In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom.

Romantic partners,
parents, childrenall these come first.

This is true in life, and in science, where relationship research tends to focus on
couples and families. When Emily Langan, an associate professor of communication
at Wheaton College goes to conferences for the International Association of
Relationship Researchers, she says, friendship is the smallest cluster there.
Sometimes its a panel, if that.

Friendships are unique relationships because unlike family relationships, we choose

to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, like marriages and romantic
relationships, they lack a formal structure. You wouldnt go months without speaking
to or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without
contacting a friend.

Still, survey upon survey upon survey shows how important peoples friends are to
their happiness. And though friendships tend to change as people age, there is
some consistency in what people want from them.

Ive listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about
their close friends, and [there are] three expectations of a close friend that I hear
people describing and valuing across the entire life course, says William Rawlins,
the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University.
Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy. These
expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which theyre
accomplished change.

The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to lifes whims in a way more
formal relationships arent. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away,
friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. Youre stuck with your
family, and youll prioritize your spouse. But where once you could run over to
Jonnys house at a moments notice and see if he could come out to play, now you
have to ask Jonny if he has a couple hours to get a drink in two weeks.
The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life's whims in a way other
relationships aren't.

The beautiful, special thing about friendship, that friends are friends because they
want to be, that they choose each other, is a double agent, Langan says,
because I can choose to get in, and I can choose to get out.

Throughout life, from grade school to the retirement home, friendship continues to
confer health benefits, both mental and physical. But as life accelerates, peoples
priorities and responsibilities shift, and friendships are affected, for better, or often,
sadly, for worse.

***

The saga of adult friendship starts off well enough. I think young adulthood is the
golden age for forming friendships, Rawlins says. Especially for people who have
the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to college.

During young adulthood, friendships become more complex and meaningful. In

childhood, friends are mostly other kids who are fun to play with; in adolescence,
theres a lot more self-disclosure and support between friends, but adolescents are
still discovering their identity, and learning what it means to be intimate. Their
friendships help them do that.

But, in adolescence, people have a really tractable self, Rawlins says. Theyll
change. How many band t-shirts from Hot Topic end up sadly crumpled at the
bottom of dresser drawers because the owners friends said the band was lame?
The world may never know. By young adulthood, people are usually a little more
secure in themselves, more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the
important things, and let the little things be.

To go along with their newly sophisticated approach to friendship, young adults also
have time to devote to their friends. According to the Encyclopedia of Human
Relationships, young adults often spend between 10 and 25 hours a week with
friends, and the 2014 American Time Use Survey found that people between 20 and
24 years old spent the most time per day socializing on average of any age group.
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College is an environment that facilitates this, with keggers and close quarters, but
even young adults who dont go to college are less likely to have some of the
responsibilities that can take away from time with friends, like marriage, or caring
for children or older parents.

Friendship networks are naturally denser, too, in youth, when most of the people
you meet go to your school or live in your town. As people move for school, work,
and family, networks spread out. Moving out of town for college gives some people
their first taste of this distancing. In a longitudinal study that followed pairs of best
friends over 19 years, a team led by Andrew Ledbetter, an associate professor of
communication studies at Texas Christian University, found that participants had
moved an average of 5.8 times during that period.

I think thats just kind of a part of life in the very mobile and high-level
transportation- and communication-technology society that we have, Ledbetter
says. We dont think about how thats damaging the social fabric of our lives.

We arent obligated to our friends the way we are to our romantic partners, our jobs,
and our families. Well be sad to go, but go we will. This is one of the inherent
tensions of friendships, which Rawlins calls the freedom to be independent and the
freedom to be dependent.

Where are you situated? Rawlins asks me, in the course of explaining this tension.
Washington, D.C., I tell him.

Whered you go to college?

Chicago.

Okay, so youre in Chicago, and you have close friends there. You say Ah, Ive got
this great opportunity in Washington and [your friend] goes Julie, you gotta take
that! [Shes] essentially saying Youre free to go. Go there, do that, but if you need
me Ill be here for you.

I wish he wouldnt use me as an example. It makes me sad.

***

As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many
of them more pressing than friendship. After all, its easier to put off catching up
with a friend than it is to skip your kids play or an important business trip. The ideal
of peoples expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their
lives, Rawlins says.

The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for
friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for
figuring out who you are and whats next, Rawlins says. And you find at the end of
young adulthood, now you dont have time for the very people who helped you
make all these decisions.

The time is poured, largely, into jobs and families. Not everyone gets married or has
kids, of course, but even those who stay single are likely to see their friendships
affected by others couplings. The largest drop-off in friends in the life course
occurs when people get married, Rawlins says. And thats kind of ironic, because
at the [wedding], people invite both of their sets of friends, so its kind of this last
wonderful and dramatic gathering of both peoples friends, but then it drops off.