I can’t get off this friendship topic. My FRIEND James over at Finding Optimism (by the way, we just clarified our status … as fellow bloggers that are friends, meaning he and Anna get a Christmas card and Eric and I get, well, nothing yet) just sent me this great link from the BBC News Magazine. Author Tom Geoghegan asks the unquestionable:

If a wide circle of friends is taken as a popularity indicator, does that mean the more you have the more successful and happy you are? Or can you have too many? What is the best number? 

The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
It may sound like a lot, but think of your Christmas card list – 50 cards to 50 couples = 100 friends.

“It’s the number of people that you know as persons and you know how they fit into your social world and they know how you fit into theirs. They are a group of people to which you have an obligation of friendship.”

They usually consist of an inner circle of five “core” people and an additional layer of 10, he says. That makes 15 people – some will probably be family members – who are your central group and then outside that, there’s another 35 in the next circle and another 100 on the outside. And that’s one person’s social world.

Friendships help us develop as people, says Mark Vernon, author of The Philosophy of Friendship, but the very term “friend” covers a whole range of relationships. You have a very close friendship with your partner but with others it may just be a common interest or history or simply children the same age.

“Aristotle said friends must have eaten salt together and what he meant is there’s a sense that people have lived a significant part of their life together. They’ve sat down and shared meals and the ups and downs of life.

“You really have to have mulled over things with them to become really good friends and there’s only so many people you can do that with.

“You can have friends because of what you do together or enjoy something together like football or shopping, but they’re not as profound friends as those who you love for themselves because of something in their character. And it doesn’t matter what you’re doing with them, even sitting alone in a room.”

There’s a limit to how many close friends like this you can have and it’s probably between six and 12, he says.

“I think this idea that you can have virtually limitless numbers of friends does water down the concept of friendship. I think it’s one of those things where less is more.”

Not if you’re a socialite like designer Nicky Haslam, who recently threw a party for 800 friends. But even people who don’t inhabit the heady world of fashion and celebrity have too many friends to manage.

A newspaper columnist once told of her shock when, having struck up a rapport with a man over dinner, she was told at the end of the meal he had no vacancies for friends. He was operating a “one-in, one-out” policy. Six months later she received a card stating he was now available for friendship.

That’s an extreme example but many people view their friendships scientifically and regulate them accordingly.

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