The Science Behind Friendship

Friendship is a feeling developed when a person starts to acknowledge that one’s feeling towards another is more than just a mere knowing. Friendship is that flame that ignites when the flints of bonding are struck together. So taking friendship as the main subject let’s see what science says about it.

1. Like a classic Bollywood dialogue, it starts off with “a dude and a dudette can’t be friends”: A study at the University of Wisconsin shows that friendship between men and women is a fairly recent phenomenon, and that it’s impossible to escape from moments of seduction and sexual tension. Scientists studied 88 friend couples of the opposite sex and concluded that men were more physically and sexually attracted to their female friends, and tended to overestimate how these women saw them.
2. Facebook is like an extrovert’s paradise, friends were limited until Facebook came along: a person generally has a countable number of friends close around but after the evolution of FB, Oxford University says that on an average, there is a significant increase in the number of friends that a person can have from 10 to 150. How cool is that!
3. When you fall in love it costs you two people: Anthropologist Robin Dunbar says that when you fall in love when a new person enters into your life, he or she displaces two others in your close circle, usually a family member or a friend. In previous studies, the specialist has calculated that we have five close friends

4. Men and women are different: Scientists studied 6,500 British men born in 1958 and found that marriage is most beneficial for men’s mental health, as it enforces their family ties. However, the opposite was true for women, as they tended to lose friends to lack of time when married.
5. FRIENDSHIP IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH: No matter if you’re female or male, having friends is a good thing. People with a wide network of friends have less tension, suffered from less stress, had stronger defenses and lived longer. Friends encourage good habits, chase away depression, help you overcome diseases and cause satisfaction, pleasure, and happiness. “Not having a social support network can be a higher death risk than obesity or leading a sedentary life without exercise,” explains Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and head of a study at Brigham Young University, on the relationship between friendship and longevity. “The studies have shown a 50% increased odds of survival if you have a solid social network.”

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