Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen
A few years ago, I had just moved into a house.
As relatively recent graduates, my husband and I had struggled with the banks to secure a mortgage – and worse still, I had a humanities background that didn’t exactly guarantee employment.
But after approaching several banks, we managed to persuade a kind loan officer to say yes. Suddenly, we found ourselves settled in the suburbs, with 190 square meters, two children and a garden trampoline.
One summer evening, while the children were asleep, we sat out on the terrace in the sunshine. We had eaten well, lit candles and were drinking wine. It sounds like the perfect evening, doesn’t it?
On paper, we had realised our dream. The problem was, it didn’t feel that way. I had a strange sense that something was missing, even though I adore my family.
What was missing were friends.
And although I felt lonely, I wasn’t alone. Studies show that many of us have experienced loneliness.
This essay was published as part of a collaboration between Insights, The Conversation’s longform series, and Videnskab.dk.
I research friendship and, over the past few years, I’ve immersed myself in everything from scientific studies to literary texts on the subject.
It is especially literature that has given me a new perspective – both professionally and personally – on what friends are, and what friendship can be.
Hungry for friendship
In other words, I have what romantic movies and popular culture tell us is important: a partner, children, a job and a mortgage.
But it isn’t quite enough.
And it made me wonder whether the life path many of us – myself included – are following might, in fact, contain some built-in flaws.
Does this path leave too little room for the relationships defined by choice and equality? The relationships that aren’t about starting a family, but about friends?
We are raised to follow a particular social script in life. One in which career, marriage and children take centre stage and where friendship is assigned a less important role.
Many of us leave behind youth – when friendship often plays a central part – in favour of the so-called serious romantic relationship of adulthood. More broadly, some people tend to treat friendship as a kind of optional icing on the cake rather than the dough that holds it all together.
But what if this script doesn’t make us happy? What if we are depriving ourselves of something essential? Renowned feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan wrote about the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1960s in her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique.
Among its core arguments is this: women who stay at home and care for children are bound to be unhappy due to wider social structures that hold them down. A challenge she labelled “the problem with no name”.
Certainly, an element of being tired of caring for others and not being at the centre of one’s own life played an important role in my own feelings of sadness and yearning. But it couldn’t account for everything: I had a job, and things to do outside the home – contrary to many women in the 1960s. I had things I wanted to do. Friedan’s analysis didn’t entirely capture the problem.
A midlife phenomenon
And so, you may recognise the feeling of being hungry for friendship, even if you don’t live in the suburbs, play house day to day, or identify as female.
Perhaps you’ve structured your life very differently from mine, and yet still found yourself wondering where your friends went.
Indeed, when do our friends slip out of our lives?
It is particularly in midlife that finding time for friends can become difficult.
American psychologists Willard Hartup and Nan Stevens have found that we spend less than 10% of our waking time with friends during the years when work and family take up most of our time and energy.
Another study, also from the US points in the same direction: more than 40% of adult participants said they wished they were emotionally closer to their friends and would like to spend more time in their company.
In concrete terms, we now spend less than three hours a week with friends, compared with six hours a decade ago. A halving, plain and simple.
This trend goes hand in hand with a broader societal shift: fewer people are members of political parties, affiliation with religious institutions is declining, and fewer engage in unions or local sports clubs. Developments the US political scientist Robert D. Putnam described in his 1995 book Bowling Alone.
And it is happening across the western world.
Even in Denmark where I live, with its strong traditions of clubs and associations, we are seeing the same pattern: we simply meet up with other people less often, and increasingly spend time alone and feel lonely. While being alone doesn’t necessarily entail feeling lonely – the latter being a subjective state – being alone does indeed raise the risk of subjective loneliness.
In my own case, there was plenty of time for friendship in my early twenties. I lived in student halls, and the best thing about those years was that I didn’t have to make plans to have a social life.
There were always people in the kitchen to talk to. Always someone to have coffee with. It was a life with built-in friendships.
So why leave that kind of collective life?
Why have children at all and, in my case, move to the suburbs?
It’s a fair question, and one I’ve asked myself. The simple answer is that I became pregnant and children weren’t allowed in student accommodation. In addition, housing in larger cities – such as Copenhagen – is almost impossible to afford for young people and young families. We are driven out of cities, to put it bluntly.
However, I was also somewhat tired of other people’s parties and other people’s mess. And sometimes, you simply want to drink your coffee alone.
If it had been possible to stay in some form of shared living that could accommodate children and still have a private kitchen, I would have done so. No question about it. But that option is rare.
And so we return to the social script I mentioned earlier.
What we might call both the social structure and the physical architecture leave little room for ways of living outside the standard couple, the nuclear family, or single life (more people than ever now live alone).
Cue a longing for new norms around friendship and community.
Literature and company
There are those who argue that the family is an oppressive institution that should be abolished altogether.
This stance builds on the radical feminism of the 1970s, where voices such as Shulamith Firestone argued that reproduction should be handed over to technology, freeing women from the burden altogether.
More recently, Sophie Lewis has made a similar case. In her book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, she calls for dismantling the social structure of the family in favour of a more collective culture of care.
I understand the motivations behind arguments like these. But if people want to fall in love and have children together as a couple, then by all means they should. Regardless of what any intellectual might think about the matter.
Are there problems with families? Can they make us lonely by taking time away from friendships? Yes and yes.
Can they also be a source of joy and meaning? Just as much so.
The reason I bring up this critique of the family is that it reflects a broader trend in books, films and culture more generally: a growing willingness to question how we live and what place friendship should have in our lives.
I’ve written about this development elsewhere, describing how friendship is gaining prominence and offering three possible explanations for why that is.
One is the rise in loneliness , which makes friendship more valuable simply because it has become more scarce.
Another is that friendship can confer status and prestige in a world shaped by social media and visual culture.
Finally, I would argue that there is a growing cultural curiosity about whether friendships can serve as a framework for life in the same way romantic relationships historically have.
The French literary star Édouard Louis is one of the most prominent figures on the literary scene grappling with friendship.
In Change: A Method (2021), he describes his life as a movement away from his family. Instead, he seeks out different friendships that help him escape a homophobic working-class environment in northern France and move towards the literary scene in Paris.
He describes how his friendship with Elena, a middle-class girl, completely overturns his worldview, and how he later becomes close friends with notable French intellectuals Didier Eribon and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie.
The latter has described their friendship of three as a “way of life” and a “radical form of life” that breaks with the status quo.
One might object that cultural portrayals of the importance of friendship like these are the culmination of contemporary individualism.
For Louis, it is about living exactly as he wants to live – entirely free from conventions and expectations. And that does indeed invoke a particularly modern form of individualism.
At the same time, they contain a longing for other people and for community.
He seems to be asking if it’s possible to burn down existing social conventions and develop our own norms for friendship and togetherness. Both Louis and de Lagasnerie conclude that yes, that is indeed possible.
Breaking with convention
The Danish author Thomas Korsgaard’s stories about Tue offer a parallel to the French Louis: Tue comes from a poor, non-academic provincial background and, like Louis, Tue moves to the city to create a new life for himself.
In his book, You Probably Should Have Been There (2021), Korsgaard writes about Tue’s turbulent early days in Copenhagen, where he spends a long time living as a destitute homeless man, until he meets Victoria (the Danish version of Elena, if you like) and, through her, learns the social codes of the upper middle class. Slowly but surely, he begins the same kind of transformation that Louis describes.
Cultural and literary history also offers many examples of female friendships that have allowed people to live outside the norms and be themselves.
The Swedish writer, Selma Lagerlöf, did not marry and instead had close relationships with other women, and Virginia Woolf’s life and work were also shaped by deep female friendships.
For many years, it was not seen as suspicious or improper for women to have romantic and borderline erotic relationships with one another – they were in many cases regarded as intimate friendships.
Male homosexuality, by contrast, has in many cases and historical contexts been met with hatred and resistance, with the important exception of ancient Greek and classical societies.
The accounts of Louis, Korsgaard, Lagasnerie, and many others, all testify to a powerful urge to break with the structures that dictate that we must live our lives in a certain way and remind us of the importance of asking ourselves if we are living according to our own standards – or the standards of someone else.
An adult friend
The feeling of missing friends, the one that hit me that evening on the terrace, may be about something deeper than simply missing having lots of people to invite to one’s birthday party or many people one can call on on a rainy day. And that, above all, is what literature made me realise.
My hunger for friendship was not so much about a need for having people around. It was more about a need to broaden my horizon and listen to other perspectives.
I didn’t just miss friends; I missed different viewpoints, fresh input and new ways of thinking.
Friendships can help us see and explore the odd and unconventional sides of life – and in doing so challenge the status quo, much like the portrayals we find in literature.
Put simply, they can make us see the world differently.
When I went to elementary school, one of my closest friends was a woman in her seventies who had looked after me as a child.
After she was no longer being paid to spend time with me, I kept seeking her out. Her name was Lise, born in 1928. With her dark humour, curls and a wardrobe full of high-heels, her apartment was my number one refuge.
Lise had a Jewish background and, at 15, had fled the Nazis in Denmark on a Swedish fishing boat.
I loved her stories from the past and everything else about her. She cooked terrible food, always gave me presents and was impeccably elegant.
Our friendship cut across all the usual boundaries. It was unusual, even odd. But it was exactly what we both needed.
What can you do?
Inspired by literature’s many examples, can we live a life in which friends take up more space, where friendships are allowed to challenge our assumptions about life?
Even if we are not ready, or willing, to throw family and all other social conventions onto the scrapheap?
I am convinced that it is possible. But it requires us to push back, at least a little, against today’s emphasis on choice and individualism, and to do something slightly unfashionable: send a message instead of scrolling. Commit. Invite someone over. Perhaps someone who you never thought of as a friend before. But who nonetheless may turn out to be valuable to have in your life.
It also requires us to view strangers as potential friends. After all, this is what friendship boils down to: strangers that you come to know, like, and trust – a definition I describe in more detail in my book Friendship from Aristotle to Snapchat (in Danish).
Say hello to your neighbour. Smile and speak to people in shops or on the bus, because so-called “weak ties” are actually really good for us and give us a sense of belonging. Sometimes it’s as simple as this: Be friendly!
It is also helpful to reach out to those who are not like us on paper.
And in so doing, move beyond the idea that like attracts like, and instead connect with those who are different from us, just as Louis, Korsgaard’s Tue and de Lagasnerie did.
To recognise that friendships can take many forms and do not have to resemble the perfect parties and baby showers that dominate social media. For some, reading a book or being out in nature may facilitate a feeling of friendship – even if these things are done in solitude.
So, as strange as it may sound, friendships may not even require other people. I recently heard German sociologist and renowned thinker Hartmut Rosa give a lecture in Copenhagen, and his reflections on resonance were highly conducive for thinking about friendship. We resonate with other beings, says Rosa, and with the world broadly speaking – not just with other people.
As for me, I’ve started bringing friends together, including people I haven’t seen in a long time, for various gatherings.
It’s not exactly trendy or reminiscent of student life; people often bring their children, and time is spent building Lego or settling disputes. But that hardly matters. What matters to me is that we can make space for one another across different stages of life.
I’ve also broadened my understanding of friendship to include everyday interactions, everything from smalltalk with other parents at nursery to lunches with colleagues and friendly online messages.
Because you don’t need a large circle of friends.
As I see it, friendship is a practice.
It’s a way of being in the world – something you do, rather than something you have.
That shift has genuinely eased my hunger for friendship, and I now see my suburban life in a different light. I’ve learned that I’m not missing anything – it’s simply a matter of doing something.
Punctuating the notion that friendship necessarily looks a certain way has also really helped me. Because friendships come in all shapes and forms: from micro-interactions to life-long bonds. Perhaps with a tree or a dog?
This article was commissioned as part of a partnership between Videnskab.dk and The Conversation. You can read the Danish version of this article here.
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Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl receives funding from the Carlsberg Foundation
– ref. How studying friendship has changed the way I understand my own loneliness – https://theconversation.com/how-studying-friendship-has-changed-the-way-i-understand-my-own-loneliness-281767
