Friendships in Middle Adulthood

In midlife, generally defined as the period between young adulthood and old age, friendships provide affection, companionship, understanding, and social support and therefore contribute to well-being. [Page 731]Friends can also affect the status, power, wealth, attitudes, behaviors, and values of middle-aged people. In addition to these consequences for individuals, midlife friendship patterns can affect society, such as by reinforcing the class structure and upholding the institution of marriage. Friendship is thus an important type of human relationship during this stage of life. This entry synthesizes what is known about the interactive processes exchanged between friends during midlife, the internal structure of midlife friendships, and how these friendships vary across contexts and individual demographic characteristics.

In Western societies, friends are not determined by blood ties, as relatives are, or by residence, as neighbors are. This absence of a structural definition of friendship results in a lack of clear consensus about which relationships are considered friendships and about the normative expectations relevant to this type of relationship. Although scholars have generally conceptualized friendship as a voluntary relationship between equals, research shows that individuals use the term to refer to relationships that do not meet these criteria, sometimes applying it to mere acquaintances and sometimes reserving it for intimates. Despite this variation in the use of the term, however, most people define friendship social psychologically and, more specifically, affectively, as a close relationship with nonkin.

With age, opportunities for and constraints on friendships change and people approach friendship with different attitudes, skills, and dispositions. Although people experience the middle years in different ways, midlife is the stage of the life course with the potential for the most responsibilities. Not all middle-aged people are committed to partners, have children, are employed, or care for older adults in their families, but these circumstances are expected of middle-aged people in Western society and can affect friendship. For example, involvement in a committed romantic partnership sometimes means dropping some friendships, adding new ones, and spending more social time with couples. Children absorb a great deal of time, which can interfere with friendship, but they also provide new sources of friends for their parents—the parents of their friends. Caring for an aging parent can limit the amount of time available to spend with friends, but can also widen a social circle, for example by adding acquaintances from the parent's neighborhood or from a caregiver's support group. Similarly, work both uses time that could be spent socializing and provides new opportunities for friendships with coworkers.

Friendships of midlife adults are also likely to differ from those of younger or older persons because of the developmental maturity often characteristic of this stage of life, such as an ability to handle a highly complex environment, the emergence of a highly differentiated self, and an achieved balance between productivity and stagnation. Midlife friendship patterns are thus different than those of younger and older people. Furthermore, concurrent sociological and developmental forces affect midlife friendships, as do prior experiences. Given that the longer people have lived, the more time they have had to follow different paths, friendship patterns are more varied across individuals during midlife than they are during earlier periods of life.

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