Importance of Family and Friendship in an Individual’s Life

Importance of Family

Close supportive relationships between parents and children, between siblings, and between
extended family members enhance the social support available to all family members. This social
support enhances subjective well-being and from an evolutionary perspective we are ‘hard-
wired’ to derive happiness from this contact with our kinship network (Argyle, 2001; Buss,
2000). There are certain things that we can do to enhance the benefits of kinship on our
experience of happiness. Keep in regular contact with members of your family. Plan your
lifestyle to allow you to maintain closer physical contact with your family. This planning refers
to both stages of your yearly cycle and the longer time frame of your lifecycle. During periods
when you are separated from your family use e-mail, the phone, and videotaped messages or
video conferencing or internet video link to stay in touch. Maintaining contact with family
members increases social support and this brings not only happiness but also improved immune
system functioning. Maintaining contact with the extended family network reduces the chances
of domestic violence and child abuse, because it pierces the veil of privacy that goes with being
an isolated nuclear family so common in cases of domestic violence.

Importance of Friendship

Maintaining a few close confiding relationships has been found to correlate with happiness and
subjective well-being (Argyle, 2001, 2000). For example, in a study of the happiest 10 per cent
of a group of 222 college students, Diener and Seligman (2002) found that their most distinctive
attribute was their rich and fulfilling social life. These students spent a significant amount of
their time socialising with friends and were rated by themselves and their friends at being
outstanding in making and maintaining close friendships. Confiding relationships are probably
associated with happiness for three reasons. First, happy people may be more often selected as
friends and confidants, because they are more attractive companions than miserable people. They
also help others more than depressed people who are self-focused and less altruistic. Second,
confiding relationships meet needs for affiliation and so make us feel happy and satisfied. Third,
close friendships provide social support. These research findings and insights on friendship from
evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2000) have implications for how we can enhance our happiness
through relationships with friends. Make a few good close friends and keep in touch with them.
If you want to make good friends, choose work or leisure activities where you are likely to meet
people who share similar interests to you and are similar in overall abilities, status and life
experience to you, since friendships between people who are more similar have been shown to be
deeper than those between dissimilar people. Where appropriate, find a match between your
unique skills, characteristics and style and the needs or preferences of potential friends. Early on
in friendships, this matching is important. If our profile of attributes and talents is unique and
matches the needs of a new friend, we are less likely to be replaced. In evolutionary terms, we
are fitter than other competitors for the role of being a friend to that person. To distinguish fair-
weather friends from truly committed friends, once a friendship has developed, test the strength
of the bond by disclosing some imperfection about yourself or putting yourself in a physically
vulnerable situation in which your friend has to help you, for example in adventure sports such
as climbing or sailing (Zahavi and Zahavi, 1997).