Transcript how can i make real friends

Laura: Look, I don't write the questions. Just give me an answer. I think you're getting nervous - you're giving all the wrong answers! Mike: That's what I said, the answers are the same. I will listen to them but also give advice so it's really the second answer. Laura: How often do you think about your friends? Throughout the day, every day, rarely, only when you need them. Mike: I think about all of you every waking moment of every single day.

All day, every day. That's my answer. Now, I have to go out. I'll see you tonight. Mike: Well, I'm going to have to live without knowing whether I'm a good friend or not.

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Mona Chalabi: And this is what I'm afraid of. Even though we can see each other in real life, [] I worry that too much time has passed for my London friends and I to be able to reset our relationships. But I have to say there is something about this whole Dunbar number thing that just doesn't feel right to me.

Having only five super-close friends in my top tier feels way too few. And 50 just good friends in the lower tier feels like way too many. For me at least, it feels like I never had a life that really looked like the one he describes here. And that's even when I was feeling satisfied with my friendships. Maybe I was just never normal to begin with. We learned from Professor Dunbar that as humans, we can successfully maintain around [] friends.

Those friends fall into different layers, depending on how close they are. So I wanted to see where my friends fall. And if you like, you can try this along with me. Mona drawing : Grabbing some paper, and some colored pens.

I am going to draw… a smallish circle, about the size of my fist. And then one…. Mona Chalabi: So I drew a circle that represented my innermost friends and put in their initials. And then there was the next circle out, some more initials. And the next circle out beyond that. Mona drawing : I'm actually going to write my sister down. Who else? In touch with regularly… God, there are so few people in New York.

Most of them were elsewhere. Mona Chalabi: It was so shocking to me that some people didn't immediately come to mind when I love them so deeply. In fact, I had to go into my phone to remind myself of the people I'd been texting recently. You would have thought those are the people that is impossible to forget…. I used a standard letter-sized piece of paper, and honestly, I wish I'd had a whole whiteboard.

The thing turned into such a mess. Mona drawing : Basically, the thing that I'm taking away from this is that there are two friends that were in the middle, who I've fallen out with over the space of the past year.

Which is quite significant, to have lost two. But I guess the thing that is interesting is that, since they have left, two people who were in an, in an outer circle have moved in. Mona Chalabi: You know, you can think about the number of friends in the [] abstract in terms of data and statistics and the Dunbar number. But then there's like, staring at a sheet of paper with the reality of your friendships on it.

And that feels different. Because this isn't just a tally, there are names that I'm looking at in front of me. So I asked Professor Dunbar what all his research taught him about his own friendships. Robin Dunbar: It is the nature of social networks, particularly the friendship component, that they turn over with time. We don't retain the same friends throughout life. It's a very, very, very small number of people that we retain as lifelong friends. When I took a closer look at my friend data, I realized that I have 9 super-close friends, which is way more than this Dunbar average of 5.

So I'm friend-rich! Well, the answer might be in my lower tier of quote unquote good friends. You see, [] according to William Rawlins , friends serve three purposes : Someone to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to have fun with.

So rather than me focusing on my totals here, I wanted to better understand how my friends make me feel. My layer of super-good friends, the ones who are now mostly married, are great at satisfying the first two qualities. Or as Dunbar puts it:. Robin Dunbar: There are those relationships where you know the person in some considerable depth, so that, when crisis happens, the cavalry will come racing over the hill straightaway.

Mona Chalabi: But they're too busy for that other friend purpose, the fun part. See, my [] lower layer of good friends in New York was huge, and they were the fun ones.

I could call them up for a drink, to go dancing. They were the Friday night cavalry. In London, I don't have enough of the fun friends. I had been really worried about how to have fun with my existing friends, but really, what I needed to do was to find my new floozies.

While I'm digging into the numbers, I realized that I don't have enough friends to just have fun with. It wasn't simply the number of friends, it was also the type of friendships that weren't fulfilling my needs.

And I think this is a really important point. But an average, which is what Dunbar's number is, doesn't actually tell us what normal [] looks like. And I'm not even getting spiritual with you here, I'm getting statistical.

See, the average just takes all of our deeply varied experiences and flattens them down into one number. Let's say you have a group of people. We work on telephone support and you never know when the next call is coming in. What he's doing is, between calls, he's writing a play, it sounds incredible, doesn't it? He's been at it for months. He might only get a minute to write before the next angry customer's on the phone, so this play is inching forward so slowly, line by line.

I can't wait till it's finished. I have no idea when that may be -- he probably doesn't either. It's such a stressful job we have with random strangers yelling at us for little or no reason, it must be such a release for him to be able to write.

Maybe he pours all his anger into it! Tell your friends about us! Share By Email. Student Teacher Premium.