In 2025, we make friends in various different places: we have online friends, we have friends we see IRL or face-to-face in our neighborhoods and community, we have friends we make at school, and we have friends we make at work. Friends help us reduce stress, maintain positive mental health, and make our lives better, overall.
And the truth is we can make friends everywhere and anywhere we go. In recent years, the increase in the phenomenon of online friendships begs a host of questions about the nature of friendship itself. Some people question whether you can really be friends with someone you’ve never met in person, while others are one hundred percent sure you can be friends with people you meet online, because they have personal experience with healthy and fulfilling online friendships.
A study published in Canada in 2013 called “Comparing the Happiness Effects of Real and On-Line Friends” collected survey data on friendship from over 5,000 people, and the authors reached the following conclusion:
“Networks of on-line friends have zero or negative correlations with subjective well-being.”
That surprised us. We expected some correlation with happiness, but the study showed none – and we got interested. The most recent research on the impact of online vs. face-to-face friends appears in the study “Add Me as a Friend: Face to Face vs. Online Friendships and Implications for Happiness,” published in 2021.
In that study, researchers analyzed a group of young adults to determine the impact of different types of friendships on happiness, comparing the impact of online friends made while gaming with face-to-face friends made offline. The research team established and tested the following three hypotheses:
- Friendship quality will significantly differ based on modality
- Face-to-face friendship quality will be positively related to overall life happiness
- Online gaming friendship quality will be positively related to overall life happiness.
We’ll share the results in a moment. First, let’s define and explore what friendship is and what it means to people, in general.
What is Friendship?
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), friendship is:
“A voluntary relationship between two or more people that is relatively long-lasting and in which those involved tend to be concerned with meeting the others’ needs and interests as well as satisfying their own desires. Friendships frequently develop through shared experiences in which the people involved learn that their association with one another is mutually gratifying.”
Research by Willam K. Rawlings and others – see the book “Friendship Matters” – defines the following characteristics of friendships, based on extensive analysis of survey data performed in the United States. According to expert on friendship, friendships are:
- Voluntary
- Personal
- Affective (related to or influenced by emotion)
- Mutually beneficial
In addition, within healthy friendships that meet the criteria above, people value:
- Sociability
- Day-to-day assistance
- Shared interests
- Loyalty
- Trustworthiness
- Honesty
- Respect
- Safety
- Acceptance
- Dependability
- Generosity
- Emotional support
According to the Mayo Clinic, benefits of friendship include, but are not limited to:
- Feeling connected
- Decreased loneliness
- Improved self-esteem, self=confidence
- Support during tough times
- Sharing good things/good times
- Giving you a reality check when you need it
- Increasing overall happiness
So far, that information puts meat on the bones of what most of us already know about friendship. We choose our friends. They’re people we like. We call them when we want to go out for fun, and we call them when we have no plans at all. We trust them with sensitive information. They accept us for who we are, and we can count on them during bad times and good times.
We could continue, but we want to focus on the last bullet point, above: the fact that one function of friendship, and one outcome of friendship, is an increase in our personal subjective happiness. We shared the results from a study conducted over ten years ago, which found no connection between online friendships and happiness.
Let’s take a look at what this new study found.
Face-to-Face Friendships, Online Friendships, and Happiness
To test their hypotheses, researchers recruited 182 people with the following characteristics:
- Over age 18
- With at least one significant online friendship, initiated and maintained via online gaming site only
- With at least one significant face-to-face friendship, initiated and maintained offline
- Willingness to reflect on and talk about both friendships
To measure the impact of the type of friendship on happiness, participants took the following surveys twice:
One set of answers was limited to thoughts and feelings about their online friendship, while the other was limited to thoughts and feelings about their face-to-face friendship.
Here’s what they found – one hypothesis at a time.
- Friendship quality will significantly differ based on modality:
- Data showed significant differences in friendship quality, based on modality
- Face-to-face friendships showed higher scores on friendship quality across all subscales on both questionnaires, including:
- Help
- Intimacy
- Reliability
- Emotional Security
- Self-Validation
First Hypothesis: Confirmed
- Face-to-face friendship quality will be positively related to overall life happiness:
- Data showed the quality of face-to-face friendships had a significant positive impact on subjective feelings of and perceptions of happiness
Second Hypothesis: Confirmed
- Online gaming friendship quality will be positively related to overall life happiness.
- Data showed no connection between online-only gaming friendships and subjective feelings of and perceptions of happiness.
Third Hypothesis: Refuted
That surprised us. We know a lot of people who have online friends – some of us have them, too – and while we’ve never surveyed ourselves on this question, we expected to see some type of connection between online friends and happiness, but in this study, the researchers found none.
In Person, Online, or Other: How Does Friendship Increase Happiness?
In this study, researchers learned that in-person friendships increase feelings of happiness, while online friends met while faming do not. But that’s not all. The researchers elaborated on their findings:
“We did not identify a significant positive correlation between online gaming friendship quality and overall life happiness. Further…these results suggest that as online gaming friendship quality increases, overall happiness decreases.”
If an increase in the quality of an online gaming friendship is associated with a decrease in overall happiness, and an increase in the quality of an in-person relationships is associated with an increase in overall happiness, then we’re left with one simple, but important question:
What’s the difference?
We’ll leave that for everyone to answer for themselves, but we propose the answer is in the lists we share in the second section of this article. The questions we all need to ask ourselves are about friendship itself. What does friendship mean to us? How do we know when we have a real friendship? How does friendship increase our happiness?
The answers to those questions will be different for everyone. If you have trouble answering them, we have a suggestion: ask for help from a friend.
