Friend-based villages are fragile
"When the chips are down and everyone else has deserted you, close family are the one group of people that will stand by you."
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There’s a metaphor I like to use with my family when talking about group cohesion: Our family is a big ship — in my mind it’s an old ship of the line but it could be a cruise too — floating through the ocean. Each person on the ship can stay onboard and continue their journey with the family, or they can hop into a lifeboat and float away to make their own fortune in the world.
My family, with each generation moving to new locations and working in new industries, has tended over the decades to be a lifeboat family. But others, such as those who work together in multigenerational businesses (among many other things), have remained in the big ship and have reaped the benefits that come with working together.
I typically use this metaphor when trying to convince my own family that we’d be better off thinking of ourselves as a tribe than as a bunch of isolated individuals.
But it also works for friendships. In fact, this ship metaphor may actually work better for friendships, because it turns out that friends are more likely to drift apart than family. Friendship is an important part of life, of course. But it’s also fragile, fleeting, and a risky thing to build an entire network or village around.
Don’t believe me?
I offer as evidence exhibit A: This viral New York Magazine piece that lamented the impact of kids on adult friendships. The gist is that author Allison P. Davis, who does not have children, has drifted away from her friends after those friends became parents. The friends are all on the good ship USS Family Life, while she’s floating away in a lifeboat.
I wrote about the piece here, arguing that it mostly reflects a desire to not become a boring old square. The piece also captures a kind of anti-child worldview; though I suspect the author would disagree with that characterization, she goes out of her way to exclude parent friends, lionizes the parents who are the least parent-like, and describes a friend’s baby as her “mortal fucking enemy.” There are lots of people who don’t have kids for a variety of good reasons, but what comes across in the piece is a much more proscriptive and aggressive philosophical opposition to kids.
But even if Davis had been more generous to her parent friends, the reality is that friendships fall apart all the time. Oxford anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar wrote about this in his 2022 book Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. The book chronicles Dunbar’s own extensive research on the topic, as well as other scholarship, and comes to the conclusion that “friends are not, in reality, all that easy to acquire and maintain.”1 They require a constant investment of time, and compared to family relationships are “much more fragile.”2
Dunbar also notes that while people sometimes have a very small number of close friends to whom they’ll remain connected for a long time, most “friendships are fickle things, here today and gone tomorrow.”3
In that light, it’s no wonder that people tend to lose touch with friends as they move through different stages of their lives. The drifting apart that Davis describes is very normal. And significantly, parenthood isn’t the only event that causes drifting; Dunbar notes that falling in love will “cost you two friendships” due to the time commitment it requires.4 Davis’ piece might just as easily have been titled “Why can’t our friendship survive your new romance.”
Dunbar also shows that one of the key factors in a friendship is similarity. “This tendency for birds of a feather to flock together,” he writes, “is known as homophily and is a dominating feature in our friendships.”5
What kind of similarities matter?
To answer that question, Dunbar describes “seven pillars of friendship.” Here they are, in his words:
Having the same language
Growing up in the same location
Having had the same educational and career experiences (notoriously, medical people gravitate together, and lawyers do the same)
Having the same hobbies and interests
Having the same world view (an amalgam of moral views, religious views, and political views)
Having the same sense of humour
Having the same musical tastes
Dunbar goes on to note that the more boxes you tick with someone, the more you’ll invest in a friendship with them. And reiterating the point about similarity, he writes that “you tend to gravitate towards people with whom you have more things in common. You tend to like the people who are most like you.”6
This information casts complaints about waning friendships in a new light. Davis, for example, writes about how she had dreamed of a highly diverse group of friends, and her disappointment that things turned out differently.
But the research suggests that’s not really how friendships tend to work. And it consequently makes sense that if friends have diverging worldviews or interests — which would surely be the case for parents and their child-free friends — their relationships will wane or fizzle.
Put another way, it’ll be very difficult for people who describe their friends’ kids as mortal enemies to maintain relationships with those friends. There’s a huge gulf between worldviews there.7
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. I’m sure we’ve all lost touch with friends over the years as our interests have diverged or our time has become more scarce. I know I have. And that doesn’t mean friendships aren’t important; Dunbar’s book also goes over many of the roles friends serve, and they are plentiful. Friendships are important and they are fragile. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Where this process becomes really painful is when friendships make up the lion’s share of a person’s social network or village. I don’t know anything about Davis’ personal life, but I get the sense that this is what’s happening behind the scenes of her piece. And either way, one of the most common bits of pushback I get to this blog is that people simply prefer friends over family. Anecdotally, my generation (elder millennials) seems to really want to build villages entirely on friend relationships. The problem is that as the friends naturally drift apart the entire village crumbles, increasing the risk of isolation and loneliness. If friendship is fragile, a village made up entirely of friends is fragile too.
On the other hand, Dunbar points out that family functions differently. He writes that family relationships tend to be “remarkably stable” over time8, that people associate kinship with trustworthiness9, and that family members “are much more likely to be willing to help each other out.”
“In fact, when the chips are down and everyone else has deserted you, close family are the one group of people that will stand by you,” Dunbar notes.10
Family can’t do or be everything11. But the takeaway is that family relationships are functionally different than friendships, and more durable over the long haul. Ergo, it would make more sense to build a village around family. Friends will come and go, but with family in the mix there’s a continuous community in place to offer support and companionship.
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Headlines to check out this week:
Having a Family Is Better Than Being Cool
(A shameless plug for my own piece)
This debate raises questions about the purpose of life. For many cultures, children and family were a key component — often the component — of a well-lived life. In some cases that mandate stems from a theology that prioritizes having kids. But this idea is widespread and transcends any single time period or culture. All the way back in ancient Rome, for example, Emperor Augustus legislated rewards for marrying and having kids under the premise that these activities were among life’s primary goals.1
The Romans certainly knew how to party, and I suspect they’d be confused by the banality of America’s childfree bourgeoisie. “You gave up on the good life and family to do shots and get DoorDash five nights a week?” I imagine Augustus saying, while strolling between a brothel and a vomitorium.
Do Two Parents Matter More Than Ever?
However, a growing body of evidence not only contradicts the conventional wisdom, journalistic narratives, and academic assertions that a stable, married family is of little or no importance to children but also indicates something quite different. In fact, marriage and a stable two-parent family appear to matter more than ever for children on a range of outcomes. Recent research suggests that an intact family is increasingly tied to the financial, social, and emotional welfare of children—and family instability is more strongly linked to worse outcomes for kids than it used to be. The upshot for children is that marriage not only still matters, but it seems to matter more than ever. Children who have the benefit of two parents are comparatively more advantaged today than they were in previous decades.
The Two-Parent Advantage
This week an important new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, by Brookings economist Melissa Kearney, underlined this conclusion. In the book, Kearney, who also teaches economics at the University of Maryland, conveys “mounds of social science evidence [showing] how the odds of graduating high school, getting a college degree, and having high earnings in adulthood are substantially lower for children who grow up in a single-mother home.”
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In fact, the true moment of crisis for the friendships in Davis’ piece probably happened not when babies were born, but rather at the moment people decided to have babies in the first place; that was the moment when worldviews diverged, the time when the ship and the lifeboat started drifting in different directions. The arrival of babies merely forced the issue and highlighted the gap in worldviews.
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Of course there will be individual exceptions to Dunbar’s findings. Some people really do have terrible families that aren’t going to offer support. Others have an atypical abundance of very permanent friends. There’s no one size fits all. But if I’m thinking about how to build my own village I’m not going to gamble that I’ll beat the odds and be the exception to the rule.