“Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.”

Over a 10-year period, up until three weeks before his death, we exchanged 150 letters. After Oliver passed away, I had to find a way to handle my sadness. So, I revisited all our letters and wrote a new book, Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks, as a tribute to exploration, letter-writing, friendship, and Oliver Sacks.

we have to learn how to become friends and to do that actually involves quite a bit of learning to enter like Universal friendship and Universal friendship is actually a pretty high stage of realization

the problem on the planet it's a lack of understanding the Art and Science of friendship like sacred friendship sacred humanism

Later, many of the people who checked in on me that day, who'd been those "imaginary" online friends, became the people who introduced me to my wife, who greeted my child, who held me when I grieved, who rejoiced as we built careers and lives together.

Every p-block with a payment in r-coins by a correct trader p ̸ = ris eventually approved or disapproved by an r-block [provided p and r are friends or have acommon friend in SG(B)]a.

In a letter to the Times Book Review in November, 1971, Nabokov wrote, “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins.”

study that found that friends living within a mile of each other are 25 percent more likely to feel happy

Figure 4. Daily average time spent with friends. Graphed by Zach Rausch from data in Kannan & Veazie (2023), analyzing the American Time Use Study.2

"Nothing like a vote in the U.N. to tell you who your friends used to be."

Think about your closest friends, and how these friendships happened. What needs are you fulfilling in each other’s lives? Are you happy with this state of affairs, or is something missing? What could be better?

I do know how to value your kindness in coming to me this morning. It is really very good of you to come and sit with me, when you must have so many pleasanter demands upon your time

I may not have many more visits from you

There is so little real friendship in the world

It would excite no proper interest there

What makes you unique is not your specific attributes. It’s your specific ties to the network around you.

Real friendships don’t form via shared interests. They form via shared context.

Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students’ network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network.

“The Hare and Many Friends”

Have you ever … In December 2008, I came across this post from someone who was on my blogroll, or in my feeds, or something. They listed 100 things that one might have done in one’s life, and invited one to indicate those that one had actually done. I took the challenge on as a lark and then decided that the same list could prompt individual blog posts, so I started doing that.2 And now I’m resurrecting the meme, and tagging Amanda Rush and ladyhope. I hope they will participate, link to this, and tag two more people.3 Of course, if you are inspired to do it too, then just go ahead.

Actively try to make more friends with people who share your likes.  In the Internet age, this is shockingly easy.  Don’t try to make more friends who share your dislikes.  You should build friendship on common passions, not joint contempt.

Friendship doesn’t scale easily to large groups and especially not forcibly. Friendships happen spontaneously at smaller scales.

“the leading cause of persistent relationships is reciprocity — returning a friend’s call.” Further, they said friends ’til the end tend to touch base at least once every 15 days.

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between words.

I have no friend, Margaret

I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me;

The second comes from Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist who in 1969 wrote a hugely influential paper called “The Strength of Weak Ties.” In this paper, he suggested that the stronger the tie between any two people, the higher the fraction of friends they have in common.

The first comes from Elizabeth Bott, an influential anthropologist who published a book in 1957 called Family and Social Networks. In this book, she hypothesized that the degree of clustering in an individual’s network could draw the person away from a tie with somebody else. In other words, if you are part of a group of close friends or relations, you are less able to make strong links outside this group.

The team found that the number of friends that pairs of individual have in common is strongly correlated with the strength of the tie between them, as measured in other ways. That’s regardless of whether people are linked by mobile-phone records or by social ties in rural Indian villages.

Social scientists measure the strength of these links using a variety of indicators, such as how often a person calls another, whether that call is reciprocated, the time the two people spend speaking, and so on. But these indicators are often difficult and time-consuming to measure.

Elizabeth empties the ritualistic forms of her friendship with Charlotte of real feeling

I sent a DM to Terry, what do you think about these guys inviting me? I trust Terry implicitly.

I am just listening to Terry Elliott talking in a solitary #clavpicnic after having spent lunch with a friend of mine

There was one of my best friends Blaise, in Cameroun who spent last Christmas with us.

A light lit up on the Spaceship's dashboard. It was Susan. Could she connect too? I have no means of picturing Susan's space at the moment she asked that. I scrolled through Susans desperately seeking Susan.

I am not at all sure where we can say we are? I have the impression that it is like being 3 spacemen in spaceships on journeys through the universe who are desperate for connection to others who have meaning for them.

Meanwhile back at the picnic spot, Terry and Keith had turned up. It was six and seven o'clock in the morning for them and they had dropped everything to spend a little time at a picnic to chat with friends.

super-friendship

6 But friendship can also form a kind of moral community, whose power should not be underestimated in its reach- ing across.

But not only do gifts make us feel close to others; feeling closer to others makes us feel better about gifts. Research shows that people derive more happiness from spending money on “strong ties” (such as significant others, but also close friends and immediate family members) than on “weak ties” (think a friend of a friend, or a step-uncle).

dancing or canoeing could be better bets for first-date bonding than simply catching a movie or sharing a meal. But the glue that positivity resonance offers isn’t just for connecting once-strangers at the start of new relationships. It also further cements long-standing ties, making them even more secure and satisfying.

I’ve concluded that love, as your body sees it, is the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: A sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; A synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; A reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. My shorthand for this trio is positivity resonance. This back-and-forth reverberation of positive energy sustains itself—and can even grow stronger—until the momentary connection wanes—which is of course inevitable, because that’s how emotions work.

We were surprised and quite pleasedto learn that people develop friendships across group boundaries pretty easily. However, theirstress levels continued to be high during these periods.It was only after the third 45-minute session that this friendship manipulation happened,that people's stress levels began to go down, but afterwards, two weeks later, a month later,after the experiment was over, people reported that they felt more comfortable, and moreat ease, interacting with members from other groups. Furthermore, they sought out interactionswith members from other groups.

but it turns out that they have a physiologicalcost to the person who is prejudiced. Why? Quite simply because being prejudiced canbe very stressful when one is interacting with members from the outgroup.

As important as close relationships are, weaker ties also have their place. Research suggests that people who have a broad range of different kinds of social roles tend to be healthier and more likely to attain professional success.

Since support can often become unequal, thus creating ingratitude and resentment, sometimes the most effective support is invisible—meaning that it is not experienced as support per se, but rather as a gesture of caring that is not costly or burdensome to the giver. For example, a person might choose to sacrifice work time to spend a romantic evening with their partner who has had a rough week, but this form of support will likely be better received if the person does not emphasize their sacrifice, but rather communicates a genuine desire to spend time with their partner. At the same time, however, Greater Good contributor Amie Gordon’s research shows that appreciation is a critical ingredient in healthy relationships, so it’s not always a bad thing to notice your partner’s sacrifices or to make sure that they know that you’re putting them first.

Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History has argued that the best way to maintain a strong, healthy marriage is to have a strong network of friends with whom we share common interests and can turn to when in need. While it might be tempting to be jealous of time your partner spends with friends, or possessive of his or her time, it’s healthier to see your partner’s friends as an asset to your relationship. They provide critical psychological support to your partner and an outlet for interests that you might not share. But your partner’s friendships are also a form of social capital for you—and it will pay to help your partner keep those networks going.

Significant others can deepen and broaden our social worlds, but they also carry the risk of creating a sense of insularity and disconnection from other parts of our social life. Staying in and watching a movie with our significant other can seem a lot more relaxing after a long week of work than attending a social event, but if we do this week after week, our other relationships may start to erode, decreasing our overall social capital. No matter how much we love our significant others, it’s unlikely that they alone can meet all of our social needs, and expecting them to do so can be damaging to the relationship over time.

Beyond the benefits we receive directly from our significant others in the form of support and comfort, our significant others also have the potential to introduce us to a whole new social network, the friendships and other connections that our partner has developed over the years. When we enter a partnership our networks double—our partner’s connections become ours as well, and vice versa.

Support in times of need is one of the major benefits of what researchers call bonding capital. Bonding capital may not give us the breadth and diversity of looser bridging-focused ties, but it gives us the closeness and intimacy that even 10,000 Twitter followers might not provide.

For many people, there is one special person to whom they feel closest—often a romantic partner, but sometimes a best friend or family member. Significant others are the first people we turn to when we’re suffering, and their support can benefit not only our mental health but also our physical health:

At times, however, friendship can be a source of jealousy and competition. According to a psychological theory called the self-evaluation maintenance model, we tend to be happy for our friends' success, but only if the success is not in a domain that is also important to us, and only if the friend is not too close. If our friends' successes threaten our own self-esteem, we may distance ourselves from them or even try to sabotage them. Friendship can also be a liability if we base our self-worth on our friends’ approval: For individuals high in friendship-contingent self-esteem, depending too much on friends can make our self-esteem unstable and increase symptoms of depression. Building social capital with friends. How can we make the most of our friendships? One approach is to be mindful of the subtle ways that jealousy can erode friendship and to find ways to reframe friends’ potentially threatening successes in a way that highlights shared benefits (e.g., your friend might be able to help you improve and reach your own goals) and that involves taking your friends’ perspective. Friends need our support and encouragement just as much when they are up as when they are down, according to research.

friendships that cross ethnic group boundaries can help reduce anxiety and potentially even improve physical health among people who tend to feel anxious in intergroup settings

What are they good for? Friendship helps us meet our needs for belonging and our need to feel known and appreciated for who we are. It also allows us to know and understand others more deeply than we can know strangers: Research suggests that our friends bring out the best in us when it comes to empathic accuracy, or the ability to know and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings.

studies show that people with a large amount of bridging capital have a greater sense of connection to the broader community, a more open-minded attitude, and a greater ability to mobilize support for a cause.

In short, it pays to be a giver on social media, not just a lurker or a taker.

What are their limitations? Facebook is no cure for loneliness, and the positive feelings gained may be short-lived. Though online contacts can be great when it comes to sharing everyday joys and challenges, there are times when no sympathetic emoticons can replace the comfort of a loved one’s physical presence. Using social media effectively requires knowing its limitations, and, as with a flaky friend, not expecting more from it than it can give.

 Studies suggest that online communication may especially benefit less extraverted individuals by giving them opportunities to provide support to others in a non-threatening environment, an experience that can in turn increase self-esteem and reduce depression. Contrary to popular opinion, research also shows that using Facebook can help satisfy our need for connection.

found time andtime again if I have really rich patterns of friendships I feel less stress on a dailybasis I have lower levels of he stress hormone cortisol so its starting to affect ourstress profiles

and what we know is tight connections tofriends are one of the great determinants of happiness and health. The strongerthe networks of friends that we have the greater the happiness and well being weenjoy in just about every part of the world. We know that strong friendships areassociated with better health profiles.

influential theorizing that I want you to be mindful of of Shelley Taylor, showing thatour tendencies toward friendship and connection activate oxytocin and counteractthe responses of stress so we start to get a picture of why friendships matter.

Research suggests that the number of close friends people report having has declined by one-third over the past generation (at least in the United States).

When we’re feeling down, the instinct is often to vent to friends. It’s good to have a support system, but if that’s all there is, it’s hard to get distance from what’s bothering you. Doing things for other people, thinking about other people, is like giving your brain a break from despair.”

Things that cause friendship are: doing kindnesses; doing them unasked; and not proclaiming the fact when they are done, which shows that they were done for our own sake and not for some other reason.

A friend is one who feels thus and excites these feelings in return: those who think they feel thus towards each other think themselves friends. This being assumed, it follows that your friend is the sort of man who shares your pleasure in what is good and your pain in what is unpleasant, for your sake and for no other reason.

And we also feel friendly towards those who praise such good qualities as we possess, and especially if they praise the good qualities that we are not too sure we do possess.

Things that cause friendship are: doing kindnesses; doing them unasked; and not proclaiming the fact when they are done, which shows that they were done for our own sake and not for some other reason.