284 Benefits and Maintenance of Friendships
Embedded throughout this book are reasons why friendships are important.
Adding to this mix, I highlight two facets that stand out for me.
First, it is true, as is often said, that humans are social animals. We have many
different kinds of relationships, but friendships are certainly a significant, pleasant
form of them. A considerable amount of the time spent with other people is spent
with friends. For example, Chicago area high school students spent 30% of their
daily time awake— close to 5 hours— with friends (in comparison with only 18%
of their time with family; Larson, 1983). Similarly, a sample of employed Texas
women estimated that they spent 2.6 hours per day with friends (compared with
2.7 hours per day with their spouses and 2.3 hours per day with their children;
Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004). Furthermore, Kahneman
and his colleagues found that participants were in their most positive moods when
they were with friends as opposed to with spouses, children, other classes of people,
or alone. Larson, Mannell, and Zuzanek (1986) obtained similar results, showing
that the pinnacle of happiness is achieved when people are with both their spouse
and friends together.
Second, there are interesting and varied views on trends of what is happening
in our social lives. Discussions have occurred vis- à- vis survey data (e.g., Fischer,
2009), the impact of technology (e.g., Boase & Wellman, 2006), and postmoder-
nity (e.g., Stevens & van Tilburg, 2011). Some see modern life leading to a decline
in relationships, others see ways social change is opening new doors. Postmodern
theorists such as Beck and Giddens (see Stevens & van Tilburg, 2011) believe that
in moving away from a more traditional society our lives have become more indi-
vidualized. They posit that we have greater freedom to set our personal lifestyles
and to construct our personal social networks according to our personal prefer-
ences. Complementing this latter view, I see significant demographic trends that
have and are taking place in the United States and other countries around the world.
For instance, between 1950 and 2010, the percentage of American adults who were
married dropped from 72% to just 51% (Cohn, Passel, Wang, & Livingston, 2011).
During roughly the same time span, the proportion of single- person households
in the United States has more than tripled from 9% to 28% (Klinenberg, 2012,
pp. 4– 5). Dystopian scholars likely see these single individuals as lonely and isolated.
My sense is that we all have a need for relationships (Baumeister & Leary,
1995) but the extent to which and means by which we fulfill that need vary. It
appears to me that accompanying the trend away from marriage there is an associ-
ated trend toward friendships becoming more important in American and probably
in many European societies. Consistent with this, Klinenberg (2012, p. 97) notes
that single women are more likely than married women to have weekly face- to- face
as well as other mediated forms of contact (e.g., phone calls or e- mails) with a best
friend. In sum, I am arguing that friendships are important because of the time we
spend with friends, the pleasure we derive from friendships, and the increasing role
of friendships in filling our social needs.