Summer always seems to move faster than expected, even when the days themselves can feel long. And as its end comes into view, the feelings that come with it can be complicated.
Packing bags for day camp. Organizing activities for your children. Fielding endless requests to do something fun. Navigating family vacations — or the lack of one. Making decisions about school in the fall. Living with the constant question of “What’s next?” These demands have defined the past few months, layered over a steady stream of national and global uncertainty.
As summer enters its final weeks, many parents are discovering that the season they hoped would feel slower has somehow become just as demanding as the school year, only with a different set of logistics. Balancing work, piecing together childcare, managing screen time, and carrying the low-grade exhaustion of being a person in the world right now require their own kind of juggling act.
If you are feeling more exhausted than refreshed as summer draws to a close, you are not alone.
And then: Friday. Dinner. Your people.
Maybe it is a group of old friends curled up on couches, telling the truth. Maybe it is you and your best friend, venting and confessing in your favorite booth at the local diner. Maybe it is a supper club you have hosted for years. For a few hours, the noise quiets. The pressure eases. You remember that you do not have to carry everything alone.
In a culture that prizes self-sufficiency and speed, friendship can easily be demoted to the nice-to-have category: lovely, but optional. It becomes the first thing we cancel when life gets busy — the “Can we keep kicking down the road until we can catch up for real? Soon, we promise!”
But what is happening in those moments is literally life-giving — in emotional, psychological, and even physiological ways.
For most of human history, survival was not a solo project. Early humans lived in groups that helped them find food, care for children, detect danger, and recover when life became frightening or uncertain. This became our hardwiring: the human brain leans into to supportive relationships to help reduce risk and effort and to effectively regulate emotions otherwise known as Social Baseline Theory.
Research suggests that women are better than men at putting that expectation into action. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that men and women report loneliness at roughly similar rates, but women are more likely than men to turn to friends and family for emotional support. Women also more often respond to stress not with fight-or-flight, but rather “tend-and-befriend” — caring for others and reaching for social connection to promote safety and reduce distress.
This is no evolutionary accident. Women have gathered throughout time to survive and thrive. Such gatherings have often been framed as either frivolous (“girls’ night!”) or somehow threatening (“Burn the witches!”). But they have endured. That’s because what may have looked like “just talking” was often something far more powerful. More than a source of refuge, strategy and mutual aid, these conversations became businesses; sometimes they became organizations, advocacy groups, or social movements.
Around kitchen tables, women have compared notes, found language for private pain, traded practical wisdom, and tested ideas before taking them into the wider world.
Science now confirms what women have long known intuitively: gathering together can steady us, strengthen us, and help us survive and thrive. Research shows that supportive relationships can buffer stress, lowering cortisol reactivity and engaging neurobiological systems involved in safety and bonding. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been making a related point for decades: close relationships are among the strongest predictors of health and happiness across the lifespan.
When women gather — over dinner, in a group text, on a walk, in a book club that is never really just about the book — we are tapping into powerful evolutionary forces to regulate one another, metabolize pain, restore perspective, and remind each other what is true.
To be sure, men need this, too. The need for attachment and emotional safety is not gender-specific, even if culture scripts it differently. Years ago, these gatherings may have looked like a bowling league or regular meeting of the Elks Club. Now it’s a standing dinner, a regular poker game that slowly opens into real conversation, a friendship where honesty is possible. These opportunities for connection are not soft extras. They are forms of emotional infrastructure.
For any gender, the stakes of cultivating such relationships couldn’t be higher. The former U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness and social connection elevated social disconnection as a public health concern: an epidemic. Loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk of premature death, heart disease, stroke, anxiety, depression, dementia, and susceptibility to respiratory illness.
On the other hand, just the steady presence of supportive people in our lives can keep us healthier, and for longer.
This does not mean friendship is a cure-all intervention. But it does mean we should stop treating human connection as merely a pleasant extra in life. Here are some tips for nurturing your own supportive relationships:
1. Don’t underestimate the power of a few
You do not need a giant social universe. Sometimes what protects you most is two or three people with whom you can be unguarded, imperfect, and known. In considering where to invest most deeply and reciprocally, ask yourself:
- Who helps you exhale?
- Who helps you think more clearly when you are flooded with anxiety?
- Who reminds you who you are when you are discouraged, ashamed, or depleted?
- Who leaves you feeling more steady and whole after you have been together; conversely, who leaves you tense, heavy or somehow less like yourself?
2. Put caring into action
Many loving relationships do not end dramatically; they erode through inattention. If someone matters to you, say so. Make the plan. Send the text. Risk being the one who says, “I miss you. I need a little more of you in my life.”
3. Protect what is restorative
You can love someone and still need a boundary. In our work at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a Make It Better Foundation 2026 Philanthropy Award Winner, we teach that emotions are information. If your mind and body are telling you that the emotional atmosphere around a given relationship is more taxing than nourishing, it may be time to set new boundaries. Not every difficult relationship should be abandoned — some are necessary, complicated, evolving, or worth repairing. Boundaries are often what make healthy connection possible.
4. Repair sooner
Healthy relationships are not built on perfection; they are built on returning to connection, empathy and acknowledging responsibility. A simple sentence — I got overwhelmed, and I wish I had handled that differently — can restore trust before distance hardens.
5. Consider what you bring
Ask yourself: What is my role in the emotional atmosphere of my relationships? Am I bringing warmth, curiosity, steadiness, and good humor — or defensiveness, impatience, judgment, or distracted half-presence? The support we long for is often something we are also being asked to offer.
A yearly girls’ or guys’ weekend, a brisk walk with close friends before the day starts, a weekly card game that gives everyone permission to share feelings, grabbing coffee at the same time and place… even a catch-up phone call, these are not space fillers or fanciful pursuits. Nor are they a break from real life.
They are time invested in your one and only life.
This post was submitted as part of our “You Said It” program.” Your voice, ideas, and engagement are important to help us accomplish our mission. We encourage you to share your ideas and efforts to make the world a better place by submitting a “You Said It.”
Robin Stern, PhD, is the cofounder and senior adviser to the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of “The Gaslight Effect” and “The Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide,” and host of “The Gaslight Effect Podcast.”
Marc Brackett, PhD, is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor at Yale’s Child Study Center. He is the author of “Dealing with Feeling” and “Permission to Feel.”
Opinions are those of the authors and do not reflect those of Yale School of Medicine.
