You need your friends to be there down the road. If you are forever canceling on your friends or failing to make a point of seeing them or talking to them or interacting with them, then you are not being a good friend and you are not maintaining a strong relationship. My message is that it is not necessarily indulgent because having good, strong friendships is as important for yourself as diet and exercise, and so it’s something you need to prioritize. But we also feel that spending time with friends, instead of working, is indulgent. So, I’m not saying that we should be spending a lot less time with family. LD: The reason we do that is that we feel more beholden to our family that we’re related to, and that makes plenty of sense-we’re legally and biologically connected to our family members. KN: You observe in your book that we tend to neglect our friendships when we get busy, more so than other relationships. And if you don’t pay attention to friends all the way along, the same thing is true. If you go from 15 to 65 and you smoke the whole time, it’s still better to stop than not, but some damage will have been done. If you get to be 65 and then now you’re ready to start paying attention to friends, well, it’s a little bit like stopping smoking when you’re 65. I think that people sometimes think (especially in their 30s and 40s), “I just don’t have time for friends right now,” and that’s a mistake. There are these transition points in life when it’s easier or harder to spend time with friends, but what is important for people to know is that friendship is a lifelong endeavor and that it is something that people should be paying attention to at all points in life. Toward the end of life, we tend to come back around to having a little bit more time once kids are grown and careers and jobs are less demanding. Then in adulthood, as people start to have jobs and maybe get married or have a family, it can become harder to spend time with your friends. You are really hyper-interested in social activity. Also, when you’re an adolescent, your brain is as attuned to social signals and connection as it will ever be.

Then in adolescence, it becomes even more abstract and relational.Īll the way through high school and college, friendships can feel easy because you are thrown into an environment where you have lots of same-age peers and the pool of potential friends is big.

But when kids go to school, they start to have deeper friendships that involve, first, doing things together, and then a deeper, shared emotional element. Lydia Denworth: When you’re very young, of course, your primary social relationship is with your parents or caregivers.

Friendship book lydia denworth