The Importance of Friendship

By Jessica Anne Pressler LCSW

I have spent nearly forty years sitting with people in some of the most tender moments of their lives — in my therapy practice, in my support groups, and at bedsides as a hospice social worker. And if there is one thing I have learned, watching people survive heartbreak, illness, loss, and everything in between, it's this: we heal better in the presence of others.

We talk so much about romantic love — how to find it, how to keep it, how to heal when it breaks our heart. But there is another kind of love that quietly carries us through every chapter of our lives, and I don't think we give it nearly enough credit. Friendship. Community. The people who show up, who stay, who see us and love us anyway.

Friendship isn't one static thing that looks the same from the time we're five years old until the day we die. It shifts and grows and changes shape depending on what season of life we're standing in, what we're carrying, what we're grieving, what we're becoming. You don't need a lot of friends at any given moment. You need the right friend, or two, or three, for exactly where you are.

Our first friendships, in childhood, teach us things no parent can teach us in quite the same way — sharing, losing, making up, being chosen and sometimes being left out. They are where we first practice trust outside our own family, learning that another person can still choose us. In the teen years, friendship becomes identity work. Friends become the mirror we hold up to test who we're becoming, and both the closeness and the sting of exclusion we feel there shape how we'll approach intimacy and vulnerability for years to come. College, trade school and graduate school often give us friendships that feel like family, forged side by side with people going through the same disorientation and discovery — bonding under pressure that creates some of the most durable friendships we'll ever have.

When love falls apart, we need something different — the friend who doesn't rush us toward feeling better before we're ready, who doesn't say "everything happens for a reason" three days after our world has upended, who simply sits with us in the wreckage and reminds us who we are underneath the heartbreak. That kind of friendship is medicine. A different closeness forms with the people we work alongside, especially under pressure — we see each other stressed, exhausted, imperfect, and still showing up, and that mutual respect earned in the trenches often surprises us with its depth.

Pregnancy and new motherhood can be some of the most isolating experiences of a woman's life, even though they're framed as joyful, and this is when we most need friends who are living it too, or who remember it and don't flinch when we admit the parts that don't make it onto social media. When our children are small, we need friends who understand a canceled plan, who show up with food when we're drowning and don't ask us to perform gratitude for it — efficient, essential friendships, low on time and high on trust.

Illness, whether our own or someone we love's, has a way of separating real friendship from performative friendship very quickly. Some people disappear when things get hard. Some people show up — they sit in waiting rooms, they ask the follow-up question instead of the polite one, they let us be scared out loud. Having even one friend who doesn't look away can change the entire trajectory of how we cope.

There is also a particular kind of bond that forms through shared survival — the community we find when we're going through something alongside people who truly understand. The circle healing from divorce, who understand the grief of mourning a life you didn't choose to lose. The parents of a child with mental illness, who understand an exhaustion most of the world cannot picture. The people in a room for anxiety and depression, who don't flinch when you say the dark thought out loud. The survivors of narcissistic relationships, who recognize the fog of gaslighting the moment you start to describe it. And the ones who share the grief of losing someone to death. These are not casual friendships. They are forged in the fire of something painful, and that is precisely what makes them so strong — there is no performing, no pretending you're fine, just the profound relief of being fully seen. I have come to believe these communities are often the thing that makes healing possible at all. Community is where it finally starts to move. If you are in the middle of something hard right now, please hear me: find your people.

As we age, our friendships become archives — the people who remember us before we became whoever we are now, sparing us from having to explain our whole history to someone new. And after the death of a spouse, friendship is not optional, it is survival. The friends who check in weeks and months after everyone else has gone quiet, who say the name of the person we lost instead of avoiding it, who simply sit with us in the empty house — those friends become a lifeline, keeping us tethered to living when we're not sure we want to be. I also want to honor something real and beautiful: for some of us, our spouse is our best friend, the person who feels like home. If that's you, I hope you know what a gift that is — and it doesn't mean you don't need other friendships too.

I want to bring one more thing into this conversation, because it matters deeply to me: when we lose a friend to death, we grieve hard, and yet our culture rarely makes space for that grief the way it does for other losses. If we lose a spouse, a parent, or a child, most workplaces offer bereavement leave and recognized rituals for what we're going through. But if we lose a dear friend — even one who was, in every way that matters, family — there is often no formal acknowledgment at all, just an expectationthat we'll show up to work the next day as if nothing happened. This is what grief researchers call disenfranchised grief: a loss that isn't openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. For many of us, our friendships are not secondary relationships. Some of us are closer to our closest friend than to our own spouse or family. When that friend dies, we don't just lose a person we liked spending time with — we lose a piece of our own history, a witness to our life. That loss deserves grief,deserves ritual, deserves recognition. If you are grieving a friend right now, your grief is valid, whether or not anyone around you understands its depth. Please don't minimize it because the world hasn't caught up to how significant that friendship was.

If there is one thing I want you to carry away from all of this, it's that friendship was never meant to be a numbers game. You don't need a big circle at every stage of your life, and needing fewer people in certain seasons doesn't mean you're doing something wrong — it means you're being honest about your capacity and what you truly need in that moment. What you do need, in every season, is at least one person who is loving, compassionate, empathetic, and nonjudgmental — someone who really listens, who knows the real you and loves you anyway, who will still tell you the truth even when it's not what you want to hear, because their honesty comes from love, never criticism. Someone you can say anything to without editing yourself, without performing, without one flicker of fear that you'll be judged for it.

That is what creates a safe space. And a safe space, held by even just one person who truly sees you, or one community of people who have lived something close to what you're living, can carry you through every stage of your life, from the schoolyard to the support group to the very last chapter. So I gently ask you to take stock of your friendships and your communities today — not by counting them, but by asking yourself honestly: do I have someone right now who feels like a safe place to land? If you do, please tell them. And if you don't have that yet, know that it is never too late to go find it. Because at the end of the day, friendship and community aren't extras in this life. They are, so often, what makes this life survivable. And what makes it joyful.

About the Author

Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker who has been a psychotherapist for nearly 40 years. She developed the “Traitor Within” framework to help people name and understand the repetitive self-sabotage that shows up in their adult lives. She is the host of the podcast Your Traitor Within, author of Your Traitor Within: A Year of Journaling Prompts for Healing and Empowerment, and author of her debut novel, Traitor Within — How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself.

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