Why we need friends

Friendship is the fifth basic food group. What do I mean? Basically this: Human beings cannot live without attachment, without companionship. It’s an indisputable fact, heavily researched and based on our biological and psychological make-up. We need another person to know that we are a person.

The human need for attachment is so basic that it even found its way to Hollywood. In the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks, for example, Hanks’s character, Chuck Noland, is stranded on a desert island when only a few days into his isolation he creates a friend out of a volleyball. Naming the ball Wilson, Noland adorns his companion with hair and a face. He brings Wilson everywhere bouncing ideas off him, talking to him, hunting for food with him, until even the audience sees this inanimate object as a key character in the movie.

“We need another to reflect off our ourselves,” says Dr. Paul Dobransky, a psychologist who specializes in relationships. “We need someone else because without that other person we don’t have a mirror into ourselves. Without another we feel a lack of existing, a lack of identity. We need emotional connection in order to live because that emotional connection lets a person know they exist,” says Dobransky who wrote the book, The Power of Female Friendship.

Well, it’s a good thing we have so much connection then, right? With all our new technology, Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter (follow me @insidebeltway) and more, we’re connecting more than we ever did, so we’re moving in the right direction.

Actually, that’s really not true. Despite technology, or maybe because of it, we’re actually less connected. According to a recent study, 20 years ago the average woman listed two as the number of friends on whom she could rely. In 2005 that number had dropped to one, a 50-percent decline. “You could see that as a public health crisis,” says Dobransky. “There’s a huge health impact.”

“Friendship is as important to our health as exercise and eating right, especially for women,” says Dr. Laura Triplette, Assistant Communications Professor and Head of Entertainment Studies at California State University, Fullerton.

But, “I think people underestimate the significance of friendship,” says Dr. Elaine Zelley Assistant Professor, Department of Communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia.

Next time, more on the importance of friendship, specifically for women. Why do women make friendship such a low priority in their lives?