How Friendship Thrives in Shared Struggle

The Timing was Key

I applied to the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania one year after receiving a brain cancer diagnosis. At this point, I wasn’t sure how the disease would progress or how quickly. My motivations and goal hierarchies honed in on improving all aspects of wellness in my control and letting go of the rest. Being diagnosed with a terminal illness changes your priorities—almost instantly.

When I was diagnosed in December 2019, I received an impressive outpouring of love from friends, family, caregivers, and strangers. Then, a few months later, I quarantined to avoid the potential spread of the pandemic. Right as I was savoring other people the most, the door closed on my social life. The effect was twofold—refreshed appreciation for the role of other people in my life and a descent into a valley deprived of the joy of being with loved ones every day.

I didn’t go to MAPP to prepare to apply the science of well-being to my population of interest. I went to spend a year seeking a deeper understanding. I wanted to understand why the most challenging experiences of my life brought deep feelings of purpose and wellness; to answer why I felt alive and most connected to others when the going was tough.

What is the one thing that makes life most worth living?

The MAPP instructors posed this question early on, and I repeated it to myself often until I thought I had an answer. Visions of summiting barren mountain peaks with snowy, whipping winds recurred. So did visions of the people who joined for those adventures. Visions of friends and co-workers visiting me in the hospital showed up too. The common denominator emerged—whether we choose the struggle or it chooses us, it is made better with friendship.

Philosophers Agree

The MAPP faculty encouraged me to study friendship for my capstone, both because I was drawn to it and because it is understudied in the psychology literature. I was relieved to find that friendship in the context of adversity was underpinned by notable philosophers.

Aristotle recounts that struggle is key for knowing your peer.

“As the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have eaten salt together.”
– Aristotle, 350 B.C.E./1998

And that friendship is paramount in the human experience.

“For no one would choose to live without friends, but possessing all other good things.”
-Aristotle, 350 B.C.E./1998

Centuries later, Cicero argues intensely to hold friendship in the highest regard.

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys and dividing our grief.”
– Cicero, 43 B.C.E./2018

And pleads with his audience to cherish friendship.

“All I can do is urge on you to regard friendship as the greatest thing in the world; for there is nothing which so fits in with our nature, or is so exactly what we want in prosperity or adversity.”
-Cicero, 43 B.C.E./2018

The Perfect Friendship

The definition and description that Aristotle established and Cicero expanded is perfect in that it is simple and leaves nothing to be removed. They say perfect friends know each other thoroughly, and because they know each other thoroughly and experience a variety of things together, they can deeply admire their respective goodwill and virtue (Aristotle, 350 B.C.E./1998; Cicero, 44 B.C.E/2018). The perfect friendship, pursued for and from virtue is both useful—in that it creates eudaimonia (well-being) which sweetens life—and compounds our social & experiential resources.

Evolutionary Psychology Agrees

While philosophy confirms that the phenomena of friendship is central to the quality of life and eudaimonia, findings from evolutionary psychology present a practical lens. There is a clear thread from our need to seek safety through contact as infants to the need for other people in our lives as adults. We are fundamentally social creatures that thrive and survive by way of connection and attachment—predisposed to enjoy social immersion and find meaning through connection with other people (e.g., Buss, 2019 Diener & Seligman, 2002; Fowler & Christakis, 2008). It seems, ironically, that we are our most secure, joyful, and meaningful selves when we are experiencing life with other people.

Today, we live in conditions that are much safer, healthier, and stable—we have laws and social systems that have taken the place of gossip and reputation-based systems for maintaining social order. Unfortunately, we are less dependent on our friends for material and emotional support (Buss, 2019). With far fewer colossal tragedies and less interdependence than before, we see our friends in action less. Therefore, we may lack the perspective that allows us to truly evaluate the goodness of our friends. A founder of evolutionary psychology as a science posits this:

“It is possible that the sense of alienation and loneliness felt in modern living, a lack of deep social connectedness, might stem from the lack of critical assessment events that tell us who is deeply engaged in our welfare.”
- Buss, 2019

Since our lifestyles have evolved away from deep social interdependence, we can supplement by choosing to seek adversity with friends. When we share our adversities, they can be a lens into our friends’ inherent strengths and virtues. We can learn who is deeply engaged in our welfare and demonstrate the same to our friends.

Virtue Resonance: A new Psychological Construct

In my capstone, I proposed a new construct to describe the echoing of virtue between friends: Virtue Resonance. You may have experienced this in a challenging situation where you and a friend were immersed and engaged in a task and then reached a breakthrough together. Or a time when you experienced something new with a friend and witnessed each other's ability and skill in a novel way. Virtue resonance could be a real-time, momentary evaluation of dyadic virtue or discovered through a reflective process. Figure 1 below represents how virtue resonates between friends dealing with contexts of adversity and challenge. I theorize that a friendship could grow by moving through three steps—awareness, attribution, and appraisal—following a shared adversity.

Positive psychology offers tools and constructs to put the philosophers’ wisdom to work. Perfect friendship, recall, is an authentic admiration for the strengths and goodness within each other. The VIA classification of Character Strengths, a comprehensive set of 24 virtuous attributes, provides a convenient language to describe the goodness and strength in your peer.

Try Virtue Resonance for Yourself

My research confirmed for me that there is something special about struggling with our friends. I am now turning my research and attention to putting the findings in action and operationalizing the virtue resonance theory.

Below are three actions anyone can take to experience, notice, and savor the best in someone else!

Seek a variety of experiences and contexts with your friends, or be disposed to new connections when you’re in an adverse context or situation.

Be aware. When adversity strikes (or you choose to seek it out!) keep an eye on how your friends rise to the challenge.

Attribute strengths by name to your friends. When I have a positive or meaningful experience with someone, I take a moment to name a strength I see shining in them; I do my best to recall these strengths when I am away from my friends.

If you’d like to read about Virtue Resonance in depth, you can find a copy of my capstone here.

References

Aristotle. (1998). Nicomachean ethics: Books VIII and IX (M. Pakaluk, Ed.). (Clarendon Aristotle Series). J. L. Ackrill & L. Judson (Eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (2020). doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198751038.book.1. (Original work published 350 B.C.E)

Buss, D. M. (2019). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind. Routledge.

Cicero, M. (2018). How to be a friend: An ancient guide to true friendship. Princeton University Press. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.23943/978069 1183893 (Original work published 44 B.C.E)

Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. (2002). Very happy people. Psychological Science, 13(1), 81–84.

Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2008). Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: Longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study. British Medical Journal, 337, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a2338

About the Author | Chris lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania with his partner, Mary Grace & their Golden Retriever, Bear. In Doylestown, he is a high school math teacher, volleyball coach, and active in local government. Chris spent several years racing bicycles at the professional level and was the subject of the 2022 documentary, Mountains We Climb, which is a chronology of his 2019 brain cancer diagnosis and return to cycling to race “the hardest mountain bike race in the world.” Above all, Chris is interested in helping others and inspiring people to value what matters the most—other people.