Moving on to your new life stage can cause an oddly primitive reaction among friends. Stylist investigates how to navigate the politics of friendship.

Words: Kate Faithfull-Williams. Photography: Armin Zogbaum

Deep breath. You’ve just been given the news that could change your life forever – you’re pregnant, have finally secured your dream house out of town, are being seconded to Australia – and the weight of keeping it to yourself is too much to bear. The one thing you really want to do is reveal all to your friends. So it can come as something of a surprise when the enthusiastic shriek-atthe- top-of-your-lungs reactions you expected from those closest to you are replaced with downcast expressions and disparaging questions: “Why?”, “Are you really ready?”, “Are you willing to give up everything else?” It’s the friendship equivalent of raining on your parade, and enough to turn an unmissable opportunity into a debacle worthy of tearing a friendship apart.

"We decided one winter night in 2008 that we’d move to California,” says Emma Jones, 31, a solicitor from west London. “Ed and I had just got married and we wanted an adventure so we applied for jobs out there and got lucky. If we didn’t move then, there would never have been a right time because life gets in the way. I knew our parents would be upset that we were leaving the country, but I didn’t anticipate that telling friends would be so hard. My best friend burst into tears and wailed, ‘But why?’” This reaction is by no means uncommon. We’ve all been that pioneer – the one who married first, or who left a great job to travel the world, or the one who actually planned to have a baby and move to the country while everyone else was at the bar downing Jägerbombs. But what we hadn’t expected was the fallout and obvious dismay from within our close friendship group.

Chances are that if you’re happily settled in your house in the suburbs or have left an old job to set up your own business, you’ve already heard the views of those friends who are feeling stung by your leaving. For Sally Hartfield, 29, her decision to quit her high-flying job as a city lawyer to start her own clothing label, Matilda & Quinn, was met with scepticism by friends.

“Lawyers tend to be risk-averse so people would say, ‘You’re really brave’ but it was a polite way of saying, ‘You’re insane’.” These unsettling reactions leave us worried that we’ve brought this all on ourselves. Being the first to ‘evolve’ past the particular life stage that we are currently settled into along with our core group of friends, leaves us open to the biting reaction from those left behind. It seems incongruous that the people we love the most can react so negatively to what is effectively a positive step forwards in the evolution of ourselves from teen, to 20-something, to fully fledged grown-up. Especially as we’ve spent the last decade relying on their validation and support. But negative energy when someone breaks away from the pack is actually a deep primitive reaction that is born from very obvious beginnings.

GROUP POLITICS

Friendships are crucial to our lives. Research shows we’d be fatter, sadder and more likely to smoke, get divorced and die younger without them. But there’s no getting away from the fact that navigating them is almost as difficult as Christmas holidays with the family. The history of friendship actually stretches back to the very beginnings of humanity. Darwin himself first alluded to what he called ‘aiding fellows’ in The Descent Of Man. He suggested that the need for making friends comes from the “low motive” of learning: that giving to others leads to receiving knowledge from them in return. So, in evolutionary terms, we all have the basic desire to learn, and we subconsciously congregate with those that might help us do that. Hence why your friendship group is likely to throw up people with similar interests and aspirations to you from which you can learn. In fact, they’re so important that without them our very survival would be threatened. “As a species we don’t survive as individuals or even as small families,” says Lisa Wood, co-author of paper Friendship: The Laws Of Attraction (published in November 2006 Psychology Today). “From caveman times where we needed groups for physical protection, right up to now where friendships play an important emotional role, interconnectedness is a vital part of human survival.”

In 1966, evolutionary biologist George Williams published Adaptation And Natural Selection. He went further than Darwin to suggest that friendship, or the propensity for altruism towards those not in our family, could be passed on genetically because it was favoured by natural selection: “Simply stated, an individual who maximises his friendships and minimises his antagonisms will have an evolutionary advantage.” So surrounding ourselves with friends rather than enemies avoids potentially lethal conflicts giving us an evolutionary edge that is still ingrained in us today. It’s no surprise then, that when one of our ‘pack’ abandons us by evolving to a new life stage, we suffer from a deep primal reaction as if our very safety has been compromised.

In fact, it’s not just humans who form close friendships in order to protect themselves and prolong their lives. Studies on chimps actually hold the clue as to why it affects us so much when a member of our group packs up their city flat, buys some Hunter wellies and heads to the country to start a family. According to scientists, chimps form bonds outside their family groups for the base needs of support in a fight, the borrowing of a valued tool, and the provision of food now and then. It seems as humans we are anthropologically programmed to do the same thing. When someone we’ve lived close to is no longer as accessible to us, we get scared our support system is diminishing, or when a colleague jumps ship we don’t have equal support if we’re ‘threatened’ at work.

PARALLEL LIVES

Growing up, we mark every life landmark with our peers, from exams to our first (usually abortive) attempts to get served in a pub. We go to university around the same age, surviving on Sugar Puffs in tandem, and chances are get our first jobs at the same time, giving us all a couple of years to bemoan terrible wages and despotic bosses in unison. But that – right there – is where it ends. Because after that, friends couple up, move away, earn more or less, and increasingly as you get older you evolve into a single entity who has to make important life decisions without the comfort of friends who just happen to be facing up to the same challenges. And it happens to coincide with when we need them the most. Why? Because by our 30s an individual is likely to have naturally ‘shed’ most of their friends (losing an average of 24 a year) so that by their mid-30s onwards the average Briton has just three close friends.

“Because our families and our jobs absorb so much emotional energy at this stage of our lives, our friendships take on different meaning – having fewer friends creates a more enriching emotional environment,” says social psychologist Dr Arthur Cassidy, who practises in Portadown, Northern Ireland. That’s all very well if you are the protagonist; the first to shed the 20-something shackles and step out alone. For those left behind, it can be a more dismal prospect.

How to navigate the politics of friendship