Why later life can be a golden age for friendship

Our social goals change in surprising ways over our lifespan – and understanding this can help us build fulfilling connections with others, research suggests.

Do you prefer meeting lots of new people, or spending time with a small circle of close friends? You may think the answer depends on whether you’re naturally more of an extrovert or an introvert. But there’s another crucial yet little-known factor that shapes our social preferences: age.

One simple explanation for this is that friendships can be more fun, and less tense and fraught, than other relationships. According to a study of Americans aged over 65, encounters with friends were seen as more pleasant than those with family members. These findings contrast with older studies that focus more on close family as the key source of support for aging adults.

Compared to young people, there is however one important difference in how older people choose and maintain their friendships. While young people tend to actively look for new contacts, older people deliberately shrink their social networks, says Katherine Fiori, a professor of psychology at Adelphi University, New York. While this reduction in the number of relationships in our lives has important advantages, it also has some disadvantages that can be worth addressing, she and others say.

One advantage of cultivating a smaller circle is that the remaining, carefully chosen ties tend to be high-quality.

“As people age, their perspective on the future changes – they have less time to live, essentially,” Fiori says. “Their priorities shift, and they tend to be focused on socio-emotional goals.”

This is also known as the socio-emotional selectivity theory. Younger adults see their future as expansive and focus on building new connections. Older adults prioritise spending time with people who know them well, and therefore whittle their connections down. Fiori explains that the winnowing down of these weaker ties is purposeful – people are doing it to focus on their close ties as they get closer to death.

Researchers have found that as part of that whittling-down, older adults even deliberately drop less-close acquaintances from their social networks. This increases the so-called “emotional density” of their social circle – meaning they work towards creating a smaller, tighter group. Older adults also tend to be more forgiving and positive with those chosen contacts, as they try to savour life and their remaining time together, the research suggests.

This focus on joy chimes with other findings on the role of positivity in older age. For example, compared to younger adults, older adults generally have a more positive attitude, and focus on positive life events and memories – a phenomenon known as the “positivity effect“.

However, you don’t necessarily have to be elderly to experience this effect of focusing more on close, joyful, positive relationships. When younger people are prompted to think about the fragility of life, and their limited time on Earth, they also change their social goals from a more expansive strategy to a more focused one, according to a 2016 study.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, this effect was particularly stark: at the peak of the pandemic, people across all age categories favoured emotionally meaningful partners, a series of studies showed. In other words, older people continued their standard, age-typical strategy of focusing on fewer but closer ties, while younger people changed their previously open, expansive strategy, and acted more like older people in terms of their social preferences.

“Findings suggest that widely documented age differences in social motivation reflect time horizons more than chronological age,” according to the study. In other words, how much time we think we have affects our social strategy more than our actual age.

However, even as a person cultivates those close ties, it’s a good idea to also remain open to new friendships, researchers say. Fiori and her colleagues have found that reducing one’s network too much isn’t necessarily healthy. Perhaps surprisingly, Fiori says there is no evidence to suggest that an exclusive focus on close ties is beneficial for mental or physical health – at any age.

“Friendships are very beneficial for the well-being of people across the lifespan, and part of it is because different relationships fulfil different roles,” she says. “Our closest ties tend to be the ones that provide us with social support, emotional support, instrumental support – but there are other functions that we get from our relationships that tend to be just as important, if not more important, but often come from different types of ties.”

For example, our friendships might offer intellectual stimulation or simply allow us to have fun – the key difference being that friendships are voluntary, non-obligatory relationships, that can begin or end at any time. (Read here about what to do when a friendship ends).

Alexandra Thompson, a mental health research fellow at Newcastle University in the UK, echoes this. “Friendships give us slightly different benefits to our family relationships for a variety of reasons,” she says. “Family relationships can be strained – they can be based on obligation. But friendship is about shared interests, and this can increase positive mood.”

Some friendships can become so close that the word itself may not feel like enough to convey the depth of the relationship. Perhaps a friend may feel like a sibling, for example. Friends can become “fictive kin”, offering the warmth and dependability of family, as well as the pleasure of friendship, says Fiori. “Kinship should not be reduced to just blood or marriage,” she says. “When that person becomes kin, then that relationship shifts, becoming more obligatory.”

In the LGBTQ+ community, people may rely on such “chosen” or “intentional” families for support as they age. This can especially be the case for the older generation, who often experienced extreme discrimination growing up, including rejection by family, and may not have had the opportunity to raise children. People who have chosen not to have children may also generally rely more on friends than on biological kin as they age.

However, while cultivating close and even kin-like ties, we can also still enjoy looser bonds, Thompson suggests. The key is to choose quality over quantity: “It’s not about having hundreds of friends,” she says. “It’s not a case of, if we keep adding friends, we’ll see reductions in loneliness, we’ll see improvements to mental health, we’ll see improvements to physical health… I think it’s always going to be about having those shared experiences and interests.”

Thompson’s PhD research explored the optimal number of friends to have as older adults for our psychological wellbeing and to combat loneliness. She found that having four close friends was the ideal number, and past this, she didn’t find any substantial benefits to our wellbeing.

“It’s about how we encourage people to make good quality, close, intimate connections, or bolster the connections that they already have, to increase that quality and depth of intimacy, so that they’re getting these benefits and different kinds of social provisions from their current friends,” says Thompson.

The effort is worth it, for many reasons: the advantages of friendship in later life stretch beyond just psychological wellbeing, and include better cognitive functioning and physical health. In fact, research consistently suggests that friendships are as important as family ties in predicting wellbeing in adulthood and old age. A metastudy which pulled together studies together looking at around 309,000 individuals, followed for an average of 7.5 years, found that people with adequate social relationships have a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. Friendships can also be a source of stability, especially important since demographic trends indicate a departure from the traditional, “nuclear family” towards single parenthood, divorce and re-marriage, making family life more complex.

So how do we create this beneficial little network of soulmates and friendly acquaintances?

For all the positive aspects of ageing on relationships, older adults do face a number of hurdles that can make meeting people very hard, Fiori says.

They don’t have the social opportunities of school, university or the workplace. They may be struggling with the grief and loneliness of outliving partners and dear friends. Declining cognitive functioning or mobility issues can add further difficulties. If a person is naturally introverted, approaching new people can also in itself feel daunting.

Gender can also play a role. Older men typically report more social isolation than women. Some research suggests that women traditionally act as “kinkeepers” and therefore have stronger ties to friends and family in old age.

But there’s also a factor that is more to do with our mindset – and especially, our own perception of aging, says Fiori.

“If someone sees themselves as, ‘I’m declining [health-wise] and nobody wants to be friends with me anymore. I have nothing left to live for’ – that kind of person is not going to be going out and trying to make friends, but someone who has a more positive perception of ageing will,” says Fiori.

She suggests that cognitive interventions might be useful to combat this – not just therapy, but more broadly, any kind of intervention that targets change in cognition to help older adults have more positive perceptions of aging.

“Self-perceptions of aging can work as self-fulfilling prophecies, such that older people who believe late life is associated with the risk of becoming lonely are less likely to invest in relationships,” she says. “In contrast, older people who see their age in a more positive light and believe that it is still possible to make new plans and to engage in new activities will invest more. And these investments in social relationships have positive consequences for well-being.”

After all, in some ways, it should be easier for us to make friends as older adults: as our personalities mature, not only does our outlook become more joy-oriented, but we also tend to become more agreeable.

“People over time gain social skills. Older adults are just more skilled socially than younger adults,” says Fiori. “So in some ways they may be better able to avoid conflict.”

Thompson makes the case for providing social opportunities. She worked with the charity Rise, in the north-east of England, on a programme for older adults called Every Move Matters. The participants were recruited through their doctor’s surgery, and took part in four, once-weekly sessions that involved a physical activity followed by time to socialise. The idea was to boost physical fitness as well as emotional connection.

“Just having that nudge, that opportunity offered to you can simply be enough to get you to go along to something like that,” Thompson says. “And the people that went along loved it.”

Having access to the internet may be helpful for the wellbeing of older adults too, especially if they are experiencing physical decline. Technology can allow them to access a wide range of resources, as well as share things with their friends. However, they are slower to adopt new technologies as opposed to their younger counterparts.

One observational study looked to explore how older adults between 69 and 91 years of age from independent living communities used technology. Each participant already owned a tablet or similar device, after seeing them being used by others, or through recommendations by friends and relatives. Though it used a small sample size, it found that technology can help to connect them with family, friends and the wider world, and therefore makes the case for improving the technological literacy of older adults in the hope of making positive improvements to their lives.

Harold, who participated in the study, said: “I feel more informed; I feel I’m in more contact with my family. I just enjoy it a great deal…for daily news and keeping up with our friends.”

There are signs that further social change is ahead – for the better. Fiori says that more recently born cohorts are spending a lot more time with friends up until late life, in comparison to earlier born cohorts.

“One of the things that we think is driving this change, too, is perceptions of aging have gotten less negative,” she says. “My colleague [Oliver Huxhold of The German Centre of Gerontology] is predicting that in the future older adults will very likely not only mention more friendships within their support network… but will also spend more time with them.”

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