“True friendship is like phosphorescence”

I don’t know who you are or where you’re reading from, but I have bad news: it’s very (very) unlikely that you’ll win the lottery. The more you try, the better; but statistics say that your options they are very low. What you will have to deal with throughout life is to deal with complicated situations: duels, breakups, disappointments and a wide variety of emotions that will drag your morale to the ground.

It will happen to you, me and the neighbor on the fifth floor, just as it happened more than eight decades ago to Rabindranath Thakur ‘Tagore’ (1861-1941), one of the Bengali literati and thinkers most important of all time.

Throughout his life Tagore shone as an intellectual and achieved great achievements, including the Nobel Prize in Literature 1913. He also had the fortune of growing up in a cultured home, receiving a good education and traveling from a very young age. None of this, however, saved him from facing his own dark clouds in life: he was widowed at the age of 40 and several of his children died when they were very young. Not to mention that he had to live through the turbulent start of the 20th century.

That’s why he knew well what comforts when one faces low hours.

And that is why this phrase of his resonates in 2026 with a special force:

“True friendship is like phosphorescence, it shines best when everything has gone dark.”

What Tagore perhaps could not imagine is to what extent his words go beyond poetry to fully enter into the field of science.

Over the last decades researchers from all over the world have tried to clarify what makes us feel happy, an ambitious multidisciplinary undertaking that has yielded results that would probably make the Indian writer nod. It’s not just that authentic friendship “shines” in the face of adversity. Thanks to it, we do it, with advantages both emotionally and physiologically.

One of the tests more resounding the one who maybe is leaves her the most curious study developed by Harvard University, an investigation conducted with hundreds of subjects over more than seven decades to understand how people are formed and, above all, what leads us to be happy.

For this purpose, in 1938, researchers selected a group of more than 700 young people (included everyone from college students to teenagers from deprived neighborhoods of Boston) and dedicated themselves to monitoring their physical and mental health for decades. Over time the study became more and more complex, expanding and including new generations. In fact it has become one of the experiments longest in historywith more than 80 years of development.

Among those original ‘guinea pigs’ were people who succeeded in the business world, fulfilled their dreams of becoming a doctor, or enjoyed successful careers in the field of law. Others did not do so well in life: they fell into alcoholism or ended up developing diseases.

What did their trajectories show?

“That our relationships and how happy we are in them have a great influence on our health,” explains Robert Waldingerdirector of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “Taking care of your body is important, but taking care of your relationships is also a form of self-care. I think that’s the revelation.”

The experiment proves that, more than money or famewhat helps us most to enjoy satisfactory lives are “close relationships”, bonds that also have important advantages for our health. “They help delay mental and physical decline and are better predictors of a long and happy life than social class, IQ or even genes,” they explain from The Harvard Gazette. This maxim is valid for all members of the study, from well-off university students to young people from depressed areas.

Experts identified a “strong correlation” between the prosperity of the study participants and “their family and friendship relationships.”

“When we put together everything we knew about them at age fifty, it wasn’t their cholesterol levels in middle age that predicted how they were going to age. It was how satisfied they were with their relationships. The people who were most satisfied at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80,” adds Waldinger..

It may sound abstract, but as explains the psychiatrist to the BBC, there is a direct relationship between the quality of our friendships and our body. We live surrounded by stress, situations that tend to increase our heart rate and blood pressure. There’s nothing strange about it. It is a natural, physiological response, similar to the one called “fight or flight reaction”.

The problem is that it is common for us to carry this state of nervousness, maintaining high levels of cortisol and inflammation, which affects our bodies. A good social network can be the perfect antidote to avoid this.

“If something happens to me that has bothered me, that is stressful, I can go home and talk to my wife or call a friend. If they are good listeners I can feel my stress level go down. But if I don’t have anyone like that, if I am isolated and alone, what we believe is that the body remains in a low degree of ‘fight or flight reaction,'” reflect Waldinger. In other words: friendship is an antidote, while loneliness and isolation contribute to our state of stress.

The Harvard study is not the only study that agrees with Tagore about the importance of friendship and to what extent it can help us through anxiety.

Another researcher who knows the phenomenon well is Robin Dunbara renowned anthropologist from the University of Oxford who in the 90s presented a theory that maintains that humans cannot maintain more than 150 relationships simultaneously. Whether or not you share that idea (especially in the age of social media), Dunbar defends the healing power of friendship, something he maintained even in a trial from 2023: “Along with quitting smoking, the best thing we can do to increase our life expectancy is to have a good network of friends”.

Again, you are not alone. In recent years, science has proven the importance of “social support” to make us more resilient to stress, the relevance of emotional relationships (also in adulthood) or the crucial role What friendship can do to overcome stress.

He has even confirmed the close relationship between our social life and our health in the broadest sense. “Time and time again over the years our research has shown that the people who do best are those who rely on relationships with their family, friends and community,” ditch Waldinger.

Their findings give special relevance to Tagore’s words. Especially in a time of liquid lovemarked by superficial relationships and lacks of solidity, and in which it is not strange feel isolated even being in a group.

Hence there are already experts like Arthur Brooks who encourage us to do something a priori shocking: cultivate “useless” friendshiprelationships without a practical and objective benefit (“useless” in the utilitarian sense), but supported by affection.

The same ones that “will shine” in the darknessas Tagore said.

Images | Wikipedia

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