Starting as friends is common, but do those relationships go better?
Starting as friends is common, especially among younger people, but the numbers swing widely with how the question is asked. There is little evidence that friends-first couples do better, while valuing the friendship inside a relationship has stronger support.
By The Savvy Rabbits Staff ·
✓Checked twice. Fact-checked against the original sources and approved by an editor. About our standards
Starting as friends is common, and younger people report it more often than older people. The evidence that these relationships go better is thin and mixed. What tracks more clearly with good relationships is valuing the friendship inside them, however they began. A trend claim that about 40 percent of young adults in relationships were close friends with their partner first could not be traced to an original survey.
Where does the 40 percent figure come from?
No original survey with that number turned up. The closest solid figure comes from the Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, which polled 5,055 U.S. adults in December 2022 using a probability-based panel.
It found that 44 percent of young adults said they were close friends or friends with their partner before dating. That combines two groups. The report's chart for ages 18 to 29 shows 23 percent close friends and 21 percent friends who were not close, so the close-friends share alone is well below 40 percent. Among young women, the split was 29 percent close friends and 21 percent friends who were not that close. Among young men, 34 percent said they were friends first.
How common is it, really?
It depends heavily on how the question is asked.
The study behind the popular "two-thirds" figure is Stinson, Cameron and Hoplock, published in 2021 in Social Psychological and Personality Science. It pooled seven samples totaling 1,897 people. Five were Canadian undergraduates and two were crowdsourced adults in Canada or the United States. The middle estimate was 66 percent.
Compare married people. In the Stinson sample of married or common-law adults, 70.6 percent said they were friends first. In the Survey Center poll, 29 percent of married Americans said they were friends or close friends, while 25 percent said casual acquaintances and 46 percent said they did not know each other.
Most Stinson samples asked a yes-or-no question and never defined "friend." The authors warn that a broad reading of the word could inflate their rate. Their one sample that offered a list of options, including "acquaintances," came in at 40 percent, though it had only 60 students. That says nothing about where the trend claim began, but it suggests wording can move the result.
The study's news release gave 85 percent for 20-somethings and LGBTQ+ couples. In the paper, married adults under 30 were at 84 percent, from 90 people, and same-gender or queer relationships were at 85 percent, from 84 people. The authors call that second group very small.
Are more couples actually doing this now?
That has not been shown. The Survey Center found 44 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds versus 21 percent of people 65 and older. But one poll compares generations at one moment. It cannot separate real change from differences in memory or in who stayed together. Stinson's married sample shows no straight line, at 84 percent under 30, 68 percent in the 30s, 65 percent in the 40s and 75 percent at 50 and up.
Pew found one in ten partnered U.S. adults met their current partner on a dating site or app, and one in five of those under 30. Rosenfeld and colleagues found that among heterosexual couples who met in 2017, 39 percent met online and 20 percent through friends. Being introduced by a friend is also different from being friends.
Do friends-first relationships go better?
Direct comparisons are scarce. The Stinson paper did not examine how relationships turned out.
A 2007 study of 137 married or cohabiting couples by Barelds and Barelds-Dijkstra found that partners who fell in love at first sight did not report lower relationship quality than those who got involved more gradually, though their personalities were less alike on extraversion, emotional stability and autonomy. Psychology Today's summary adds that the two groups did not differ in commitment or intimacy, and that love-at-first-sight couples reported more passion. A co-author told the magazine that the group was not necessarily representative and that she suspected a lot of love-at-first-sight couples had already divorced.
The Survey Center found a split by gender. Among men, 46 percent of those who were close friends first said they were completely satisfied, versus 37 percent who did not know their partner beforehand. For women the figures were 40 and 38 percent.
What about being friends now?
This has better support, but it answers a different question. Two studies of unmarried partners, with 190 and 184 participants, linked valuing the friendship side of a romance with more love, sexual gratification and commitment, and a lower chance of breaking up. In a large UK survey, Grover and Helliwell estimated that the well-being effects of marriage were about twice as large for people whose spouse was also their best friend.
Neither was about how couples started. Both are observational, and people in happier relationships may simply be more likely to call their partner a best friend. Nearly all of this rests on what people say about themselves, sometimes years later.
How can someone move from friends to more?
No tested method turned up, and Stinson's team notes there is no equivalent cultural script for it. What follows is practical guidance, not a research finding.
Expect it to take time. Stinson's friends-first students were friends for a median of 12 months, and 70 percent said attraction came after getting to know each other.
Ask instead of guessing. In one study of 88 pairs of heterosexual college friends, men overestimated how attracted their female friends were to them.
Say it once, plainly and privately. Something like, "My feelings have gone past friendship. No is a completely fine answer."
Treat no as the answer. That means no repeat asking, no waiting them out, no guilt and no recruiting mutual friends.
Let them set the pace afterward. The friendship may change, a real cost to weigh first.
Remember that being a good friend does not earn a yes.
Anyone who keeps being pressured after saying no, or who feels unsafe, should turn to a trusted person, a professional or the hotline below.
This article is educational and is not therapy or professional advice. If you are in an unsafe or abusive relationship, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233.
Sources
Survey Center on American Life, "From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide in American Dating and Relationships": https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/from-swiping-to-sexting-the-enduring-gender-divide-in-american-dating-and-relationships/
The Hill, "Young Americans are once again switching up how they date": https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture/3910904-young-americans-are-once-again-switching-up-how-they-date/
Zenodo (full text), "The Friends-to-Lovers Pathway to Romance: Prevalent, Preferred, and Overlooked by Science" (Stinson, Cameron, Hoplock, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2021): https://zenodo.org/records/5136908
EurekAlert! (Society for Personality and Social Psychology), news release on the Stinson study: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/535967
Pew Research Center, "Key findings about online dating in the U.S.": https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/
PNAS via PubMed Central, "Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting" (Rosenfeld, Thomas, Hausen, 2019): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6731751
Psychology Today, "Keeping the Flame Alive": https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200801/keeping-the-flame-alive
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (abstract), "Love at first sight or friends first? Ties among partner personality trait similarity, relationship onset, relationship quality, and love" (Barelds, Barelds-Dijkstra, 2007): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407507079235
Purdue e-Pubs, "On the Benefits of Valuing Being Friends for Non-Marital Romantic Partners" (VanderDrift, Wilson, Agnew, 2013): https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/psychpubs/62
National Bureau of Economic Research, "How's Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness" (Grover, Helliwell, 2014): https://www.nber.org/papers/w20794
EurekAlert! (Springer Nature), news release on the Grover and Helliwell study: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/731254
British Psychological Society Research Digest, summary of Bleske-Rechek and colleagues (2012): https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/just-good-friends-attraction-opposite-sex-friends-common-and-burdensome
Our columnists weigh in
Rosanna and Destiny are AI-created personas. These takes are opinion, not professional advice.
R
RosannaAI persona
The friend who tells you the truth
You may have read this hoping for permission. Or a prediction. It gives you neither, and I think that helps you. Nobody can tell you the friendship makes this safer. In the study of 137 couples, the ones who fell in love at first sight did not report lower quality than the ones who took it slowly. So here's what I'd tell you. Say it once, plainly, to their face. Then be ready to hear no and mean it when you say that's fine. The part I'd push on is the waiting. Being kind to someone for a long time is not a plan to be chosen. They get to believe your friendship was real. It should be. If you can't be near them yet, say so and take some room. That is more honest than hanging around and hoping.
D
DestinyAI persona
The one who already knew
Watch the one who calls it friendship while keeping a quiet count of favors. You know the type. Attentive, patient, a little too pleased to be needed. Now look at the other kind, the pair in that student survey who simply became friends and felt the heat arrive later. Seven in ten described it that way. No scheme in it. I would not read a sign into a long look across a kitchen. The men in one study misjudged how attracted their friends were to them, and a sharp eye is no cure for wanting. Ask the question out loud, then let the answer sit in the room without arguing with it. A no spoken in daylight is gold. It tells you exactly where you stand.
The Savvy Rabbits Staff
Our editors' take
We would keep two questions apart. How a couple began is one. How much they value being friends now is another. The evidence is firmer on the second, and even there it does not prove cause. Look at the spread in the counts as well. Married people landed at 29 percent in one survey and about 71 percent in another sample. That gap should make anyone careful about a single tidy figure, and the 40 percent claim is tidier than most. We did not find a large study that follows friends and strangers from the start of a relationship and compares how each fares. Until someone runs one, "friends first" describes a route. It does not guarantee an outcome.
