How many best friends

From there, we tend to have a cluster of 10 close friends who round out our most important support network. They're people whose deaths would devastate us, whose loyalty we cherish, who we probably like to see on our birthday.

After that, we usually have 35 less close, still lovely friends, and then about people in a more tenuous friendship category about 75 per cent of this group are acquaintances and 25 per cent extended family. Any of these circles can include family members — because sometimes they're the friends with whom we happen to share DNA. Our romantic partners get their own bonus category. They're our most important allies in the pursuit of things like happiness, self-esteem and wellbeing.

Research by an academic called Susan Degges-White found that people with three to five close friends report the highest levels of life satisfaction. People who are pleased and comfortable with the number of friends they have, no matter what number that was, also reported high life satisfaction.

The study suggests we benefit from "feeling a sense of belonging within one's social network" and, really, that could be achieved with any number of buddies. The ideal number is three to five, but it's of course possible to have fewer than that or more and be living your best life.

I love all this evolutionary psychology stuff, but I also hesitate to prescribe an exact number of friends for every wildly unique person to have in order to be happy. Summer has also stopped accumulating new friends because life and age tend to make us more discerning about who we have in our lives. This is extremely common — one study followed people over a year period to evaluate their psychological wellbeing in relation to their social network.

Yeah, really: According to the MIT Technology Review, the ideal number of best friends for any one person is limited to just five at any given time.

But there's a little more to it than just that, so before you start dropping people from your squad , read on. Robert Dumbar has conducted a lot of the research we have right now on the subject of friendship. He's the man behind the Dumbar Number Theory , which suggests that the average person can have up to friendships in real life — although it's also a lower number than both the average and median number of friends Facebook users have online.

Dumbar's research was also the basis for the recent discovery that the average human can have five best friend relationships at the same time, and that's what we're talking about right now. Here's the deal. People like "Instagram friends" may fall under the acquaintances bracket.

Being natural sharers, millennials were found to want as many friends as possible , more than any other age group. Personality-wise, the most important qualities people look for in a friend are honesty and authenticity. There were some interesting location-specific preferences as well though: For example, people in India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia valued friends who are "intelligent and cultured," whereas Americans cared more about finding friends who are "non-judgmental.

While society commonly portrays female friendships as a series of real conversations , male friendships are often still seen as more surface level. Snapchat did find a slight trend validating those stereotypes, with women being slightly more likely to just want to sit and enjoy each other's company while men tended to prefer outside stimuli when they hung out e.

Yet, trends show that the dynamic of male friendships has significantly changed in recent years as men have become more open to expressing their feelings and thoughts. In many cases, it is also increasingly common for men to seek out emotional and physical closeness in their platonic friendships.

Millennials are by far the most share-happy of any generation. When participants were asked if they would share different topics with their friends, in each category millennials were the least likely to keep something to themselves. Though millennials and Gen Z individuals were both raised in the digital age, their comfort levels for discussing things with friends are quite different.

Their connection to the emergence of social media was with those platforms, and those platforms are all about networks," Chloe Combi , journalist and author of Generation Z: Their Voices, Their Lives, told Snapchat. Brought up on social media, young people today are at ease with making and connecting with friends through a screen. An open generation, they share their lives with friends and followers while keeping a small group of people close.

With so many ways to interact, millennials have found a way to balance in-person and virtual methods of support and love in their friendships. Do weightier factors, such as your moral view, matter more than seemingly less important ones?

Dunbar: No. The seven pillars are what economists call substitutable—each is as good as any other. A three-pillar friendship can form with any combination of three pillars.

However, liking the same music seems to be especially good for relationships with strangers. Han: Unsurprisingly, the amount of time spent together is a crucial factor for forming and maintaining friendships. A study by Jeffrey Hall, which you mention in your book, outlined how many hours it takes for someone to go from an acquaintance to a casual friend, then to a meaningful friend, and finally to a best friend.

Dunbar: It takes about hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend. This fits with our data, which suggests that close friends are very expensive in terms of time investment to maintain. I think the figures are a guideline rather than precise. It just means friendships require work. Dunbar: I think the important lesson here is: You should not try and over-rationalize what you do in the light of this.

If you do that, you will get it wrong, for sure. But either way, they are very difficult to unlearn. We have to be very, very flexible. If you try and apply rules consciously, everything in all these natural sequences just falls apart. The science side is illuminating and interesting in explaining why we do the things we do.

Han: It should be a heuristic, not like computer instructions. Han: Do you think the pandemic will have any long-term negative impact on how we form friendships?