Friendship or Romance: We All Need to Belong

Some people find “true love,” however they define it, and couple up for their personal “happily ever after.” Others may spend a lifetime looking for a relationship that can live up to their dreams and never find a person who is able to or willing to make those dreams come true. But romantic relationships aren’t for everyone, and being single can bring as much satisfaction as being coupled can bring. It is increasingly apparent that the key to a happy and healthy life is as simple, and as complicated, as having healthy relationships with people who genuinely care about your well-being.

The most viral moment of the 2024 Grammy awards was when the audience realized that it was actually Tracy Chapman who was standing beside Luke Combs as she played the opening bars of “Fast Car.” Social media was lit! Twitter users shared the video, confessed to having listened to the song over and over the next day at work, and celebrated the unlikely musical union of a queer Black folk singer with a white country music artist. There was a line from the song, written by Tracy Chapman, that seemed to resonate with absolutely everyone, breaking down any imagined walls between groups:

“Your arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder, and I had a feeling that I belonged, I had a feeling I could be someone.”

Decades before “belonging” became a popular buzzword and the goal of interventions across business, education, and myriad other settings, Tracy Chapman named it. She lifted up the importance of being seen, being accepted, and being (both literally in the song and metaphorically in life) embraced by another, and feeling empowered by that sense of fullness we get when someone sees us and moves towards us, not away from us.

With Friends or Lovers: We need to Belong

Fisher et al. (2021) emphasized the universal need to forge and maintain healthy long-term relationships. While the first thought of such relationships may center around romantic relationships, cultural shifts suggest that younger generations are less interested in finding a single significant other with whom they want to spend their lives. In monogamous romantic relationships, we engage in psychological attunement with our significant other, and this attunement intimately connects us with our partner whose responses to our own behavior and presence support our awareness that we have value, which supports our self-esteem, and which, in turn, supports our sense of belonging. In simpler terms, we make choices that help ensure our continued sense of belonging within our relationships.

Psychological attunement can be as simple as recognizing through a partner’s facial expression that they are overwhelmed and reaching out with support. We experience the benefits of attunement when we are infants whose cries of hunger are met with nourishment from our caregivers. When we attune with a partner in a healthy relationship, we experience a healthy sense of self-esteem, which creates a welcome and essential sense of belonging.

Friendships Have Significance, Especially for Singles

Friendships, though, are also valuable relationships that provide a significant sense of belonging and connection. Not only that, but Fisher et al. found that we psychologically attune to our friends just as we might if we had a romantic partner. In addition, single people are more attuned to their friends than partnered people were found to be. This finding reinforces what many single people realize when a friend partners up—the friendship is likely to grow less close and fall down in the priority list for the now-partnered friend. The unpartnered friend usually recognizes this pretty early on, but it may not be until a romantic relationship ends that the partnered friend realizes that their friendship support system is not as tight or easily accessed as it had been before the romantic relationship began.

Belongingness Is a Fertile Foundation

Feeling that you belong to a place, a relationship, or an organization positively affects your self-esteem as well as your emotional well-being and mood. It protects against loneliness. Feeling a sense of belonging, with a partner or good friends, can boost your confidence while ensuring you’ll have a safe place to land in case it’s needed. Belongingness is about moving towards others, not closing ranks against them.

Tuning Up Your Emotional Attunement Skills

1. Affirm your friends or partner. Let them know that you believe in them.
2. See, really see, your friends or partner. Observe their facial expressions, their body language, their gestures, and their eyes. Get to know what they are saying before they have to spell it out.
3. Listen to their concerns without having to rush in with your own opinions. Bring curiosity to the conversation and practice active listening through open-ended questions and focused attention.
4. Validate their feelings and perspective. You don’t have to agree, and you should not judge, either. Remind yourself that it’s OK to have differing viewpoints and that sometimes friends and couples must agree to disagree.
5. Be willing to open up and be vulnerable. When someone trusts us enough to share intimately with us, that strengthens the relationship. Don’t leave your friend or partner on an “intimacy cliff” waiting for you to catch up with their own willingness to share deeply.