by Dan Morrice, for Bridges for Communities

What does a marathon runner from Birmingham and an El Salvadorian hairstylist have in common?

I didn’t know either, so I tracked down Max and Sarah to find out.

Sarah is a defence specialist, who moved to Bristol for work, loves running and volunteers for us at Bridges for Communities. Max is a hair stylist from El Salvador, with an epic TikTok following and an infectious laugh. Bridges’ befriending programme matches local Bristolians with refugees and asylum seekers for one simple purpose… friendship. They had seemingly nothing in common, but Max needed some support and Sarah volunteered to be a friend.

We all need a friend at some point, it’s part of being human, but in the last few years, research has been mounting to suggest that the ancient art of friendship is something that might be slipping away from us.

How do we reclaim it?

First, the evidence.

According to Martin Armstrong from the World Economic Forum, the number of close friends people have in the US has dropped noticeably in the last 30 years [1], and in Britain, according to a YouGov survey, more than half of adults in the UK find friendship difficult [2].

Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar is a world expert in friendship science. I wonder what it’s like to be his mate? Do you think, as you sit down for a pint, ‘Is he studying this?’ His tried and tested ‘Dunbar formula’ suggests we are wired for 150 people in our extended community, 50 of which are friends, 15 close friends, and just 5 who are the deepest, ‘call-me-at-3am-if-you-need-me-friends’ [3]. The numbers can vary a bit, but it’s a helpful litmus test.

I wonder what constitutes one of those ‘close friends’.

How do you make someone’s top five?

The Japanese have a special word for those best friends, ‘Kenzoku,’ which literally translates as, ‘family.’ It describes a friend you’ve chosen to treat as a brother or sister, someone you are loyally committed to and vice versa, someone who knows you, who would sacrifice almost anything for you [4].

It gets better.

Unfracturing

As fear and prejudice, hate crime and tribalism have soured in the last generation, the evidence suggests that the best way to tackle all manner of madness and misunderstandings is… with friendship. As Jon Yates demonstrates in Fractured, close friendship with someone from another background has the power to reverse a multitude of societal problems [5].

Suddenly the elusive ‘them’ that your curated news feed and social circles are so keen to demonise are represented by someone with a name, a smile you appreciate, someone with strengths and weaknesses, hopes and dreams, all strangely similar to your own.

No more elusive ‘them’ syndrome.

At Bridges for Communities, one of our key philosophies revolves around this simple defiant practice — getting people from different walks of life to meet each other, and discover they have More in Common, in the words of the late Jo Cox. It’s not about pretending to agree with everything everyone believes or thinks, it’s simply about seeing the humanity in each other.

Yates’ research demonstrates that while meeting is an important first step, the real work is done in forging friendship, the Kenzoku kind. It’s not easy, but the potential is world-changing.

Sacrifice and love

While researching my book, Finding the Peacemakers, I spent many months in Israel-Palestine interviewing peacemakers and studying cross-cultural friendships [6]. As I write this article, the tragic events in Gaza are ongoing and it feels more difficult than ever to imagine people from opposite sides of the conflict forging peace together. But my experience from spending time there is that when ordinary people have the chance to meet, even in the most challenging circumstances, remarkable things can happen. The story of Aziz Abu Sarah and his friend Nurit is one such story.

‘I usually visited high schools with my dear friend Rami, an Israeli graphic designer and fellow member of the Parents Circle. Rami and his wife, Nurit, lost their thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, in a suicide bombing… With Rami and other members of the Parents Circle Families Forum, I have visited dozens of Israeli and Palestinian schools to share our stories of anger and grief and say that nonviolence is the only way forward’ [7].

These are the words of Aziz Abu Sarah, a National Geographic presenter, and a member of the Parents’ Circle Families Forum, a network of Jewish and Palestinian parents who have lost children or siblings in the ongoing conflict. Rather than avenging the death of their loved ones, they found they had something in common with the supposed enemy — a shared grief. Aziz’ brother was killed by Israeli soldiers, and in his sorrow, he was drawn to Jewish friends, Rami and Nurit who were mourning their daughter.

Together they tour schools speaking to Palestinian and Jewish teenagers about the power of peace and forgiveness. There are many more like them, radical friends, rarely in the headlines, working shoulder-to-shoulder for peace. They’re not condoning the political decisions of their leaders, but coming in the opposite spirit, with camaraderie and compassion, to demonstrate an alternative to war and hatred.

If those friendships are possible in the heat of conflict, surely they are in peacetime, in Britain, in this hour?

Sarah and Max seem to suggest they are.

Max taught Sarah how to make Pupusas, he treated her to a haircut and helped her parents with their Spanish. Sarah was there for Max when he suffered panic attacks, helping him through, cheering him on, and being the friend he needed, listening, loving, and believing in him over many a frappuccino. We always tell our volunteers that they don’t need specialist skills, being a friend is what people need most.

From Aziz and Rami to Sarah and Max, these sorts of friendships are changing the world in significant and subtle ways, but sadly, the evidence suggests friendship in general is on the decline.

Roughly 1 in 3 UK adults don’t have a best friend at all.

No bestie, soul-mate or Kenzoku to call on at 3am when the chips are down.

How can this be?

Pals before pixels

In Bowling Alone, a seminal study in modern Western behaviour, political scientist Robert Putnam explored all the possible theories behind the decline of friendship and community in the last few decades. Despite many hypotheses, he discovered that one of the biggest factors was… Screens [8].

Tracking the introduction of TV to communities across Canada, he saw an unnerving parallel. Whenever TV reached a community, what followed was a decline in every form of community life, engagement in groups, interest in neighbours, participation in community activities, friendships, willingness to learn from others… everything was sacrificed on the alter of LCDs.

And this was before smartphones.

The impact on cross-cultural friendships was one of the biggest casualties.

Jon Yates describes the tendency in human nature to gather with ‘People Like Us,’ as one of the causes of fracture in society. The problem is not that we are different from people from other walks of life, but that we are distant. As we are drawn to people like us, we’re isolated from those who are different, and isolation creates a petri dish for fear and misunderstanding.

Social media exacerbates these tendencies. The algorithms in cyberspace behave like our brain cells in neuro-space. In the words of Canadian neuro-psychologist Donald Hebb, ‘Those that fire together wire together’ [9]. He was referring to neurons in the brain, but the same is true in digital echo chambers and even communities. Our repeated screentime activities, conversations and mental processing carve deep gullies that send every thought, interaction, post and opinion in the same direction.

If only there was a simple solution.

There is.

It’s not rocket science. When we build friendship with someone outside of our ‘bubble,’ whether that’s a physical bubble or a digital bubble, it blasts a brave new trail in our thinking. Ingrained prejudice and generational traumas have the potential to be healed and rewired by a ‘Kenzoku friend’ from another culture.

The societal benefits mirror the personal benefits. According to the World Health Organisation, social isolation and loneliness can increase the chances of an early death by 32% [10]. That sounds like a depressing statistic, but turn it on its head and there’s remarkable hope.

A good friend could add years to your life.

And theirs.

That’s true in any culture.

Rekindling Deep Friendships

The question is, how? How do we go about rekindling those deep friendships, those society-saving bonds, those closer-than-a-brother mates?

At Bridges for Communities, we get that question a lot. I’ve asked it myself. We tapped into the best resource we have, the lived experience of countless volunteers, people like Sarah and Max, who have done just that for years — formed deep, mutually life-giving friendships with people from all creeds and cultures.

You can find our top tips here.

References

[1] Martin Armstrong, Friendships: Less is Now More, World Economic Forum, Nov 3rd 2022. (Available here).

[2] Milan Dinic, The YouGov Friendship Study, YouGov, December 16, 2021. (Available here)

[3] Robin Dunbar, Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, (Little, Brown 2021)

[4] Alex Lickerman MD, The True Meaning of Friendship, Psychology Today, December 15, 2013. (Available here)

[5] Jon Yates, Fractured: Why our societies are coming apart and how we put them back together again, (HarperNorth, 2021)

[6] Dan Morrice, Finding the Peacemakers, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2021)

[7] Kelly James Clark, Aziz Abu Sarah and Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Strangers, Neighbors, Friends: Muslim–Christian–Jewish Reflections on Compassion and Peace (Cascade Books, 2018), pp. 9–11.

[8] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, (Simon & Schuster, 2001)

[9] Donald Hebb, The organisation of behaviour, (John Wiley and Sons, 1949)

[10] World Health Organisation, Science in 5, Episode 120. (Available here)