number of friends

When it comes to friendships, it’s not how long or how close or how good. Instead, the latest craze seems to be how many. No one is quite sure how many friends you need or how many you can have. Given the number vacuum, some members of social networking sites like Facebook, My Space, or LinkedIn are accreting new friends like young boys collects baseball cards---acquiring impressive numbers of online “friends” that approach the hundreds and thousands.

Such excess raises the question---How many friendships, real, virtual or a combination of the two---can any one person reasonably handle? It depends on who you are and what it means for you to befriend someone. Are your friendships casual or close? Are they intense or intermittent? Are they brief or long-standing?

Every woman I know has a finite amount of time for friendship (which varies based on how she chooses to balance her social needs with the rest of her life). Additionally, some women are naturally more adept than others in both making friends and keeping them.

British anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar has conducted research that concludes that humans are functionally hard-wired to handle a maximum of 150 friends at a time. That number, 150, has been dubbed Dunbar’s Number. The term was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point and has been cited recently in a spate of news articles.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Carl Bialik (AKA the Numbers Guy) suggests that technology may actually enable us to expand the number of friends we can juggle simultaneously. He points out that social networking sites can help us maintain contact with people who are at the outer fringes of our circle of friends. Cell phones, emails, and IMs have similarly expanded our capability to reach out and touch someone.

“Prof. Dunbar isn't sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated,” writes Bialik. “The research, he says, ‘made us realize people don't know what these wretched things called relationships are -- and that helps explain why we're so bad at them.’”

• Brits collect an average of 396 friends each over their lifetime.
• People wind up staying in touch with about 1 out of 12 of the friends they make.
• The average number of friends they maintain is 33.
• Only a fifth of the keepers are close friends.
• Ironically, people spend more time with social friends than close friends.
• Women see their social friends every 3.5 days while they see their close friends only six times a year.
• Two-thirds of those surveyed call the attrition of friends one of their “biggest regrets in life”

When it comes to social networking sites, like Facebook or MySpace, things are largely black or white, says blogger Nancy Baym.

On her blog, Online fandom, Baym remarks: “One of the great shortcomings of social network sites as they currently exist is that almost all of them offer you only one kind of friend. It’s binary — you’re a friend or you aren’t...

A recent article by Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry S. Lodge on MSN.com, Why Love Heals: How Friendships Keep You Healthy, discusses the findings of a study that examined the correlation between friendship and good health.

“A study of more than 4,000 women and men in Alameda County, California, showed a direct link between the size of one's social circle and survival, with larger circles bringing ever-greater longevity. Women with fewer than six regular contacts outside the house had significantly higher rates of blocked coronary arteries, were more likely to be obese and have diabetes, high blood pressure, and depression, and were two and a half times more likely to die over the course of the study than those with an extensive social network.”

The article goes on to say that both good friendships and a good number of them are associated with good health; a combination of the two is the best prescription of all.

What are your thoughts about why friendship is linked to good health?

Aristotle characterized three different types of friendships, according to a recent article in Philosophy Now by Dr. Timothy Madigan. They include friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of good.

Friendships of utility offer some mutual advantage to both parties (for example, co-workers, business partners, classmates)

Friendships of pleasure describe those where people simply enjoy spending time together (for example, members of a book club or women who shop or exercise together)

Friendships of good are relationships that tend to be lifelong, based on people valuing each other's virtues