{"id":406382,"date":"2022-02-14T17:11:47","date_gmt":"2022-02-14T14:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-key-to-survival-find-five-people-hold-them-close\/"},"modified":"2022-02-14T17:11:47","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T14:11:47","slug":"the-key-to-survival-find-five-people-hold-them-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-key-to-survival-find-five-people-hold-them-close\/","title":{"rendered":"#The key to survival: Find five people. Hold them close."},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The key to survival: Find five people. Hold them close.<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Close relationships\u2014about five of them\u2014are as essential as food and water, according to this author\n <\/div>\n
\n Loneliness kills, and friendship preserves. There\u2019s really nothing else\u2014not exercise or even quitting smoking\u2014that matches the positive effect on mental and physical health of having friends, writes the inventor of \u201cDunbar\u2019s number\u201d in Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships<\/em>. Quite simply, he says, friendship is \u201cthe best predictor of your chances of surviving from this moment into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over a quarter-century ago, Robin Dunbar, the British psychologist who now heads Oxford\u2019s Social<\/a> and Evolutionary Neuroscience<\/a> Research Group, established his famous cognitive limit to the number of people\u2014150, give or take\u2014with whom anyone can maintain stable social relationships. In his new book, Dunbar concentrates on humans\u2019 inner circles to understand how those close friendships are made and how they differ in composition by family circumstance, age, gender and culture, while still almost universally capp<\/a>ing out at another stable number\u2014five.<\/p>\n

By \u201cfriends,\u201d says Dunbar in an interview, he means close relationships. \u201cFor most of us, the inner five, the shoulders-to-cry-on friends, are made up of two friends plus two extended family members, with the fifth sometimes [being] a friend and sometimes kin.\u201d<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0How the most connected man in Toronto came back from death<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At 74 and deeply embedded in a globe-spanning web of former grad students and post-doctoral associates, Dunbar can cite reams of evidence to support his thesis about the importance of friendship, which the era of Big Data helped him arrive at. \u201cIt\u2019s extraordinary,\u201d he exclaims, \u201cwhat you can learn from phone records.\u201d In one study, some 18-year-olds\u2014just entering into the \u201cchurn\u201d years of their lives, when about 40 per cent of their relationships will change as they enter university or the workplace\u2014were sending over 100 texts a day. The frequency and length of messages to new friends replaced, almost exactly, the attention once paid to others.<\/p>\n

Dunbar points to an important difference between the kith and the kin in our social networks. Family is simply there<\/em>, usually from birth, and is capable of withstanding long periods of neglect, benign or otherwise, without loss of a mutual sense of obligation\u2014what Dunbar calls \u201cthe kinship premium.\u201d Friends require hard work to gain and keep. A solid \u201c30 minutes a day on average,\u201d says Dunbar, which is why intimates are so few in number: \u201cThe main issue is the sheer amount of time involved,\u201d he says. Distance can actually make the heart grow fonder in regards to family\u2014who can be as annoying as they are dependable\u2014but stretching available time beyond its breaking point tends to destroy friendships.<\/p>\n

Although Dunbar believes the evidence shows a \u201cstriking sex difference\u201d in the intensity of friendships\u2014with women\u2019s bonds being more fervid\u2014both sexes find that distance simply cannot be bridged by electronic communication. \u201cThere is something deeply engaging,\u201d says Dunbar, \u201cabout eye-to-eye across the kitchen table\u2014and the ability to touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Susan Pinker, whose book The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier<\/em> has seemed ever more prescient since its 2014 publication, completely agrees. \u201cIn-person contact is essential for touch or non-verbal communication, that little pat on the arm,\u201d says the Montreal-based developmental psychologist. Getting together signals \u201cyou\u2019re willing to invest the time,\u201d she adds, a calculus we all subconsciously register. \u201cIf you don\u2019t sustain a friendship, then it melts away\u2014unless it\u2019s with your intimate family members.\u201d<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Why pet people are the animal lovers that wildlife needs<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of all the lockdown workarounds for the rituals and emotions of friendship as we knew it before COVID-19, only pets\u2014whose ownership spiked during the lockdowns\u2014offered the possibility of touch, says Pinker, the happy owner of a pandemic puppy: \u201ca big, hairy baby who needs attention and more haircuts than I get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both psychologists see the pandemic as a real-world experiment in how friendship may evolve. Dunbar is cautiously awaiting the results of studies into the corroding effects of isolation, while Pinker is optimistic the lockdowns have acted as a wake-up call. \u201cBefore the pandemic, I think there were still a lot of people thinking, \u2018Skype, FaceTime, I don\u2019t really need to go out and do this personally.\u2019 Now we all know we need to.\u201d And both, too, know further changes in our social relationships, unrelated to social media or epidemics, are on the horizon. For about a century, Dunbar notes, the Western world has held at about half-family and half-friend in its social circles, down from what was almost entirely family not that far back in history. With families continuing to shrink, so too will the kin share of our inner circles. We are all going to need more friends.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cThe BFF quotient.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n