Why Your Friends May Be Better for Your Mental Health Than Your Partner
Monday, March 10, 2025.
Human beings, in their infinite wisdom, have long insisted that romantic love is the holy grail of human happiness.
Entire industries—wedding planners, dating apps, even an entire wing of pop music—exist solely to reinforce this collective delusion.
But what if the real secret to well-being isn't candlelit dinners and whispered sweet nothings, but rather eating cold pizza on a friend’s couch while discussing if aliens have a secret base under Greenland?
Love and Friendship: A Neurotic Comedy
A study recently published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests precisely that. After tracking people for over two decades, researchers found that close friendships act as a consistent buffer against depression throughout life.
Romantic relationships, on the other hand, resemble a malfunctioning spaceship: exhilarating at first, but frequently ending in chaos, existential dread, and the desperate search for an escape pod.
The Great Betrayal: When Romance Ditches Your Mental Health
It turns out that, while friendships were reliably linked to fewer depressive symptoms from adolescence to middle age, romantic relationships had a more complicated effect. Engaging in a romantic relationship was actually associated with increased depressive symptoms, regardless of age.
Yes, you read that correctly. Romance, the alleged antidote to loneliness, might actually be one of the things making you sad. Psychologists have long warned that love often arrives not as a warm embrace but as an emotional investment riddled with performance anxiety, unspoken contracts, and the occasional tax penalty.
The Science of Friendship: Low Maintenance, High Reward
It’s not exactly shocking that humans thrive in social groups.
The need for connection is baked into our nervous systems, alongside an inexplicable fondness for reality TV. Feeling included has been repeatedly shown to protect against depression (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). The problem is that different relationships function in vastly different ways.
Romantic relationships are often built on exclusivity, high emotional stakes, and the unspoken expectation that one’s partner will magically meet all needs—emotional, physical, logistical, and sometimes, unfortunately, psychic.
Friendships, by contrast, allow for greater flexibility. If Friend A isn’t available, Friend B might be. Need emotional support? There’s a friend for that. Need someone to remind you that you actually can quit your job and move to Montana? There’s a friend for that too.
A previous meta-analysis found that friendships were particularly beneficial for emotional resilience (Chopik, 2017).
Romantic relationships, while often deeply meaningful, demand a great deal of maintenance—sometimes to the detriment of mental health.
Unlike friendships, which can ebb and flow naturally, romantic relationships often operate under the illusion of permanence, setting up inevitable disappointments when reality intrudes. Yikes.
The Study: Longitudinal Proof That Romance is… Tricky
Junwen Hu, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University, sought to untangle these differences by analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. This dataset has been following thousands of participants since their teenage years, checking in on their mental health and relationships at four key life stages: ages 15, 16, 28, and 38.
Hu’s findings were illuminating, if not outright damning for the Valentine’s Day industrial complex.
Consistently, friendships were associated with fewer depressive symptoms. This effect even strengthened in adulthood, as though friendships aged like fine wine while romantic relationships aged like unrefrigerated dairy.
Romantic relationships, however, presented a different narrative.
While there was no overall correlation between being in a relationship and having fewer depressive symptoms, the act of starting a new romantic relationship was consistently associated with more depressive symptoms—at all ages. The honeymoon phase, it seems, is a myth propagated by poets and people who sell engagement rings.
Yet, over the long term, romantic involvement did start to correlate with fewer depressive symptoms—but only in middle age.
Adolescents in relationships actually showed more depressive symptoms than their single peers, suggesting that teen romance is essentially just an advanced course in emotional masochism.
The Limits of Love (And the Strength of Friendship)
The study had its limitations, of course. It was correlational, meaning that while friendships tended to make people less depressed, there’s always the possibility that less depressed people just happen to make better friends.
The same uncertainty applies to romantic relationships: maybe relationships don’t cause depressive symptoms so much as they attract people who already have them.
However, other studies align with these findings.
A recent investigation into relationship dynamics among young adults found that perceived support from friends was a stronger predictor of psychological well-being than romantic involvement (Uchino, 2021).
Another longitudinal study showed that friendships, particularly in early adulthood, were better predictors of overall life satisfaction than romantic relationships (Demir et al., 2012).
Hu himself seems to share this growing skepticism toward romantic prioritization. “Love can be trouble sometimes,” he said. One suspects he might be slightly underselling it.
The Takeaway: Don’t Ditch Your Friends
The cultural obsession with romance—those endless movie montages, those insufferable songs about eternal devotion—may need some recalibration.
Yes, romantic relationships can be meaningful, and yes, they can bring deep, abiding long-term happiness eventually.
But they also bring stress, uncertainty, and occasional heartbreak.
Friendships, on the other hand, seem to offer a steady, antidepressant effect without the risk of joint bank accounts and arguments over thermostat settings.
So, if you find yourself questioning whether your social priorities are aligned correctly, consider this: Your friends might be the real MVPs of your mental health. Perhaps the best relationship advice is the simplest—never ghost your friends for a partner.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, W. (2008). Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. W. W. Norton & Company.
Chopik, W. J. (2017). Associations among relational values, age, and well-being across the lifespan. Personal Relationships, 24(2), 408-422. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12187
Demir, M., Orthel-Clark, H., Özdemir, M., & Bayram Özdemir, S. (2012). Friendship and happiness: A longitudinal investigation of the role of friendship quality. Journal of Happiness Studies, 13(5), 871-897. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-011-9294-7
Hu, J. (2025). A Longitudinal Analysis of How Romantic and Friendship Involvement are Associated with Depressive Symptoms. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
Uchino, B. N. (2021). Understanding the health implications of relationships: Relational mechanisms and stress. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 147-172. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050850