Is there a limit to the numbers of friends we can have?
Facebook limits us to 5000 friends, however, the average Facebook friend list is closer to 338 friends. Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, social media alters friendships. How can we measure friendship when everyone can befriend any person on the planet through the Internet?
Social media generates a distorted idea of friendship. We look at our ever-growing number of followers without knowing all those people personally. Our online circle of friends is those people who fill up our friends' lists and follower counts, but we do not hang out with them physically. These “friends” were maybe at one point within our inner circle of friends.
However, life happens, and they fade into the distance to be found only in the dusty corners of old Facebook photos. Social media gives us this illusion that we are still actually friends with them. Whether if we like a photo or favorite a tweet, we feel like we are maintaining a friendship. However, no sane person will agree that this is a legitimate friendship.
We pretend that every tweet, every like, and every little taste of online communication adds up to one real conversation.
We think that the only way to become real is to share. We feel alone without our friends; social media is the only way to connect with them. We nitpick what we want to share with the rest of the world.
We start thinking selfishly. We lose conversations that create connections. We give up brief tangible connections with unceasing empty connections. We stop developing personal friendships.
Webster Dictionary defines friendship as one attached to another by affection or esteem. Twitter, a more trustworthy source, says Nicest things you can have and the best thing you can be. Urban Dictionary says: A friend is a partner, not a leader or a follower; A friend is someone who tells you if you're being stupid, but who doesn't make you feel stupid; Someone you like so much, it doesn't matter if you share interests or traits.
Combining these definitions, let us just say that a friend is someone who knows you and likes you, someone who you spend time with and who you trust. With this extremely broad definition, how many friends is too many?
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and psychologist, gained notoriety for his research on a measurement of the limit to the number of relationships a stable brain can maintain.
Dunbar concluded that the human brain cannot handle more than 150 relationships; personal and acquaintances. He came to this number by the work of primatologists who found connections between brain size and social groups among primates. Dunbar’s number averages among people with the number of friendships varying between 100 and 200 connections.
Through his research, Dunbar also identified three different circles of friendship; everyone has an outer circle, middle circle, and inner circle. Our outer circle consists of more than half of our friends. These people are our “just friends,” or “I know them, but we do not hang out regularly”; a.k.a as acquaintances.
In the middle circle, we accumulate around 30-40 friends. We consider these friends our good friends. We hang out with these friends and want to spend quality time with them. In the inner circle, we only have on average 9 friends. Only 9 friends we consider as our close friends.
These are the shoulders we cry on, these are the people we ask for help when we need it the most, these are our true, personal friends.
Thank you, social media (heavy sarcasm)! Social media outlets allow us to double and triple our available connections. We easily tip scales at close to an average of 1,500 connections through social media.
Our ability to find more people with similar interests to connect with through various social media outlets supercharges our friendship connections. Can our brains handle this extreme level of friendship?
How many friends is too many friends? Right now (through social media), we can keep up with all our past and present friends. We watch their lives unfold one Snap story at a time without any face to face, or personal, value. We are lacking connections beyond the screen. We only have so much time to give to in personal connections, yet we give away countless hours to empty online connections.
It is time to start talking again. Real friendships, ones that are within the first two circles (middle and inner circles), require time and real conversations. However, time is finite.
Our friendships are then finite. We have a limited amount of time for each friend. If we increase the number of friends we have, we must decrease the amount of time we can give to each one. As we spend less time with our “friends”, we slowly lose more real and personal friendships.
Are we then actually limited to 150 relationships? As both the virtual realm and our understanding of our own brain’s plasticity develop, maybe we can increase that number.
There is a lot of research behind Dunbar’s number. We shouldn’t be worried that our brain can’t handle all our friendships. We should be wary that we might be stretching our friendships thin. Simple choices, like texting instead of calling, cause us to lose the real human connection inside of a conversation that builds personal friendships.
