There for you?
Forget Zoom chats, friendships must be nurtured in person to mean much, finds Clea Skopeliti
The cover of Robin Dunbar’s latest book states: “Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think.” A year into a rolling series of lockdowns, most of us would agree with this statement more than ever. But the Covid crisis has also put a strain on many friendships, with the stressful circumstances of isolation throwing the natural state of our social circles off balance.
The anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist is best known for Dunbar’s number – the idea, first proposed in the 1990s, that we have a cognitive limit on the number of friendships we are able to maintain.
Made up of concentric circles, it hovers around 150, with the smallest circle – about five – amounting to closest friends and the outer band of around 100 people considered “just friends”. Dunbar qualifies this loosely as someone you are closer to than an acquaintance.
It is these relationships that were at the forefront of my mind while reading Dunbar’s book – friends who are, more often than not, friends of friends, whom you bump into once in a while.
As Dunbar demonstrates, citing a number of studies conducted by himself and PHD students over the years, each of our social ecosystems is made up of ties that can be delicate and are ultimately dependent on renewed contact. Dunbar explores the role of social media in maintaining friendships, concluding that most connections rely on meeting in person to maintain that bond.
“All [communicating over digital media] does is slow down the rate at which friendships naturally decay with time when they are not continually reinforced,” he writes. “In the end, unless it is a deeply strong relationship, nothing on the digital earth will prevent that friendship quietly subsiding into an acquaintanceship.”
Dunbar does not delve into the pandemic’s impact on friendships in much detail, mainly drawing on longer-term research – including examples that occasionally feel laboured, such as records from the Domesday Book that prove the significance of the number 150 as a social phenomenon.
When Dunbar does refer to the pandemic, it is to reinforce his recurring point about the strength of kinship ties, pointing to how virtual group activities, such as having meals over Zoom, has been kept up mainly by families rather than groups of friends.
Friends is at its best when discussing the way friendship is maintained: the compromises we make and the cognitive minefield that maintaining a balanced social
world can often be. However, the first couple of chapters feel a bit slow, reading more like a compilation of research abstracts than flowing prose, and there are a few points that seem questionable.
For example, he writes that, despite the apparently “rather different social worlds” of men and women, “something seems to make heterosexual relationships work better”. He supports this argument by comparing how long UK opposite-sex and same-sex couples had been married before getting divorced in 2017, making no reference to the caveat that gay marriage was only legalised in recent years.
On the whole, however, the book offers poignant observations about how we have evolved to rely on one another for help and companionship – and how these bonds make our lives meaningful.