Climbing the Friendship Ladder

As we dove into exploring how friendships are made earlier this year, the Alive team took a deeper look inward at what friendships are like for all of us. After all, core to our methodology is the concept of #samedifferent — older adults want what we all want out of life — and sometimes meeting the needs of older adults means getting to know our own core needs.

Through a series of exercises, we reflected on three friendships in our lives; a dear friend, a new friend, and a long-time friend. Then, we took this exercise to our community of older adults. What we learned is that friendships aren’t black and white, they are not switches you turn on and off, they are ladders. They step up, and sometimes down, over time. This important nuance is critical to designing new friendship making experiences for older adults, and for everyone. Read why below.

Featured feedback

“We don’t just have, or not have friends, we tend to have friendships in different stages.”

The friendship making process takes time, and while it can happen, it’s rare for us to meet someone and quickly become close friends. Friendships are investments that begin with just a single encounter and a sprinkle of chemistry. One user told us, “Chemistry is important and easy to find early.” We often know right away if a person is someone we’d like to be friends with, but how do we build towards establishing that friendship?

If we stop to think about our friendship network, often we have many friends in many stages. Some of them are closer friends than others. Some we see all of the time, and some rarely. Some friends are far away, some near. Some friends we talk to on the phone but rarely see, and others we see often. Helping older adults to expand and develop their greater friendship networks will enable them to have more traditional social networks that include friends in a variety of stages.

Why this is important

Friendships serve a vital role for connectedness in later life as our social structures diminish. These social connections serve to not only provide a source of joy, but support our long-term health. According to Michigan State University scholar, William Chopik, friendship can be even more important to our health and happiness than family as we age. In a pair of studies involving nearly 280,000 people, Chopik found that friendships become increasingly important to happiness and health across our life span. In older adults, friendships are actually a stronger predictor of health and happiness than relationships with family members.

Creating new experiences for older adults to meet and connect with others is just one part of the work, but helping older adults attain higher level friendships is of particular importance. Close friends act as sources of support, help us stave off loneliness and enhance the joys of growing older.

What we’re learning

Friendships ladder from a single encounter, to more intimate, lasting friendships over time.

The friendship ladder is a sequence of rungs, and at Alive, we believe there are accelerants and decelerates that either advance friendships up the ladder or step them down. More on that later.

After a first introduction (and a sprinkle of chemistry), we’ve learned that repeat encounters help increase the chance of a potential friendship. This additional exposure to a new friend helps with making the important ‘ask’ which comes next, to spend time together in some way. Perhaps have coffee, visit a museum, or attend an event. As we begin increasing and double-opting into shared experiences, we naturally open up, and share more intimate life details, further strengthening bonds and the potential for dear, or lasting friendships. It’s within this set of rungs or steps, that unique opportunities for innovation emerge.

The opportunity

When building products or services that help older adults connect, consider which moment of the friendship making process your product will meet them.

By understanding where users might be in the process, we can help them to spark early chemistry, get repeat exposure and interaction, and even nurture spaces to provide more intimate exchanges.

Consider designing products and experiences that help people with moving up the entire friendship ladder, or fragmenting the experience and helping them with just a single stage of the friendship making process. By breaking the process into parts, we can imagine an entire suite of products that help connect us to people we already know, in deeper, more meaningful ways, or even help us take the next step with a possible friend in which we had a great first encounter. The friendship making space is ripe for innovation, and older adults are eager to adopt new solutions that meet them in these moments.

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