WASHINGTON—She bends your ear off with daily installments of her latest life crises. She borrows your best earrings and never returns them. She knows all your secrets.

Best friends get on our nerves less as we age, according to a University of Michigan study presented Monday (Nov. 18) at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America here.

” With age, we also tend to feel that our best friends are less demanding,” says Aurora Sherman, a U-M psychology student who co-authored the presentation on best-friend relationships with U-M researcher Toni Antonucci.

For the study, Sherman and Antonucci analyzed the give-and- take between best friends ranging in age from 13 to 94 years old. Only 73 of the 1,498 people surveyed were eliminated from the study because they said they did not have a best friend.

The researchers analyzed the degree of reciprocity in each friendship by asking: ” During your life, would you say you have provided more support, advice, and help to your friend, has it been about equal, or has your friend provided more to you?”

They found that the vast majority of people felt their relationships with best friends were about equal. But among those who thought the give-and-take was unequal, twice as many felt they were giving more than they were getting.

” Feeling that you’re putting more into a relationship than your friend has a big impact on how satisfied you are with the relationship,” says Sherman. ” Teens who felt this way were the most likely to say their friend was too demanding and got on their nerves.

” But we were surprised to find that feeling over-benefited seemed to have little impact on how good people thought their relationship was.”

According to a widely accepted explanation called equity theory, getting a really good deal in a relationship is supposed to make you feel guilty, and guilt has as great a negative impact on the quality of the relationship as feeling angry and resentful because you’re giving too much.

But the over-benefited best friends in the U-M study felt their relationships were just as good as those who gave and took equally.

Sherman and Antonucci found few significant differences between the best friendships of men and women. But their findings did confirm the popular view that disclosing private feelings and concerns to a best friend is much less important to men than to women.

” Men who are best friends report a low level of disclosure,” says Sherman. ” For women, disclosure tends to define what it means to be a best friend.”

U-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan