Why Friendships Get Harder, and Why They Matter More Than We Think

By: 63° Editorial

August, 2026

Friendship changes as we grow. The people around us change, our lives become fuller, and staying close starts to require more intention. But from adolescence through adulthood, some of the strongest research on wellbeing keeps returning to idea that the quality of our relationships matters.

Some friendships seem to happen before we have even decided to make them. You sit beside someone in school, you are placed on the same team, you keep seeing the same person after class, or you spend every lunch break together. Later, you might live in the same university hall or start work alongside someone at the same time. Repeated contact does a remarkable amount of the work for us.

Then life changes.

For a teenager, that might mean changing schools, falling out with a friendship group, watching a best friend become closer to someone else, or discovering that the people you have always known no longer feel quite like your people. Later, it might mean university, work, relationships, children, family responsibilities, money, long commutes or moving somewhere new. A friend relocates, someone’s schedule changes, or one person’s life accelerates while another’s slows down. The friendship still matters, but seeing one another stops happening automatically.

That is probably why the sentence “we need to see each other soon” can survive for several months without anybody being dishonest. Friendship is not necessarily becoming less important; the conditions around it are changing and the science suggests that friendship deserves considerably more attention than we tend to give it.

A systematic review of 43 studies examining friendship quality and wellbeing among adolescents found that better-quality friendships were consistently associated with greater life satisfaction, happiness and self-esteem, while poorer peer relationships were associated with loneliness and, across many studies, depressive symptoms. Most of the research was observational, so it cannot prove that better friendships directly cause better mental health, but the pattern was strikingly consistent.

The same broad picture appears later in life. A systematic review of 38 adult friendship studies found that friendship quality and time spent socialising with friends were associated with wellbeing, while support, feeling that one matters to friends and efforts to maintain friendships also appeared important.

Friendship is not simply something pleasant sitting around the edges of a healthy life. It may be part of one.

1. The friendships we need change as we do

Friendship at 13 is not the same as friendship at 33. During adolescence, friendships become particularly important because this is a period when identity, independence, belonging and social confidence are developing rapidly. The people around us can influence how we see ourselves, what feels normal, what we try, what we avoid and where we feel we belong.

That is why friendship problems can feel enormous when we are young. Adults sometimes respond to adolescent friendship difficulties by saying that you will make new friends or that you may not even know these people in ten years. Perhaps that is true, but it does not make the experience trivial now.

The systematic review on adolescent friendship quality found that stronger friendship quality was associated with better wellbeing across several measures, while poorer peer relationships were repeatedly linked with loneliness.

Later in life, friendship begins competing with more responsibilities. Work becomes demanding, romantic relationships deepen, children arrive, parents age, people move and time becomes less flexible. The relationships may still matter just as much, but they simply stop maintaining themselves.

2. One of the longest studies of human life keeps coming back to relationships

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence comes from research that has been following people for most of their lives. The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938 with 724 participants drawn from two very different groups in Boston. Researchers followed them through adulthood, collecting information about their physical health, mental health, work, relationships and later life. The study eventually expanded to include spouses and descendants and has now been running for more than eight decades.

Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School who directs the study, has described one of its most important findings like this; the people who were most strongly connected to family, friends and community tended to be happier, healthier and longer-lived than people who were less well connected.

Perhaps even more interestingly, relationship satisfaction in midlife turned out to be an important predictor of later wellbeing. Waldinger has explained that researchers expected conventional health measures such as cholesterol to be among the strongest predictors of who would be doing well decades later, but the warmth and quality of relationships proved remarkably powerful.

That does not mean friendship alone determines how long or how well someone lives. Genetics, healthcare, income, lifestyle, illness, environment and many other factors matter.

The Harvard Study also began with a narrow sample of men in Boston, which is an important limitation when interpreting its findings broadly. The later inclusion of spouses and descendants has expanded the study, but the original cohort was not representative of the world.

Still, the study’s central finding has been reinforced by a much wider body of research on friendship, relationships and social connection. The strength and quality of our relationships appear to matter.

3. The lesson is not that everybody needs a huge social circle

This is where the Harvard findings become particularly useful. The point is not popularity, knowing hundreds of people, having a full social calendar or being invited everywhere.

Waldinger has repeatedly emphasised the value of having people in your life you can genuinely rely on. Harvard’s reporting on the study describes strong relationships as an important predictor of physical and mental wellbeing across the life course.

That matters whether you are 15 or 75. A teenager does not need to be the most popular person in school, a university student does not need twenty close friends, an adult does not need dinner plans every weekend, and an older person does not need an enormous social network.

The more useful question is, Is there anyone in your life with whom you feel safe, known and supported, and are you being that person for somebody else?

3. Quality matters more than collecting people

Social media has made friendship unusually visible. We can see follower counts, group photos, birthday tributes, trips and who was invited somewhere. Sometimes, who was not invited becomes even more visible. All of this can make a socially healthy life look like a numbers game, but the research paints a different picture.

The World Health Organization describes social connection as involving not just the number of relationships we have, but also what those relationships provide and how satisfying or supportive they are. Its work on social connection recognises social wellbeing as an important dimension of health.

The adult friendship review reaches a similar conclusion, with friendship quality emerging as one of the factors consistently associated with wellbeing. You can therefore have a large friendship group and feel unsafe being honest with any of them, while another person may have two close friends and feel deeply supported. You can have hundreds of people interacting with you online and still have nobody you want to call when something has actually happened.

The question may not be how many friends you have, but what the friendships you have are actually like.

4. Small moments do more relationship work than we realise

One of the most useful ideas from John and Julie Gottman’s work on relationships is the concept of bids for connection. Their research is best known in the context of couples and families rather than friendship, so we should not assume that every finding transfers directly.

The underlying idea, however, is useful across many kinds of relationships.

A bid is simply a small attempt to connect. It might be someone saying, “Look at this,” a friend sending you something because they know you will find it funny, a teenager telling a parent what happened at school, someone asking if they can tell you something, or a friend checking whether you got home safely.

The Gottmans describe “turning toward” as noticing and responding to these attempts at connection rather than repeatedly ignoring or dismissing them. The idea is powerful because relationships rarely survive on their biggest moments alone. Showing up for the funeral, the wedding or the crisis matters enormously, but friendship is also built through hundreds of ordinary interactions between those moments.

It grows when you remember what somebody told you, reply when they reach out, ask what happened next, notice when they seem quieter than usual, celebrate their good news properly and make room for the stories that may not be particularly important to anybody else but matter to them.

Relationships often deepen quietly, and they can fade quietly too.

5. Good friends are not only there when life goes wrong

We tend to measure friendship by who shows up when life falls apart, and that matters. But there is another test we speak about less.

Who can handle your life going well?

The adult friendship systematic review found that people’s responses when friends shared positive events were among the relationship characteristics associated with wellbeing. There is a meaningful difference between telling someone good news and feeling them genuinely become happy with you, and sharing the same news only to sense comparison, negativity, competition, pessimism, minimisation or distance.

Whether you passed an exam, got into university, made the team, landed the job, landed a big opportunity, started a company, had a baby, bought a house, finished a race or finally did something you had been afraid to do, being able to experience joy without making yourself smaller matters.

Friendships can be tested by hardship, but sometimes they are tested by growth too.

6. Conflict does not necessarily mean a friendship is failing

There is a version of friendship, particularly when we are young, where closeness seems to mean never having problems. Then somebody disappoints you and the entire relationship feels suspect. Real relationships are messier. People misunderstand one another, get jealous, forget things, feel excluded, cancel plans, grow closer to somebody else and change over time.

This is another place where the Gottmans’ emphasis on repair offers a useful principle. Healthy relationships are not relationships in which nobody ever gets anything wrong. What matters is partly whether people can come back from difficult moments.

Learning how to tell someone that something hurt, admit that you misunderstood, explain that you felt left out, apologise when you were wrong or simply ask to talk about what happened is a useful relational skill at almost any age. A friendship that survives disagreement may eventually become safer than one in which nobody ever tells the truth.

7. Not every friendship needs to last forever

The science telling us that friendship matters should not become another wellness command telling us to preserve every relationship. Some friendships become consistently one-sided, while others become controlling or humiliating. Some require you to make yourself smaller in order to remain accepted, and some simply belong to an earlier version of your life.

People change, values change and circumstances change. Sometimes a friendship becomes less close without either person being wrong.

Quality matters, but boundaries and safety matter too. A long history does not automatically make a relationship healthy, and recognising the value of connection does not mean every connection deserves to be maintained.

8. Money changes how friendship happens

This is something relationship articles often ignore. Friendship can cost money because transport, restaurants, trips, concerts and even mobile data cost money. For teenagers, differences in financial circumstances can be particularly awkward. One friend may be able to afford every outing while another keeps inventing reasons not to go because admitting that they cannot afford it feels embarrassing.

Adults experience versions of the same thing. One person’s casual dinner may be another person’s significant expense, and one person may be able to book the trip while another simply cannot. Good friendship needs enough flexibility to survive different financial realities.

Connection does not have to happen in expensive places. It happens in kitchens, classrooms, football pitches, religious communities, neighbourhoods, salons, barbershops, parks and family homes, as well as on walks, on buses and over long phone calls.

What matters most is not prestige or spending, but attention, reciprocity and enough safety to be yourself.

9. Moving away changes friendship too

Distance used to end many relationships almost by default, but technology has changed that.

A friend can move from Lagos to London and still know what happened to you that morning. A teenager can stay close to someone who changes schools, and families can live across several countries while remaining in daily contact.

That is real connection.

Distance still changes relationships, though, because you lose many of the ordinary interactions that helped sustain them. The spontaneous visit disappears, as does the walk home, the quick conversation after class or simply having someone nearby. Friendship may need to become more deliberate because proximity is no longer doing the work. The WHO’s work on social connection makes an important broader point here. Culture, life stage and social circumstances all shape what connection looks like, and much of the existing evidence has historically come from North America and Europe.

That is exactly why there should not be one supposedly ideal form of friendship. Connection in Lagos may look different from connection in London, just as connection at 15 may look different from connection at 50. The need underneath it can remain remarkably similar.

10. So what actually keeps friendships alive?

Friendships probably require fewer grand gestures than we imagine, but they do require continued participation. They stay alive when people initiate rather than always waiting, respond when someone reaches out, remember what mattered to the other person, ask a second question rather than stopping at “I’m fine,” celebrate good news properly and show up when things become difficult.

They also benefit when people apologise after getting something wrong, speak about hurt rather than silently collecting resentment, recognise that somebody may temporarily have less capacity without assuming they no longer care, and allow the relationship to evolve as life changes.

Some friends speak every day, while others speak once a month. Some barely communicate for long periods and then spend three hours together as though nothing changed. Frequency is not the only measure of a friendship. A better measure may be whether the care underneath it remains mutual.

63° Take

Friendship matters at every age, but it does not look the same at every age. For teenagers, friendship can shape belonging, confidence, identity and emotional wellbeing. For young adults, it becomes part of navigating university, work, independence, relationships and moving away from home. Later in life, maintaining friendship often requires more investment and intention as work, family, distance and responsibility compete for time.

Across those stages, the research keeps pointing towards the importance of quality rather than popularity, the size of a social circle or how socially busy somebody appears.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has spent more than eight decades following human lives, and one of its clearest lessons is that warmer, more supportive relationships are strongly associated with happier, healthier lives.

That does not mean friendship is a medical treatment. It means relationships deserve to be treated as part of the architecture of a better life rather than something we squeeze into whatever time remains. You do not need the biggest circle, to be the most popular person in the room or to have a social calendar that looks impressive online. What matters more is having enough relationships in which you feel seen, supported, safe and able to be yourself, and paying enough attention to those relationships to give them a chance to stay alive.

Sometimes that means answering the message or sitting together after school or work. At other times, it means showing up when life is difficult, celebrating someone’s good news without comparison or competition, saying sorry when you were wrong or simply being the person they know they can call.

After decades of studying what makes a good life, one of the most enduring findings is remarkably ordinary. Our relationships matter, and one of the most valuable investments we can make in living better may simply be taking better care of them.

Sources

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36564745/

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36760434/

3. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/02/work-out-daily-ok-but-how-socially-fit-are-you/?

4. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/can-relationships-boost-longevity-and-well-being?

5. https://hsph.harvard.edu/health-happiness/news/the-good-life-a-discussion-with-dr-robert-waldinger/?

6. https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/good-life

7. https://www.who.int/groups/commission-on-social-connection?

8. https://www.gottman.com/blog/turning-toward-our-children-answering-bids-for-connection/?

9. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978240112360?

   
   

This article provides general information about relationships and wellbeing. Persistent bullying, social isolation, depression, anxiety or unsafe relationship dynamics may warrant support from a trusted adult or appropriately qualified professional.