Letters | Close friends hold the key to your health and happiness
- Readers discuss the importance of good relationships in the age of social media friends, the underprivileged in our midst, and why Hong Kong needs English-speaking tourism ambassadors
Your well-being is not only about exercise and diet, but also friendship.
In 1938, Harvard scientists launched a programme to track the lives of a group of young men, hoping to discover the secret to leading healthy and happy lives. Summing up the decades-long study in 2015, Robert Waldinger, the programme’s director, said that close relationships, more than money or fame, help delay mental and physical decline.
In the United States, a survey found that the share of people saying they have no close friends increased from 3 per cent in 1990 to 12 per cent in 2021. Similarly, 58 per cent of Britons reported having no more than 10 friends in a 2021 study; 7 per cent said they did not have close friends.
Friends are not easy to make, and time is an important input. Research by the University of Kansas estimated that it takes around 50 hours to form a casual friendship, 90 hours to go from casual friends to friends, and over 200 hours to become close friends.