Friendship Through the Centuries: A Brief History

How Has Friendship Changed?

The meaning and understanding of friendship have changed fundamentally over the centuries. Three major phases can be distinguished (Schmidt, Guichard, Schuster & Trillmich, 2007):

Middle Ages: friendship was barely distinguished from kinship, though it was clearly set apart from enmity. The term referred to a broad web of benevolent relationships rather than a specific, emotionally close bond.

Phase 1: The Middle Ages

Early modern period through the 18th century: an emotionally charged friendship cult developed, in which friendship and romantic love were scarcely separated and correspondingly idealized. Friendship was considered the highest form of human connection — a view reflected, for instance, in Montaigne.

19th/20th century — Simmel’s “differentiated friendship”: Georg Simmel (1890) described a pivotal shift. As modern society differentiated into many social spheres, the holistic friendship ideal was no longer sustainable. In its place came differentiated friendship, where different friends address different sides of one’s personality. Friedrich Tenbruck (1964) linked this shift to a stabilizing function: friendships catch the liberated yet unsettled individual and serve as “the complement to an incomplete social structure.”

Phase 2: The Friendship Cult

20th century: only here did the modern understanding of friendship as a distinct type of relationship take hold — non-sexual, non-familial, and non-neighborly. This differentiation made today’s psychological study of friendship as an independent category possible.

In current sociological discourse, friendships are even declared the “vanishing point of social hopes” (Bude, 2008): where marital and family relationships become fragile, friendship appears to be a particularly fitting form of connection. Friendships not infrequently outlast partnerships and neighborhoods (Bude, 2017). At the same time, a secularization is visible: the understanding of friendship becomes more pragmatic, and the gap between the holistic ideal and fragmented practice widens.

Phase 3: Differentiated Friendship

Today, friendships are even viewed in everyday psychology as a potential alternative to family. Behind this lies the idea that people can shape their relationships free from the “corset” of kinship and neighborhood, according to personal preference. Neyer and Wrzus (2018) suspect there is a kernel of truth: people today shape their relationships more in line with their personality, leading to greater diversity across relationships. Empirically, however, this historical trend cannot be confirmed.

What ismeasurable is a counter-trend: the meta-analysis by Wrzus et al. (2013) showed that friendship networks have shrunk in recent decades — the more recent the publication year, the smaller the reported friendship network. Remarkably, there was no parallel trend for family networks, contradicting the widespread rhetoric of the “decline of the family.”

The Modern Shrinkage Trend

The historical framework draws on Schmidt et al. (2007), who trace the evolution of friendship and kinship concepts over centuries. The empirical finding about shrinking friendship networks comes from the meta-analysis by Wrzus et al. (2013), which is considered especially robust due to its size (277 studies, ~180,000 participants). Neyer and Wrzus (2018) combine both perspectives and suggest increasing mobility demands as a driver of network contraction.

Historical claims about the meaning of friendship are necessarily imprecise, as they rest on literary and philosophical sources rather than empirical data in the modern sense. The trend toward smaller networks observed in the meta-analysis could also have methodological causes (e.g., changing measurement instruments over the decades). Whether friendships “replace” family cannot be conclusively answered empirically — the evidence on network size points more to complementarity than substitution.

Frequently Asked Questions

How has friendship changed historically?

Today, friendships are even seen as a potential alternative to family in everyday psychology. Behind this lies the idea that people can shape their relationships free from the “corset” of kinship and neighborhood, according to personal preference.

Did friendship exist in the Middle Ages?

The meaning and understanding of friendship have changed fundamentally over the centuries. Three major phases can be distinguished (Schmidt, Guichard, Schuster & Trillmich, 2007).

Since when has friendship been private?

19th/20th century — Simmel’s “differentiated friendship”: Georg Simmel (1890) described a decisive shift. As modern society differentiated into many social spheres, the holistic friendship ideal was no longer sustainable.

Are friendship networks really shrinking?

The historical framework draws on Schmidt et al. (2007), who trace the evolution of friendship and kinship concepts over centuries. The empirical finding about shrinking friendship networks comes from the meta-analysis by Wrzus et al.