4. A strong friendship
between the two families.
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Not only that, but in older adults, friendships are actually a stronger predictor of health and happiness than relationships with family members. ... Friends also can provide a source of support for people who don't have spouses or for those who don't lean on family in times of need...
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Friends become increasingly important to health and happiness as people age, according to new research in the journal Personal Relationships. They’re so crucial, in fact, that having supportive friendships in old age was found to be a stronger predictor of wellbeing than having strong family connections.
The new paper explores the findings of two studies about relationships. In the first, involving more than 270,000 people in nearly 100 countries, author William Chopik found that both family and friend relationships were associated with better health and happiness overall. But at advanced ages, the link remained only for people who reported strong friendships.
“I went into the research sort of agnostic to the role of friendship,” says Chopik, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “But the really surprising thing was that, in a lot of ways, relationships with friends had a similar effect as those with family—and in others, they surpassed them.”
For the other study, Chopik analyzed a separate survey of nearly 7,500 older people in the U.S. Here, he found that it wasn’t just important to have friends, but that the quality of those friendships also mattered.
When people said their friends were a source of strain, they reported having more chronic illnesses. (Interestingly, that was not the case for people who reported strain from their spouses and children.) When their friends were a source of support, people were happier.