Friendship love is the feeling of mutual caring, kindness, and intimacy between good friends. It’s reserved only for friends who put your happiness first, never ask you to compromise on your principles, and inspire you to be your best self. It’s for the friends who care most about spending time together, sharing mutual interests, and building a personal history together — not being friends solely to benefit from your appearance or social/monetary status.
We feel friendship love as a result of cannabinoid and dopamine neurotransmitter activation. Evolutionarily, cannabinoids are a relatively new reward system. They developed as our social interactions outside of our families units became more important for our survival.
Feeling friendship love:
It rewires your brain for trust, safety, and shared joy, offering one of the most natural and sustainable sources of long-term well-being.
Find out more about cannabinoids and the benefits of feeling friendship love in July 2025's weekly challenges. And be on the lookout for related polls and questions so you can reflect on your own memories of friendship love!
Challenge: Introduce yourself to a neighbor or a person you interact with daily but haven’t quite met yet (e.g. your mail person, local barista, fellow commuter, etc.)
Why this matters: To activate our cannabinoid reward system, we need to both treat others with kindness and care, and find others who will reciprocate. Friendship love can actually be experienced with strangers or people who we don’t yet know in our community, but it’s normally less intense than with really good friends.
Cultivating warm relationships enhances your own health and happiness. But it’s not a choice that you make only once, and it’s not always easy. As humans, even with the best intentions, we get in our own way, make mistakes, and get hurt by the people we love.
So don’t let preconceived notions about how people might react prevent you from extending a small kindness. We often limit our own happiness for no reason by wrongly assuming how interactions will go.
Getting out of our comfort zones and striking up a convo with a stranger can feel intimidating, but we invite you to open yourself up to that connection. When sharing simple kindnesses, we all win.
Challenge: Catch up with one or two of your long-time friends this week. Talk about anything besides work, and remind them how important they are to you.
Why this matters: The key to genuine friendship love is a mutual sharing of positive, healthy interactions. Enjoying true friendship can require a high level of emotional intensity. So more friends doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll enjoy higher levels of cannabinoids. Instead, consider quality over quantity.
While connection requires effort, vulnerability, and the risk of discomfort, it’s also what makes life feel most meaningful. Every time we reach out, forgive, ask a better question, or stay just a little longer in someone else’s presence, we invest in something more sustainable and valuable than quick dopamine hits. We activate the FGN behind the incredible positive emotions of belonging.
Maintaining long-term friendships over time is linked to:
This makes sense under the Matter Framework. Social isolation is strongly linked to elevated cortisol levels and a greater likelihood of developing mental and physical health concerns. We need our more recently evolved feel-good neurotransmitters (FGN) like cannabinoids to lower our cortisol (a stress hormone) and restore emotional balance.
So treasure and nurture those relationships with friends that reciprocate, appreciate, and express gratitude for the love that you share. It’s not only beneficial for you, but them, too!
Challenge: Time to play. Make a plan this week with your friends to do something fun: a music jam, escape room, team sports, a night of dancing, all of the above... Just some ideas, trust your instincts :)
Why this matters: Play is one of the fastest, most natural ways to boost well-being: physically, emotionally, socially, and even cognitively.
Social play reliably produces rewarding effects and enhances our capacity to learn tasks (see the evidence in mice). When we play with others, we’re engaging reward systems designed by evolution to promote cooperation, connection, and community. In particular, you’re likely to activate:
These feel-good neurotransmitters (FGN) not only help you enjoy social interaction, but also reinforce the behavior, encouraging you to choose active, social, playful connections again and again.
Over time, these positive experiences strengthen your brain’s reward circuits, making it easier to seek out fun as a healthy habit. As you continue to seek novel, spontaneous activities like games, dancing, or team challenges, you will build more neuroplasticity, helping you think more flexibly and solve problems in new ways.
Challenge: Plan an unforgettable weekend for you and your friends. Leave space for spontaneity and a little bit of risk (but please still stay safe!)
Why this matters: Our studies show that memories tied to fulfilled plans lead to longer feel-good neurotransmitter release. Planning an unforgettable weekend can create a sense of positive anticipation. This gives us a dopamine boost before we even start, enhancing the motivation to do the experience together.
As the plans begin, the novelty of being together, doing something new, in a new place further increases dopamine levels with adrenaline release, ensuring you and your friends will be able to recount these memories for the many years to come. Stepping outside your routine (i.e. being spontaneous) essentially forces your brain to make new connections and think flexibly (i.e. build neuroplasticity).
While you coordinate, problem-solve, share laughs, and high five together on the trip, serotonin, oxytocin, cannabinoids, and opioids are flowing, deepening trust and closeness. You also get an additional boost of opioids (creating gratitude) when you complete the unforgettable weekend.
All that said, planning an unforgettable weekend with your friends means you experience positive emotions for longer (pre and post the event!) You return home with a refreshed perspective and more mental agility, better able to take on whatever challenges you might’ve been facing beforehand.