Are we expecting too much from our friends?

Or the case for lowering the friendship bar

Photo by Kevin Gent on Unsplash

A few months after I turned 30, I went on a holiday I didn’t want to go on. My extroverted boyfriend - now my extroverted husband - wanted to go to a festival in a Croatia. He really wanted to go. While we had plenty of pals independently, we didn’t have a shared group. So he proceeded to recruit friends to a WhatsApp group until there were 15 of us posting links to Airbnbs in a coastal Croatian town. I threw just enough dancing ladies into the thread to give the impression that I was looking forward to it. But I wasn’t. In fact, I was dreading it. I’m aware of how spoiled this sounds; it was a holiday, not a smear test. But I’d just started a new job, while managing an episode of anxiety and the labour of making nice with people felt like effort I didn’t have the energy for. So nobody was more surprised than me what happened next. 

The seven days that followed were among the best of my life. We spent our days drying out on the beach, fuelled by Barbecue Lays and supermarket lager, before taking a taxi to the festival site come sundown. We took turns on the inflatable assault course (I didn’t say it was boujee) and we packed into a bar to watch England make the semis of the World Cup. (The semis!) But it wasn’t the holiday bit of the holiday that made it magical. A fellow ‘girlfriend’ I bonded with on obnoxiously early beach trips would go on to become my bridesmaid; a couple we coaxed into coming last minute now live around the corner from us. To this day, the trip gets talked about in our friendship group – the group conceived on that holiday – with a misty-eyed nostalgia that makes us unbearable to be around. But if this story sounds nauseatingly smug, I’ve endured the shadow side of expectations, too.

If you asked that anxious workaholic for her predictions of 30-something friendship, she’d have given you one of two answers. A bonded gang of ‘mum friends’, raising our kids alongside each other, or a Martini-swilling schedule soundtracked by the Sex And The City theme tune. (She was sitting on the motherhood fence - some things don’t change). Five years on, my life bears no resemblance to either of those scenarios. I don’t have children, so the NCT crowd never arrived. And with a friendship group predominantly employed in early years parenting, there are vanishingly few people available at cocktail hour. (Mine’s a Marg, anyway). If I sound miserable with my lot, I’m not; I’m happier at 35 than I ever was at 30, face time with friends features in my plans most weekends and I love them just as much in parks and playgrounds as I did on bar stools and dance floors. If anything, watching my friends become parents has made me love them even more. But there’s a gap between my expectations of my 30-something friendships and what they look like in reality – and it’s a gap I’ve had to grapple with.

Mind the gap

When I recount this story to Professor Jeffrey Hall on a Zoom call, he isn’t surprised. I first interviewed the Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas from my locked-down living room in 2020, while writing a feature about loneliness. And when I saw his name attached to several studies on expectations, at a time when I was struggling with them, I decided to get back in touch. He tells me the expectations you hold about a friendship directly inform how much you enjoy it. ‘But expectations by themselves aren't the biggest determinant of how satisfied you are with a friendship - it's the degree to which your experience matches those expectations that matters.’

Back in 2011, Professor Hall and his colleagues were the first to apply the ‘Ideal Standards Model’ – a measure of romantic expectations – to platonic relationships. Among the headline findings of that particular piece of research was that high expectations were associated with lower friendship satisfaction, and vice versa. ‘On the one hand, high expectations help you to develop high quality relationships because you tend to elicit more out of your friendships,’ he tells me. ‘But if your expectations are too high, you’re never satisfied. And there have been several papers which show that women and girl’s friendships are more characteristic of that type of behaviour.’

And yet, a bar set too high is the least of it. Expectations are…woolly, with the behaviours that are indicative of a standard being met varying wildly. Hall gives the example of the expectation of being liked for who you are (a biggie, in friendship research). ‘In some friendships, that might look like taking the piss out of you; in others, that might look like never criticising you. And this is the tricky thing about studying friendship: we’ve known for decades what the components are, but the behaviours supporting it are loose – and idiosyncratic to the way you form a friendship.’

Raising the bar

That expectations are a bit of a headfuck is perhaps one reason attempts to study them dried up. The research evolved from child psychology in the 1970s with the idea that expectations develop in three stages. Young children expect their friends to engage in shared activities, like coming to their birthday party; older children expect certain values to be met and young adults expect qualities like self-disclosure and intimacy. In the decades since, we’ve learnt that there are 37 different types of expectation; we expect more from the friends we can call at 3am than we do from the ones we meet for dinner twice a year; and women are more likely to value support, while men tend to place more emphasis on enjoyment.

But by 2015, academic interest in the topic had all but evaporated. Now, nearly a decade on, the topic is having a second wind. ‘I’m hearing all these ideas about being disappointed with friends or toxicity in friendships – this is all expectations. So the topic is having something of a re-birth.’ The reason? Our standards have soared. If our expectations were born at our childhood birthday parties, they’ve well and truly come of age. Today, birthdays are the bare minimum; we expect our friends to attend our every ribbon-cutting, from bells-and-whistles weekends away to weddings that require a plane ticket to attend. ‘And if they don’t show up for this stuff, they’re a failed friend – what the hell is that about?’ says Hall, before diagnosing the disconnect. ‘What seems to be the problem is that people’s expectations of their friends are rising at a time when their flexibility is declining, so we’re simultaneously asking more of each other while putting up with less.’

If the roots of some of this bar-raising are obvious - the march of therapy speak; the ‘always on’ nature of our comms; the culture of ‘doing it for the gram’ - others are more surreptitious. While our collective coming-to-terms with the life-lengthening power of connection is, emphatically, a good thing, we’re inadvertently piling ever more expectations onto relationships already groaning under their weight. ‘A paradox of communicating the importance of friendship is that, by doing so, we’re elevating expectations to a place where modern life can’t really meet them,’ Hall tells me, referring to everything from the cost-of-living crisis to the social fallout of the pandemic. ‘The reality is that continuing to push people to make connections if they don’t have the time or ability is just making things worse.’

Expecting, better

This isn’t to say that you should sack off your standards entirely; expecting too little is as fatal to friendship as expecting too much (relationships require a basic level of nurturing). But there’s a sweet spot: somewhere between opting out of connection-cultivating holidays and feeling irked that your life doesn’t look like a TV show. ‘The key is to have expectations that honour your friends for the sources of love, support and companionship that they are, while treating them in a forgiving, low-stakes way,’ adds Hall, with the caveat that this stuff feels hard because it is. ‘There are structural shifts going on that make the problems we’re sorting out beyond us. I’m a researcher who studies friendship and I have to give myself tasks to help me maintain them. But while we’re not to blame for how hard this feels, we also need to recognise our agency.’

There will always be a gap between our expectations and reality; we can’t account for other people’s actions, nor life’s unknowability. But even bringing our expectations into conscious awareness is a step in the right direction. I find this process surprisingly confronting, but it’s only by doing it that I realise how incompatible my (early-thirties, pre-pandemic) expectations were with the life I’m living now. A fresh set of social T&Cs is in the works. For now, I’m expecting different things from different people; reserving the behaviours that used to feature heavily (spontaneity, hedonism) for those who share my circumstances, while meeting those who don’t where they are. Because while phases of life are fleeting, friendship is a long game. And if there’s anyone worth doing a bit of presumption paperwork for, it’s the people you want to hold onto.