How to Be a Better Friend

You have friends. Good ones, probably. You get dinner, swap stories about work, laugh at the same jokes you’ve been laughing at for years. But sometimes you walk away from those conversations still a little hungry, like you spent two hours together and never quite got past the surface.

In 2024, the American Friendship Project put a number on that feeling. Researchers Nick Pennington, Jeffrey Hall, and Amanda Holmstrom surveyed American adults and found that 75% are satisfied with how many friends they have. But 40% want more closeness in those friendships, and 36% are struggling to maintain the ones they’ve got.

Most people already have enough friends. What they’re missing is depth. And the research on what creates depth points to a handful of specific behaviors that nobody explicitly teaches.

Your friends like you more than you think

Before anything else, it helps to know that you’re probably doing better at this than you believe.

Psychologist Erica Boothby and her colleagues at Yale ran five studies showing that people systematically underestimate how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company. They called it the “liking gap.” It showed up in five-minute chats between strangers and in dorm relationships tracked over months. The cause is familiar to anyone who replays conversations in their head afterward: you fixate on the awkward thing you said while the other person remembers the moment you made them laugh.

Jamil Zaki’s lab at Stanford found something similar at a larger scale. In a 2025 study of more than 5,000 undergraduates, students consistently underestimated how empathic and caring their peers were. When researchers displayed the actual data about peer warmth in dorms, students became more likely to take social risks: starting conversations, inviting people to hang out, being honest about how they felt.

Marisa Franco, a psychologist and author of Platonic, distilled this into a single actionable insight: “The more you assume people like you, the friendlier you’ll be, and the more they actually will.” She’s drawing on research by Danu Anthony Stinson showing that expectations of acceptance produce warmth, which produces actual acceptance. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a useful one.

The liking gap matters because it shapes everything else. If you underestimate how much your friends value you, you’ll hold back. You won’t share the vulnerable thing, you won’t make the first call, you won’t celebrate as hard. Knowing the gap exists is the first step toward closing it.

Celebrate the good news harder

Ask someone what a good friend does and they’ll describe crisis support: showing up when things fall apart, listening during the hard times, being the person you can call at 2 a.m. That all matters. But the research says something less obvious matters more.

Psychologist Shelly Gable at UC Santa Barbara studied how people respond when friends share positive events: a promotion, a new relationship, a personal milestone. She found that these responses fall into four categories.

“That’s amazing, tell me everything! How did it happen?” is active and constructive. You ask questions, show genuine enthusiasm, help them relive the experience. “Oh, that’s nice” is passive and constructive — positive but low-energy, already drifting toward the next topic. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? That sounds like a lot of pressure” is active and destructive, zeroing in on potential problems. And changing the subject or checking your phone is passive and destructive.

Only the first response predicted higher relationship quality. And in subsequent research, Gable found this effect was independent of how people responded during hard times. The two processes work in parallel: crisis support reduces distress, but celebrating good news together builds the positive emotional capital that makes a friendship feel alive.

Think about the last time a friend told you something they were excited about. Did you match their energy? Or did you nod, say “that’s great,” and move on to your own thing?

Share something real

There’s a study from 1994 that keeps showing up in friendship research, three decades later. Nancy Collins and Lynn Miller analyzed 94 studies on self-disclosure and found a three-part loop: people who share personal information are liked more, people share more with those they already like, and people grow to like others as a result of having disclosed to them. Sharing creates closeness, which creates more sharing, which creates more closeness.

This loop explains why some friendships feel stuck at the surface. If neither person goes first with something real (an anxiety, an embarrassment, a half-formed fear), the friendship stays in the shallows. Someone has to go deeper.

The reason most people don’t is that vulnerability feels riskier from the inside than it looks from the outside. Psychologists call this the “beautiful mess effect,” and Franco highlights it in Platonic: when you imagine being vulnerable, you picture yourself as exposed and awkward. When you watch someone else be vulnerable, you see them as brave and authentic. People judge their own vulnerability more harshly than others judge it.

A 2024 longitudinal study by Costello, Bailey, Stern, and Allen tracked 184 people from ages 13 to 29 and found that adolescents whose friends disclosed deeply to them later showed greater capacity for vulnerability in romantic relationships. Friendship, in this framework, is where people learn emotional intimacy. The skills carry forward into every close relationship that follows.

The practical version: next time you’re catching up with a friend and the conversation is circling the usual topics (work updates, weekend plans, something you saw online), try dropping one level deeper. Mention the thing that’s been on your mind. The worry about your kid. The doubt about a decision you made. You’ll feel exposed for about ten seconds. Then watch what happens.

Take the initiative (even when it feels one-sided)

Marisa Franco’s most cited insight comes down to one sentence: “The assumption has to be in adulthood that friendship does not happen organically. It happens based off of initiative and effort.” She cites research showing that people who believed friendship happened through luck were lonelier years later than people who believed it required work.

This cuts against a deeply held cultural belief. In school, proximity did the work for you: shared classes, shared hallways, shared boredom. You could be passive and still end up with close friends. In adulthood, every friendship requires someone to send the first text, suggest the plan, and follow up when the plan falls through.

Jeffrey Hall’s research at the University of Kansas found it takes over 200 hours to develop a close friendship, with people needing to double or triple the amount of time they spend together when transitioning from casual friend to real friend. Someone has to drive that escalation. If you keep waiting for the other person to initiate, and they’re waiting for you, both of you end up wondering why the friendship faded.

Reciprocity is a pattern, not a scoreboard

The flip side of taking initiative is the frustration of always being the one who does it. Psychologist Debra Campbell named this the most common complaint she hears in her practice: “Quite a few clients have told me they always have to be the one who suggests a catch-up with certain friends, otherwise it doesn’t happen. It almost always leaves them feeling unwanted and undervalued.”

That frustration is grounded in data. A 2016 study by Almaatouq and colleagues at MIT and Tel Aviv University asked people to name their friends, then checked whether those people named them back. While 94% of people expected their friendships to be mutual, roughly half of the nominations weren’t returned. The mismatch between how mutual we think our friendships are and how mutual they actually are helps explain why so many people feel like they’re carrying more than their share.

But Shasta Nelson, a friendship researcher and author of Frientimacy, draws an important distinction. Reciprocity should be measured in overall investment pattern, not transaction by transaction. Your friend might never be the one to suggest dinner, but she remembers your mom’s surgery and asks about recovery weeks later. He never initiates a call, but when you call him, he drops what he’s doing and gives you two hours.

Nelson’s broader framework identifies three requirements for a healthy friendship: positivity (interactions leave both people feeling good), consistency (regular, repeated time together), and vulnerability (mutual sharing and being seen). Her argument is that when a friendship feels unsatisfying, the useful question isn’t “who initiated last?” but “which of these three things is missing?” That reframe moves the conversation away from scorekeeping and toward something you can actually fix.

The hard question is distinguishing between a friend who shows up differently and a friend who doesn’t show up at all. If the overall investment pattern feels unbalanced over months, the friendship may genuinely lack reciprocity. That’s worth a direct conversation, not a slow fade.

When a friend is hurting, lead with presence

One of the most consistent patterns in how people fail their friends shows up during crises. A Reddit user described it in a thread that’s been referenced thousands of times: “When my father passed, NONE of my friends showed up to the funeral… Surprisingly two of my neighbors that I barely know showed up. I’m friends with them now.”

People don’t avoid friends in pain because they don’t care. They don’t know what to say. They’re afraid of making it worse, so they say nothing. Or they jump straight to problem-solving mode, offering advice and silver linings and plans of action, because fixing feels more comfortable than sitting with someone else’s grief.

Clinical research draws a clear line between two types of support. Emotion-focused support means acknowledging what your friend is feeling without trying to change it: “That sounds incredibly hard. I’m here.” Problem-focused support means offering solutions: “Have you tried talking to a lawyer?” Both have value, but the order matters. UW Medicine’s clinical research on toxic positivity finds that responses like “Just look on the bright side” or “Everything happens for a reason” shut people down rather than opening them up. The alternative is simpler than most people realize: ask “What do you need from me right now?” before offering anything.

The friends people remember during hard times aren’t the ones who said the perfect thing. They’re the ones who showed up and stayed.

Friendship is a skill, not a personality trait

The idea that some people are naturally good at friendship and others aren’t doesn’t hold up well against the data.

Emotional intelligence explains over a third of the variance in friendship quality, according to Wei Ye’s research across 333 adolescents. Every dimension of EI was positively associated with companionship, intimate communication, and trust. And EI itself is a set of learnable skills: empathy, emotional regulation, social awareness. A 2021 study by Lim, Khoo, and Yueh found that even people with insecure attachment styles scored high on friendship quality when their communication skills were strong. Attachment style shapes your starting point, but it doesn’t have to set your ceiling.

Glick and Rose’s research on friendship development found that children with higher-quality friendships subsequently developed more competent social strategies. The friendship itself was the classroom. For adults, the same mechanism applies: every honest conversation, every time you choose to show up instead of retreat, every moment you respond to good news with genuine energy instead of polite distraction, you’re practicing. Enough repetitions, and it stops feeling like effort.

Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist, puts the stakes plainly: “The number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking.”

Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship, builds the case from biology. Among baboons, females with the strongest social bonds lived longer and had healthier babies. She calls the principle “survival of the friendliest.” And she has a pointed warning for people who plan to invest in friendships later, after the career settles and the kids grow up: the benefits compound over time, and so does the cost of waiting.

The remembering problem

Every behavior in this article depends on one unglamorous foundation: remembering. Remembering what your friend is going through. Remembering to follow up on the thing they told you three weeks ago. Remembering that a friendship won’t maintain itself while your attention is elsewhere.

You might keep all of this in your head and do fine. Or you might use a notes app, a recurring calendar reminder, or a dedicated relationship tool like Contacts Magic or Contacts Journal. The tool matters less than the habit. The point is to free up your mental bandwidth for being present in the conversation rather than scrambling to recall what’s happening in your friend’s life.

Pew Research found that 61% of American adults rate close friendships as extremely or very important for a fulfilling life. That’s higher than marriage (23%), children (26%), or money (24%). We already know friendship matters. The question is whether we’re willing to practice the specific things that make it work.