Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [98]
The Concept of Triadic Closure
Now researchers at Harvard and UCLA are using the Facebook social utility to learn more about triadic closure, or how friends become friends of friends. More than a century ago, a sociologist named Georg Simmel first described the concept of triadic closure, but there have been few empirical studies on the topic.
Using Facebook as a laboratory, social scientists hope to better understand how friends befriend their friends’ friends—which one day may shed light on the exclusionary social cliques that draw circles keeping some people in and others out. Given the importance of friendship in our lives, used well, Facebook and other such social networking sites could potentially yield important information on how to build and sustain healthy relationships.
If best friends live across the country, they can plan a weekend getaway on one coast, the other, or somewhere in-between. If a best friend at work is retiring, she can make arrangements to see former colleague, regularly outside the office. If she’s a young mother, she can make time to get away for an evening or afternoon movie with her single friend.
Emily told me about her friend Robin, who sounded like a poster child for keeping connections and maintaining friendships: “I think friendship takes serious commitment and a lot of time,” says Emily, 59. Robin, whom Emily met in high school, is “very gifted” in that regard. Robin is a great letter writer and a fabulous hostess. In the summer, her old Victorian house is like a B&B, with friends coming and returning because she makes their stay so pleasant and relaxing. Thirty years ago, she met a French couple in a restaurant in Toulouse. They struck up a conversation, and she’s kept in touch and invited them to the United States, and she still visits them in France.
“Robin is amazing that way,” says Emily. She knows that Robin’s Christmas letter list must be endless, but she is always glad to be included on it. “I marvel at her efforts to stay connected and think of all the wonderful people I’ve lost touch with,” she says.
While preserving friendships comes almost instinctively to Robin, other women have to work at it, making conscious efforts to retain friendships they cherish that seem to be drifting away. This may entail finding better ways to communicate with your friends. Dana, 46, told me that she regretted not having the communication skills and courage to tell her former best friend that she missed her and to ask her why she was drifting away. “I think I was too shy, stoic, and immature to do that in high school,” she says.
When my dear friend Linda left New York and moved to Washington, D.C. (to marry the man I introduced her to), I thought the move might signal the end of our friendship as we knew it. (To a degree, my matchmaking had already altered my relationship with her husband.)
My fears were unfounded because Linda is as tied to her cell phone as a baby is to an umbilical cord. She calls me during her commute to and from work—and whenever else she is in transit. I do the same. We also text each other back and forth several times a day. Ironically, our long-distance friendship has brought us closer than we were previously. Of course, we also make it a point to connect in person multiple times a year, both as girlfriends and as couples.
Advances in technology have created a plethora of opportunities for friends to click, literally and figuratively, resulting in a seismic shift in how women befriend, defriend, and maintain connections. The ubiquitous use of cell phones, text messages, emails, instant messages (IMs), and social media (in some cases added to, and in other cases supplanting, conventional telephones and snail mail) have redefined friendship. They have also removed most of the alibis once available