Last update: 10 September, 2022
A recent study of the APA (Association of American Psychologists) published in Psychology and Aging allowed to demonstrate what many of us suspected: as the years go by, the parameters of friendship change. In concrete terms, at the age of 30, quality is more important than quantity in friendship.
This study reveals that at 20 we relate to a wide variety of people who enrich our worldview, which affects our personality and breadth of expectations.
At 30, however, we are socially exhausted from entertaining other people and prefer more quality in our relationships and materialize everything we have learned into well-being.
The study showed that the relationships of both age groups had a long-term effect: people who had many friends at 20 and few at 30, but of better quality, showed greater psychological health at 50. The conclusion doesn't translate into having fewer friends at 30, but into properly select those that really make us feel good.
Friendship along the course of life
The importance we attach to friendship remains constant throughout the course of life, but at each stage it manifests itself in a different way.
When we are small, we give more importance to authoritarian figures that surround us: parents and teachers. We relate to other children to gradually develop awareness of our personal individuality, to set in motion our emotional, cognitive and social skills through play and school.
During adolescence, the concept of friendship changes dramatically. In this phase, the relationships with our equals and not with the authority figures will determine our character and our incipient identity formation, which will be more or less tormenting based on the fact of being able to relate to other adolescents similar to us. .
At this stage, friendship is lived more intensely and will normalize with the onset of youth, when friendship will play a crucial role in developing our personality, our habits and our interests. As we approach our 30s, these relationships will be fewer and more selective.
Friends at 20
When we are 20, our whole world is boiling. We do not have many things clear, but we act without fear and with such spontaneity as to lead us to know many people. The pains are also experienced very intensely and we live in the pole of intimacy versus isolation, as everything seems to be very polarized.
We need to meet new people to feed us, without too many prejudices or expectations… We run into ongoing social proof with people we don't know, because we need it, we need to enjoy our freedom and see what we really care about.
