Humans are social beings by nature. Whenever we are with people whom we are close with and care about, we tend to feel better about ourselves, our moods generally improve. This is why everyone enjoys spending time with friends.
Humans seek to build friendships with like-minded people who we can relate to and who we can see some of us in them. People often joke around saying that a true friend knows everything about us and still like us anyway. It’s these types of intimate friendships that we all need in our lives as they are the friendships most likely to last thought our lifetime.
So why are friendships so important to us all?
#1: Friendships Improve Your Social & Life Skills
Friendships teach us how to interact with the world. The friends you have in life provide you with the foundation and components that almost any relationship is built upon; from acquaintances, coworkers, and even marriages.
We don’t just talk with our friends, but we learn from them while we are also teaching them. Friends teach each other everything about navigating our lives and social situations, from making conversation, how to interact with others, as well as how to love, laugh, and forgive. Over time, friends provide guidance dealing with moods and mannerisms, as well as many other aspects of communication such as sarcasm and innuendos.
Friends provide the safe emotional space we require for us to completely be ourselves, even when we find ourselves outside our comfort zones.
#2: Friendships Are Good for Your Mental Health
An often-overlooked benefit of having solid friendships in your life is that they help with our mental health, just like eating right and staying fit is important to our physical health.
Quality friendships help us to make better life choices, while also keeping our stress levels manageable, which may even help you to make positive changes to your future self. This means we’re happier when we choose to spend time with happy people.
Having friends that you can relate to means that you can always discuss your problems with them because a problem shared is often a problem solved. Just sharing your concerns with friends may help find a solution, which feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off your shoulders.
#3: Friendships Improve Our Quality Of Life
Friendships ensure our lives are full of genuine understanding, good conversation, heartfelt caring, quality support, and probably most importantly, good times with laughter and fun. Whenever we fall down or struggle through harder times, good friends will always be there helping out where they can and putting things into perspective for us. Friends are also there for our good times in life, toasting our successes, patting us on the back whenever we’ve done well, and laughing at our lame jokes. When humans have healthy and quality friendships in our lives, we don’t just live- we thrive.
The importance of friendship cannot be overstated. Apart from the emotional and psychological impact of friendships, there are also other benefits that cannot be ignored. They can even be more important to our general wellbeing and psychological welfare than romantic relationships, because friends provide us with more happiness than virtually anything else.