question on researcher’s minds is whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to face time. The ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face conversations, which lead to bad consequences. People who study relationships believe that good friendships that we develop as a child show us how to have healthy and lasting adult relationships. (4)

In “Me and My 400 Friends: The Anatomy of College Students’ Facebook Networks, Their Communication Patterns, and Well-Being,” Manago, Taylor, and Greenfield seek to understand if there is a trade-off between large networks of social connections on social networking sites (such as Facebook), and the development of intimacy and support among today’s generation of young adults. Published January 30, 2012 and consisting of 12 pages of research, the study was conducted by online survey distributed to students at a large urban university. Participants answered questions about their relationships by sampling their Facebook contacts while viewing their online profiles. The findings of this study indicate the transformation of the nature of intimacy in the environment of a social network site, while also emphasizing the psychological importance of audience in the Facebook environment. It is suggested that social networking helps young adults satisfy psychosocial needs for permanent social relationships in a geographically mobile world.

In a study done with hundreds of college students, they were asked what relationships were most important to them. 47% answered romantic partner, 36% answered a friendship, and 14% answered a family member. (Adler, 302) From this study, you can conclude that most of our relationships that mean the most are our romantic relationships, but why? Romantic relationships are the most complicated because intimacy, gender, culture, and social media. In friendships you worry about types of friendships, gender, and social media. In family relationships there are patterns of communication, effective communication, and creating a family through good communication.

Today, the average person spends at least two hours a day on social media sites. Through social media, texting, and online chatrooms, people can communicate with others that they would otherwise have no contact with. For this topic, it is important to define what ‘friendship’ really means. Some have argued that a friend is someone they talk with; others say it’s someone they’ve shared an experience with. For this essay, friendship will be defined as someone who is kept in constant contact with through and outside of the internet. The majority of effects seen from technology are negative: from decreased in-person social interactions, to loss of identity, and ultimately the watering down of friendships. Social media has changed the expectations of social relationships. While technology does allow users to stay connected with family and friends from varying distances, technology’s negative effects also make it harder to maintain those relationships and have a lasting impact on how people will pursue their future relationships.

With this, online friendships are a self-seeking prophecy. This idea diverges from the original studies of online relationships, which discovered that internet users are lonelier than those with less access to the internet (Tufecki 7). The more recent study of the hyperpersonal nature of today’s society online, known as “Seek and Ye Shall Find”, found the opposite to be true, emphasizing that individuals who believe that online friendships and strong relationships can be gained through those networks have much higher odds (52%) of acquiring new friends (Tufecki 7) and benefit most from online interactions. The hyperpersonal nature of the cyberspace comes to be seen as a space for people to be freer of social judgment due to the mediated communication deemphasizing appearance and shifting its focus towards