You should move near your friends
If you’re a woman – of any age, really, but particularly in your thirties and beyond – we’ll bet that a running topic of conversation with your friends is that one day, when you’re old, you’ll start a commune. Perhaps a ramshackle country pile made of stone and crumbly mortar somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Or a villa in Valencia, with a kidney-shaped pool that glints in the afternoon sun and where you’ll barbecue massive Spanish prawns over ebony coal and a riot of flames.
You have these conversations because of things you intuit.Friendship is what will sustain you when whatever has defined the bulk of your adult life, from careers to child-rearing, is done. Loneliness is lethal. And what could be more idyllic than living out your sunset years with the people who’ve thumbed sticky glitter on your face in a sweaty festival tent, lit the wonky pink candles on your 40th birthday cake and have been at the top of your call list for any major life update?
A less audacious version of the set-up is happening in the here and now. The idea of placing proximity to friends – if not living within the same four walls – at the centre of any house move is gaining traction.
In the US, one developer has launched the ‘Live Near Friends’ tool. People living in the States can input their postcode into a web page to create a personal link to send to their gang – those interested can receive alerts for homes to rent or buy within a five-minute walk of the sender (and can control the typeof home they see, whether that’s
a studio flat or a family house).
Brooklyn-based Priya Rose wrote a newsletter on how she got 22 of her friends to live within walking distance of her and her husband (it involved signing up for rental alerts in her area, going to viewings herself and sending videos to her mates).
This step led to the creation of a sort of loose co-living project, dubbed ‘Fractal NYC’: a friend network of people living within the same apartment blocks, who open up their communal spaces to one another. In a less formalised fashion, things are going down here in the UK, too. A small but growing number of voices are speaking openly about their decision to pick up the keys to a place selected largely thanks totheir network being there already.
For you, it might be a novel concept. What changed, then, to spike this curiosity in less orthodox living? How can it work for those with big responsibilities, from work to kids? And what could being (physically) close to your friends mean for your health?
Vibe shift
One voice observing this emerging shift is Rhaina Cohen. She’s the author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship At The Centre (£24.99, St Martin’s Press), a recently published book exploring the experiences of people for whom friendship, rather than romantic relationships, is the axis on which their world spins.
She and her husband live with two friends, another couple, and the latter’s two kids in a rented home in Washington DC. ‘I think people are coming to the realisation that the model that they’ve been told is the legitimate way of living [the nuclear family] might not fit for them,’ she reflects, on the growing. number of people reassessing how we structure our lives. ‘And that other kinds of relationships provide them with meaning, and they want maybe a bigger array of people around them.’
She’s noticed things shifting in the five-year period during which she’s worked on her book. ‘Conversations have changed in that time. I think culture has done a better job of showing friendships [with] a plot line that is worth following.’
She cites the 2023 high-school movie Bottoms, which dug deep into the tightness of queer teenage friendship, as well as an influx of articles and podcasts on the theme. Contrast that, she says, with the 90s and 00s cultural soup– perhaps best illustrated by the TV show Friends. ‘Here, Monica kicks out her best friend Rachel from her apartment so that she can live with her boyfriend; at the end of the day, people all pair off into romantic relationships.’
She also believes that a recent raft of media attention focused on non-monogamy, including the book More: A Memoir Of Open Marriage (£18.99, Ebury Press), by Brooklyn-based writer Molly Roden Winter, speaks to a wider issue of chasing connection.
‘I think there’s a wholesale questioning of the idea that one person should be your everything – and I do see a resonance between the thinking of people who have really deep friendships and people who aren on-monogamous,’ she tells WH, as well as ‘a less hierarchical approach to relationships’.
Cohen’s personal situation, too, has illuminated the benefits of centring friendship. ‘I think that closeness is not just about being able to have a deep three-hour conversation, it’s also about having full context for a person. For example, our friends have recently been searching for new jobs. We know all the details because we see them every day.’
Community care
The benefits for the parents among us are sizeable, too. Cohen offers a recent example, in which the eldest child of the couple she lives with had to go to A&E. They were able to simply hand their baby over to Cohen’s husband while they tended to their other kid.
When you consider the seismic challenges facing modern parents, from a lack of affordable childcare to having little time to shoot the breeze with peers, this style of living starts to feel intensely practical.
Last year, Rose Stokes, a 36-year-old writer, left south London – somewhere she had spent a decade living – with her husband to raise their toddler side by side, though in separate houses, with Rose’s best friend in Bath.
After deciding that city living was no longer for them, the couple considered other towns, but the lure of such solid friendship was too much to pass over. Now, the family can swing by and see the person Rose shared her childhood, teenage and young adult years with casually – and her son has a meaningful relationship with another loving adult, as well as
his parents.
‘We see her once or twice a week,’ Rose says. The impact has been transformative. ‘For anyone thinking about putting down roots closer to loved ones, especially if they’re in the process of starting a family, I would absolutely recommend including places closer to your friends in your search. I’m so lucky to have the two loves of my life – my husband and my best friend – around at the same time.’
Gang gains
Considering friendship when it comes to where you live is an idea applauded by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at theUniversity of Oxford and author of Friends: Understanding The Power Of Our Most Important Relationships (£12.99, Abacus).‘Over the past decade, there has been a tsunami of studies showing that the single best predictor of your physical and mental health is the number of close friendships you have,’ he tells WH.
In this definition, friends include family members with whom you have a tight bond, as well as a romantic partner. The optimal number of these is about five, Professor Dunbar observes, though your extroversion levels and gender play a role (women tend to have more, men fewer).
Around this core five, ideally, you’ll have a layer of good – if not ride-or-die – friends, taking the number of people in your support system to between 10 and 15.
The profound health benefits of such a social web seem to be rooted in the endorphin system, he explains. First, there’s the uplift you get from socialising – laughing, hugging, dancing, eating together, for instance. ‘These trigger the release of endorphins in your brain. These neurotransmitters are a type of opioid, similar chemically to morphine, which makes you feel relaxed and calm and bonds you with whoever you engage in the activity with.’
Second: ‘Endorphins, when released, also trigger your immune system – specifically, the natural killer cells in your white blood cell system, which can even target viruses.’ Meaning your friends are, effectively, the human equivalent of First Defence. So how does this thread into the case for keeping your mates at a close distance?
‘Friendships decay quickly if you don’t see people at the right frequency. To keep someone in your inner circle, you have to see them at least once a week, and to keep someone in the second layer of 15, you have to see them at least once a month, give or take periods where you might be on holiday or sick.’
Professor Dunbar notes that encounters of this frequency tend to require friends to live at most 30 minutes away from each other. Given the current crisis of friendship – a post-pandemic report from think tank Onward found that 20% of 18- to 34-year-olds in the UK had one, or no, close friends, triple the rate among that demographic in 2012 – it’s alarming to hear him note this it only takes three to four months of not seeing someone for a ‘noticeable decline’ in the quality of the friendship.
Kejal, who works in PR, has seen first-hand the impact of geographical closeness on the quality of a friendship. She and her husband moved to a specific area of south-east London in order to be closer to multiple sets of friends, which has resulted in those relationships being bathed in more soul-enriching time together.
‘One of those friends we moved to be near I considered a good mate. Living a mile from each other brought us closer, though, and she asked me to be her bridesmaid. I don’t think that would have happened without the move.’
Bond builder
Given that living near – if not always with – friends comes with such health benefits, why aren’t we doing it en masse? The answer is that, of course, we used to live in tight communities, with people being born and dying in the same town, locked inside intimate webs of kinship networks through the ebb and flow.
Now, thanks to dramatic shifts to the economic system we live in, that’s not the case. ‘In the modern era, especially for people in a higher socio-economic class, it’s normal to move for university or work, spending a lot of life away from your family and community of origin,’ says Maria Sironi, a social demographer at University College London.
At the same time, the way our culture thinks about romantic partnership has changed. ‘Over the past 150 years or so, marriage began to eclipse other kinds of relationships,’ explains Cohen. When marriage was functional – an arrangement based on a need to share resources and rear children, and in which men did not conceive of women as their equals – profound friendship with people of the same sex was necessary.
Now, it’s normal to see a spouse not only as a romantic and sexual partner, but also as a best friend, confidante and travel companion, all rolled into one – possibly minimising how you perceive the need for other friendships in your life.
Of course, there’s also the truth that people move, which may cause you to think more about, say, what you like about an area rather than emphasising whether or not it’s close to your mates. Both Rose and Kejal say that they love where they live for the place itself, as well as for their friends, meaning that they’d still be happy should things shift.
Cohen’s housemates are upping sticks soon, meaning their arrangement will come to an end. She and her husband are considering staying in the same house and finding more friends to move in with them.
Moving, famously, is up there in the stress stakes with life events as dramatic as divorce. And, given the current economic state of the country, much will factor into where you live, from rent increases meaning you get priced out of the community you love
to needing to be close to your workplace.
But if a move is on your horizon? Assess where your friends are at.It might end up being the healthiest decision you ever make.
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