How Friendships Change When You Become an Adult
Curated from: theatlantic.com
Ideas, facts & insights covering these topics:
4 ideas
·1.44K reads
2
Explore the World's Best Ideas
Join today and uncover 100+ curated journeys from 50+ topics. Unlock access to our mobile app with extensive features.
Friendships are unique relationships
Unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into friendships. And unlike other voluntary bonds, like marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure.
You wouldn’t go months without speaking to or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without contacting a friend.
86
376 reads
3 Expectations of friends
There are three expectations of a close friend that people describe and value across the entire life course.
- Somebody to talk to
- Someone to depend on
- Someone to enjoy
The beautiful, special thing about friendship is that friends are friends because they want to be, that they choose each other and can choose to get in, and can choose to get out.
107
331 reads
Friendships
- In childhood, friends are mostly other kids who are fun to play with
- In adolescence, there’s a lot more self-disclosure and support between friends, but adolescents are still discovering their identity, and learning what it means to be intimate.
- During young adulthood, friendships become more complex and meaningful. They're more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the important things.
- The middle-aged persons define friendship as “being there” for each other but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends, whether because of circumstances or through the age-old problem of good intentions and bad follow-through.
102
326 reads
Levels of maintaining a relationship
- Just keeping a relationship alive. Saying “Happy Birthday” on Facebook, having a friend’s tweet—these are the life support machines of friendship. They keep it breathing, but mechanically.
- Keeping a relationship at a stable level of closeness. Being able to write a message, being able to send some support comments if necessary.
- Making it a satisfying relationship.
90
413 reads
IDEAS CURATED BY
Ira Varma's ideas are part of this journey:
Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection
How to ask open-ended questions
How to avoid awkward silences
How to show interest in others
Related collections
Similar ideas
9 ideas
When Do You Become an Adult?
theatlantic.com
9 ideas
8 ideas
How to make friends as an adult
psyche.co
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Personalized microlearning
—
100+ Learning Journeys
—
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates