The first time I told my friend Tim I loved him we were both fifteen.
Tim and I had met in elementary school, and he was the only boy I invited to my sixth birthday party. It was a dress-up affair, and Tim, true to form, came dressed as a “person”—a fact we still laugh about today because, despite all that has changed in the decades we’ve been friends, Tim’s disdain for costume parties has not wavered.
The following year, I changed schools and didn’t see Tim until summer vacation five years later. Outside our local supermarket, our moms spotted each other and stopped for one of those mom-to-mom chats every preteen dreads. After quickly working out that we lived on opposite sides of one of our town’s main roads, my mom suggested that Tim and I walk to and from school together. Now eleven, memories of my sixth birthday party long faded, I couldn’t believe she was doing this to me. After we parted ways and stepped onto the escalator to leave the shopping center, out of earshot from Tim and his mom, I hissed at mine for embarrassing me. I didn’t want to be friends with whoever that was, thank you very much. After being placed in many of the same classes, Tim and I eventually came around on my mom’s suggestion and spent most afternoons after school walking home together. We played compilation pop albums out of Tim’s portable CD player, we’d sit by the creek that flowed under a rickety wooden bridge (a path I was strictly forbidden from taking, unless I was walking with Tim), and then often finish our walks home with a visit to one of our houses for a glass of water after spending thirty minutes in the beating sun. By the final two years of school, despite being in different friendship circles, we were incredibly close.
Tim and I were both growing up in public housing with single parents, so when our Ancient History class planned a trip to Pompeii it wasn’t exactly a surprise that neither of us was able to go. On the weekend most of our classmates were overseas, we decided the only suitable substitute for the trip would be to spend the night locked in my bedroom watching The Lizzie McGuire Movie, which is famously set in Italy. We watched the film, took photos together to upload to Myspace, and at the end of the night my mom asked if Tim wanted to stay over. Once again, I was embarrassed by her suggestion. Tim was a friend, sure, but he was still a boy, and in my teenage mind, that placed him in a different category from my girlfriends, whom I always wanted to invite for sleepovers.
In hindsight, this was one of the first signifiers that Tim and the friendship we had was special. By the time Tim came out to me one afternoon on a park bench outside our art class, there was no other way I could have responded than with, “I love you.”
Many scenes from the early years of my friendship with Tim could be given a sepia treatment and not feel out of place in an indie coming-of-age film. But when I remember that time, I don’t just see the burgeoning friendship of two teenagers, I see a connection that existed outside class, or even school, and held space within my family. When I was elected as the female school captain, my mom’s excitement for me was equal to her disappointment that Tim wasn’t going to be my male counterpart—since he was elected vice captain, meaning we often weren’t paired together on projects or at assemblies. When Tim returned from four months of backpacking in Europe a week early to surprise his friends and family, he turned up at my house to find I wasn’t there; Mum called me and, not wanting to spoil the surprise, simply told me to get home immediately with a sense of urgency I couldn’t imagine her using for anything other than a true emergency. I was in such a rush to get there I reversed into a utility pole while pulling out of a parking lot and crumpled in the back of my beloved 1993 Suzuki Swift.
In those years, and still today, I considered Tim family—a compliment reserved only for our closest friends. But why? Family matters for many different reasons, but one of the most ignored is the influence these relationships can have on the way we value our friends.
In 2017, psychologist William J. Chopik undertook a study1 with 271,053 adults, from teenagers to people in their seventies, from ninety-seven different countries. While a lot of research had already proved the effect that close relationships have on our overall health and well-being throughout our lives, Chopik wanted to compare the effects of different kinds of close relationships. Namely, he wanted to look at family, spouses, children, and friends.
Chopik’s research found that people who place a higher importance on friendships have “particularly better health, happiness, and subjective well-being at older ages” than people who don’t. More specifically, the research found that for people in older adulthood, the positive effects of friendships are stronger than that of their familial relationships. The study also found that the more important people’s friends are to them, the more likely they are to feel the benefits of having these close relationships.
To me, one of the most interesting things about a study that compares the relationships we have with our parents, siblings, partners, and children to those we have with our friends is that there’s no guarantee people will have all—or even any—of those meaningful familial relationships. And when we look at the family sizes and structures of generations before us, we know millennials are statistically less likely to have as many children or siblings as our parents or grandparents. In 1910, the average American household was made up of 4.54 people. In 1959, it was made up of 3.34 people. And by 2002, there was an average of 2.56 people in every household.2 But if families are becoming statistically smaller, who exactly is filling the gaps? Our friends.
Despite not being one myself, I’ve always found myself drawn to only children. Tim is an only child, as is my partner, Michael. It’s not uncommon for me to gravitate toward a new friend only to find out after a few conversations that they don’t have any siblings—in fact, I’m quite used to it by now. I adore both Tim and Michael for a million very different reasons, but what I admire most in both is the care with which they treat their friends. When I speak to them about what it was like growing up without siblings, as I often do, their stories are very different (Tim played Monopoly alone, moving the different pieces around the board himself, while Michael spent hours in his backyard throwing a football as high as he could in the air) but the sentiment behind them is the same: No matter what you’re doing, a friend can make all the difference.
The only children in my life don’t fit any of the stereotypes that once plagued kids who grew up without siblings. I know that Michael and my sibling-less friends know how to share and be patient and put others before themselves because I have witnessed it firsthand repeatedly. Living closely alongside them, I have seen the way only children hold their friends close, because they know what it means to be alone. While I know the guarantees that come along with my sister’s love—that I will always have someone to call, someone who can cherish my childhood as much as I do, and someone who will one day share the responsibility for our parents—I also know how it feels to fill that role in the life of someone without siblings. And it’s a privilege.
One of the reasons modern households are becoming smaller is because people are having fewer children. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national birth rate in the US fell by almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. And while this decline shows that many people are remaining childless or child-free, the numbers also suggest that only children are becoming more common.
There’s a lot of talk about what shrinking households—and populations—mean for a society. From elderly people who are without kin to care for them to the politics of an aging workforce, many discussions are being had worldwide about the impacts of people choosing to have smaller families. But little of this discussion looks at the roles friends play in the lives of those with small or nonexistent families.
I’m endlessly interested in the ways our families and friendships collide, the way they push and pull, like ocean tides. A 2015 study titled “Family and friends: Which types of personal relationships go together in a network?”3 looked to investigate what influence familial relationships and friendships had on one another. Researchers wanted to know: Does having a smaller family usually mean having more friends?
The study confirmed, as researchers expected, that people with numerous family members who have active involvement in their life had fewer nonfamily members—like friends, neighbors, and colleagues—in their close network. The study also found that those without as many active family members in their network welcomed more friends into their lives to fill the space. What was most interesting about this research was its focus on “active” family members. For a family member to hold their place in someone’s social network, and not have their role filled by a friend, they needed to actively participate in the relationship. The study found, essentially, that even if you do have siblings, parents, and other relatives, they still need to consistently show up if they want to remain part of your life. People want to feel that they have a network they can depend on. So people who don’t have dependable family instinctively look to bring their friends closer.
When your biological family is small, friends become more than an insurance policy—they become a lifeline. Since I was a child, I’ve had friends who have little to no recollection of ever meeting one of their parents, despite their being—as far as we knew—alive and well. At school, I had friends with parents who were incarcerated or living so far away they were unable to be part of their kids’ day-to-day lives. By the time I turned thirty, I had a handful of friends who had already lost a parent, some while they were teenagers and others in the decade following. I’ve sat with friends after they’ve spent afternoons in hospitals and held them after funerals. But just as prevalent as loss is the need for care.
Today, I have friends who are legal guardians or emergency contacts for siblings who are physically or psychologically unable to reciprocate the kind of care they are being provided. And I have friends with no interest in reconnecting with their siblings or parents for a variety of reasons, ranging from clashing personalities to abuse. As positive a person as I aim to be, I’m not delusional enough to think that this trend of unwell parents, broken family ties, and sibling tensions won’t continue as my friends and I enter middle age and beyond. Life, after all, only becomes more complicated. While some of us are fortunate enough to maintain faith in the promise that our family will always be there for us, the reality is that this isn’t always the case. To assume that everyone has a biological family who can care for them unconditionally is to discount the experiences of people who were separated from their parents, who have family members living with addiction, who were unable to have children, or who have been rejected by the family they were born into. The reality is that when it comes to family, there are no guarantees.
In Far from the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love,4 Andrew Solomon presents the idea of horizontal and vertical identities. According to Solomon, vertical identities are those that are passed down to children through DNA and shared cultural norms. These include ethnicity, eye and skin color, language, and, for some, religion. Horizontal identities, on the other hand, are those that are foreign to someone’s biological parents. Solomon spoke to hundreds of people with shared horizontal identities and their families, including those diagnosed with deafness, autism, and Down syndrome, as well as people who have committed serious crimes despite being brought up by parents who haven’t, child prodigies, and trans people with cisgender parents. In the book, and in the world around us, there are endless examples proving that horizontal identities can provide bonds just as strong as, or even stronger than, vertical identities.
“Modern life is lonely in many ways, but the ability of everyone with access to a computer to find like-minded people has meant that no one need be excluded from social kinship,” writes Solomon. “Vertical families are famously breaking down in divorce, but horizontal ones are proliferating. If you can figure out who you are, you can find other people who are the same.”
While the “horizontal identities” Solomon explores so deeply in his book are big, weighty, and, in most instances, life-changing or -defining, the existence of the term prompts me to think of the tiny horizontal identities we can each carry. For example, being vegan, loving video games, playing a certain sport, or being a fan of a particular band are tiny horizontal identities that don’t necessarily separate us from our biological families in a meaningful way but can spark connection to a new community of people with shared interests and experiences. And there are even smaller things too, not always substantial enough to be classed as an identity, that can leave us feeling more connected to our friends rather than to our family.
But horizontal identities need not operate at the expense of our vertical identities. Soon after turning sixty, my mom joined a local motorcycle club, where, on weekends, she rides her vintage BMW, which she had stopped riding when pregnant with me. My sister became a mother years before I’d even thought about my own fertility, and I see how she’s bonded with friends who were raising babies at the same time she was. When I hear my family mention friends I haven’t met, I don’t feel distant from their lives. I’m happy that they’ve found people they feel close to, who can offer them things that I can’t.
The more people there are who can understand us in ways our family can’t, the less pressure there is on our families to know every part of us. When we take a different path from family, for whatever reason, friends can lift the expectation that the people we’re related to by blood should know us better than anyone else.
Many millennials are part of what’s known as a “sandwich generation,” defined by the Pew Research Center5 as a generation of adults with at least one living parent sixty-five or older also raising a child younger than eighteen or providing financial support to an adult child. Essentially, a sandwich generation is made up of people who are juggling the care of two other generations—the one above and the one below. A friend recently spoke of how it felt to be caring for her toddler while also caring for her elderly parents, one of whom was dying of cancer. It’s a scenario you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, but it’s one that a lot of us will face. If you’re lucky enough to have loving parents who live a long life and to have children, if you want them, it seems the trade-off is the space in between, when you inevitably—particularly if you’re a woman—become a caregiver for all.
As society is currently structured, caring roles for our young and old often fall to our biological family. But what of the care needs of the caretaker? Who is there to mind the children while the caretaker’s parents are being taken grocery shopping? Who stocks the fridge of someone who has spent the week driving between their kids’ school pickup and parents’ doctor appointments? Even the sandwiched adults with healthy parents and healthy children are left to carry the emotional labor that can come alongside love, care, and obligation. For people squeezed into the center of the sandwich generation, friends can be a welcome release for the pressure. Relatability is at the heart of most friendships. We’re drawn to people who just get us and whom we understand in return. In adulthood and middle age, connection that was once found by bonding over assistant-level jobs with deplorable salaries and badly behaved housemates is found in new ways. Friends who are of similar age to us are the people most likely to understand the squeeze of the sandwich generation, arriving to give support at a time when empathy and advice can be far more valuable than a proposed solution to an unsolvable problem.
Almost every summer of high school, I would spend two weeks with my friend Bess’s family. They vacationed in the same spot, a campsite hidden between a beach and a sloping national park. Even now, it’s one of my favorite places in the world. When I first started going camping, Bess and I were typical teenage girls. We were moody with her parents and slept in late every morning until the tent got too hot to bear, when we could emerge and throw our duvet-wrapped selves onto a beach lounge to continue dozing. Everything we wore that first summer was hot pink, and the inside of our tent was filled with hot pink bags we’d collected at the mall. I still remember, clear as day, Bess telling some local boys we met on the beach that she’d be sixteen next year—a fact that was technically true, even though she was fourteen (while I was still thirteen) at the time.
Bess’s family, much like her, are loud, clever, kind, and a little eccentric. For the first few years, I felt nervous when her aunties pulled me in for tight hugs or her cousins asked me about school or my plans for college. The intimacy of two weeks spent with a family who were so eager to welcome me felt intimidating. But as years passed and Bess and I grew older and closer, it no longer felt like I was being invited along on their camping trip; it felt like my summer tradition too.
Without the blessing of school vacations or the freedom of college schedules, it’s hard to spend more than a day or two at the campsite now. Still, I visit every year I can, only to be greeted by a family who will, at any cost, try to convince me to stay for lunch, stay for one more afternoon swim, stay for dinner, then stay the night in a tent that’s coincidentally empty and can be made up with a bed in just a few minutes, no hassle at all. Alongside the identities that define us and the life stages we find ourselves in, our personalities also play a big part in the way we approach friendship and relationships with our family. A 2022 study, “Interdependencies between family and friends in daily life: Personality differences and associations with affective well-being across the lifespan,”6 looked at the so-called big five personality traits—extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—and how they relate to the way we interact with both family and friends.
This study found that while most people were in daily contact with their family more often than with their friends, participants were happier when with their friends than they were with family—particularly when it came to people with higher extroversion. It also looked at how our personality influences whether we are more likely to feel closer to our family network or to our friends. People who were conscientious—and thereby more sensitive in nature—tended to have more contact with their family, due to a higher sense of duty. Meanwhile, people who identified as being more open-minded, extroverted, or agreeable tended to gravitate more toward their friends, especially the latter group who often found that many people wanted to be friends with them.
Interestingly, researchers behind the study also pointed out that despite some family members feeling like friends and some friends feeling like family, most people still associate family with “hierarchy rather than equality” and “obligation rather than choice.”
People were more likely to feel like they were volunteering their time to friends, whereas time spent with family felt tied up with a sense of duty. Even for extroverted people like me, who are most likely to have strong bonds with both their family and their friends—presumably because they have the energy to balance both—the results feel exactly right. Who we are, what life stage we’re in, and what we enjoy all blur the lines of importance between our family members and friends. The one constant, no matter who sits at the heart of this conversation, is that there are endless ways friends can complement, supplement, and coexist with our families. One should never be more important than the other by default.