Discussion

Why do we have to sacrifice some old friends? Instead of a failure to be mourned uncritically, the gradual dissolution of some friendships as time goes on is, I believe, a natural and not entirely sad aspect of human development. People change at different rates and through different life stages — education, career, relationships, parenthood, relocation — meaning that the foundation of friendship based on values, interests and day-to-day reality is increasingly at odds: staying in touch can easily become less rewarding than it is exertional. They are things that can become somewhat circumstantial — friendships of shared context rather than deep personal resonance, which fade into the background when that context suddenly shifts. Understanding this without guilt or undue longing I think is a sign of emotional maturity more than betrayal.

Question: Why do we need to have new friends? The point is that human need for social connection is not constant — it develops with changes in our circumstances, interests or personal growth. They bring new perspectives that force us to think about problems in ways we never considered, connect us with experiences and communities we might not have encountered otherwise, and give the unique energy of relationships where the baggage that comes from years together doesn’t build your relationship history. It comes with functional dimensions too — involvement with professional networks, community integration around local life, and the social infrastructure of new life chapters (e.g., parenthood) all create conditions in which new friendships become a necessity not just a nicety for the exigencies of changed circumstances.

Old friends will lose contact with each other. What almost always causes the distance between old friends is not an explicit decision or a single, gaping rupture, but rather the continued build-up of small omissions and delays that create great distances over time without any one occasion ever truly being so decisive. Geographical proximity continuse tack as the most structurally important factor because writers who are kaput to each other spately and well-meaning but exhausting phone calls or texting do not make up for the fact that literloo book kantopaloose taketentothe bee have in how much work buse lives and op ether elondegive leigh individually following it. Diverging life trajectories — in careers, in family timelines, in social circles — erode the shared experiential common ground that you build from while shooting the shit and catching up: it makes running into each other feel increasingly more clunky and requiring purposeful engagement to maintain.

Are you somewhat adept at managing good relationships with others? I consider myself reasonably attentive in the relationships that matter to me, but I am not by any means a natural at this. I know that relationships worth having take hard work, and make an active commitment to putting in that work — remembering important dates, checking on each other in the wake of meaningful events happening in our lives, not waiting to be reached out to and initiating contact ourselves, showing up hunger for attention when we do meet up. Most meaningful limitation I see for myself is in relation to how much I’m prepared to invest — I have a few, deep personal relationships but prefer them over many shallow connections as both a temperamental preference + usually an accurate assessment of the limited time and energy human beings we have to maintain more than just one or two substantive friendships.

Does having only a handful of friends mean you have less opportunity? What is more important than the number of those few friendships is what kind they are: But tend to be wider, deeper, and more meaningful than a large collection of superficially similar acquaintances but do possess broader perspective, deeper challenge and more profound support. And I would argue that for genuinely horizon-broadening purposes, quality of connection counts significantly more than quantity. That does not mean the worry is unwarranted, though: Acceding to the demands of extremely small social networks — especially those with strict demographic and ideological mimetic similarity — can easily form echo chambers in which existing views are confirmed and distorted to prioritize sameness over personal growth that human harmony relies upon. I suspect that the ideal is a small core of deep friendships supplemented with an outer layer of more superficial acquaintances that provide the breadth of perspective that any single close circle could not hope to provide.

More Friends Are Better Than Few – True Or Not The number of friendships is not an independent variable affecting the “health” of friendship — the quantitative to qualitative relationship between friendship and flourishing is a far more contextual, individual calculation than gross more-is-better logic can justify. In fact, i wrote about this in 2015 on social psychology research showing that the quality, depth and reliability of close friendships are much more important predictors of wellbeing, resilience and life satisfaction than the number and sustained prominence of social connections one has. An average human only has so much space for true — defined by the reciprocity of mutual awareness, continuous investment, and trust — friendship in his or her life: Trying to foster more friendships than that capacity allows results in a greater number of weaker ties exclusively, as opposed to relatively deeper ones. The fact is, it is not the ones with the largest social networks that tend to be, psychologically speaking, in the best positions; It is those who have some good friends ( few but very trustworthy and present).