For the only child, friendship offers an opportunity for intimate peer interaction unavailable in the home. Retirees as well as other nuclear family members are increasingly relocating due to work, educational, or romantic choices. Because of the relocation to another town, state, or country of working and retirement-age relatives, parents, grandparents, and siblings, family members may not be around in adult years for frequent contact. Although you cannot replace members of your family when someone moves, you can always form new friendships. The number of working mothers of school-age children continues to rise.
Friendship offers the elderly opportunities for close relationships.
Friendship may mean feeling wanted and useful in your older years instead of alone and isolated. Friendship offers intimacy to singles. For unattached and unmarried, divorced, or widowed singles, friendship will impact on your mental health until you start a family of your own, or if you remain or become single for much or all of your adult years. Even the best marriages may benefit from the emotional and intellectual stimulation of friendship. Friends provide each other some of the career continuity once offered by lifetime employers.