Friendship beats romance. Here’s why │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin
Our friends are arguably the most important relationships in our lives.
Find out what’s so special about human friendships, and how they differ between men and women.
Anthropologist Anna Machin explains which aspects of love and attraction are hard-wired into our brains by nature, and why we can blame (some of) our misbehaviour in relationships on biology. She also gives us a glimpse of what the future of love might look like.
More on the science behind this video:
Dr Anna Machin’s website https://annamachin.com/
Dr Anna Machin’s blog https://annamachin.com/blog/
This series was produced with our partner Pint of Science! Find out more: www.pintofscience.com
Do you share things with your best friend you’d never tell your partner? Find out what’s so special about human friendship love.
Humans are one of the few species whose relationships extend beyond the reproductive, and a large proportion of our social network is made up of friends and acquaintances. But our friendships, particularly if we have a romantic partner, large family or children, are often at the bottom of the love pile. Arguably though, you can dispense with romantic love if you don't want that life partner, and parental love if you don't want children, but you get rid of your friendship love at your peril.
Friends bring concrete benefits in terms of health and well-being. For example, our friends, particularly at pre-school when we venture away from the family for the first time, are the first relationships we actively choose to be in. When we are adolescent, we move our primary attachments away from our carers to our friends. And it often becomes the greatest influence in our behaviour and our actions. And as adults, our friends remain important.
For women, they are often more intimate attachments than those we have with our romantic partners. For men, they are a source of ease and of a good sense of humour. Somewhere you can really, truly be yourself. Now people tend to choose friends similar to themselves. This is known has homophily. Even down to their brain activity. Our friends tend to be the same gender as us, the same ethnicity and often in the same age range. We have mirroring in our behaviour, our personality, and how kind we are and how likely we are to help each other out. And when we look at the brain activity of friends, for example, observing the same scene, we see the same areas and intensity of brain activity. It shows that friends perceive, interpret and react to the world in similar ways. Similarity means that one’s own values are reinforced, but also it cuts down on cognitive costs of the relationship, as it's much easier to predict the person’s thoughts and moves. And as the number of singles increases and we live further and further away from our extended family, often our friends become our chosen family and we experience a love so deep that it's the same as that we have with our kin.
Recent research has shown that 6% of American adults will be single for their entire lives. So, in many cases, friends can be the primary attachment figures, and for single people they can be the most valued and influential people in their life. The more friends you have, the more secure you are, and you particularly are not avoidantly attached. It’s not about who you love or the nature of that love, but it's all about loving someone. We’ve seen that men and women experience friendships in different ways.
In the next episode, we’ll explore how a mother’s love differs from a father’s, and what this means for modern dads.
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