120 ELLE.MY

BEAUTY Psyche

A few weeks ago, I was kidnapped by my friend. While this wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm (I have no prior experience with kidnapping, but I assume blindfolds and rough handling would be involved), I wasn’t happy to find that while I thought we were driving towards an evening of chatting together over drinks about life, love

and our latest hair disasters, Iylia had other plans. Five minutes picking me up, she received a phone call.

“Sure,” she said to the mysterious caller. “We’ll see you there!”“See who?” I asked suspiciously.

As we get older, it’s harder to nurture new friendships. Is the emotional investment worth it?

By Samantha Joseph

The friend limit

“Oh it’s just Poots. She’s great!” I groaned. “And two other people.”I attempted to open the car doors. Locked. “We can turn back!”She rolled her eyes and launched into a spiel about how

making new friends was a great experience, but all I could hear was her forcing me to expend unnecessary energy to converse with strangers. My kidnapping was the result of a discussion we’d had about the difficulties of making friends since we began working. No time, limited activities outside the office to meet new people,

something very interesting – that our brain has limitations when it comes to close connections. He inference, based on the size of the human brain, is that the average number of people you could sustain in a social group is 150, and your closeness decreases by divisions of three, so that your closest group of friends and family would be around five. These numerical limits are called Dunbar’s number. The next number is 15, slightly less intimate but still close friends, and so on and so forth. As you might expect, the closeness drops as the number increases.

If you’re like me pre-kidnapping, you would think, look, here’s a scientific explanation not to invest so much time and energy into making and keeping new friends, because not only do you not have the time for it, you don’t even have the cognitive abilities for it. Talk about an argument ender. (You can pick your gauntlet of friend-making up from the floor now and eat it, Iylia.) At the same time, Dunbar’s number is just a ballpark figure, and for each

person, the friend making limitation may be different. It’s okay, you’re not a freak if you have 10 best friends.

Despite my protestations, I went along with Iylia and met up with her friends (whom she had inherited

from another friend). I had a good time. I actually wanted to see those people again – I wanted to go out and do things with them, embarrassing things and fun things, and create shared memories. I decided I’d been wrong and should always keep an open mind. “It’s usually beneficial to have new friends, especially if these new friends encourage and influence our self-development,” says Risky. “Having new friends also allows us to see the world from a different perspective, which will help us to tackle our own ignorance or unconscious ethnocentrism.” That’s right, I was fighting ignorance and making friends.

A couple of weeks later, I went for another event involving a different friend, and while socialising with her friends, all I felt was – a fizzle. You win some, you lose some.

“Having new friends allows us to see the world from a different perspective.”

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and in my case, convincing myself I had enough friends and wasn’t interested in new people. My friend was not impressed.

We weren’t the only people in this friend-making conundrum. As people move on from carefree college days and onto the responsibilities of adult life, work begins to take up the bulk of our time. Then we start pairing up and juggling spending time with the significant other and hanging out with existing friends. Eventually some of us will have families, and that will reduce the time spent outside the home and office even more.

Social Network Changes and Life Events Across the Life Span: A Meta-Analysis, a study published in 2013 backed up this reasoning, explaining that as we grew older, our focus changes from an ‘information acquisition’ form of socialising where we mingle in large groups with diverse people and orient ourselves on our place in the world, to ‘emotion regulation’ when we become adults, where we become focused on emotionally investing in close relationships like family, and close friends. Our social satisfaction comes from different places as we age – when we are younger, we value discovery, and as we get older, we seek out stability.

If I’m honest, I miss that sense of adventure when you first meet someone, risking the first small emotional investments as you wait to discover if they will turn out to be a socially awkward weirdo secretly in love with your professor, or a nutjob who wears tighty whities to tan on the beach. (I’ll always love you, Kit.) I also had normal friends. We would go together to the beach, the clubs, and the hospital if someone was ill. But they are also the exact same people that I now go to the beach, the clubs, and the hospital with if someone is ill.

So how do we go about making more friends? It’s not as simple as deciding you’d like new friends. First off, I’m told, you have to approach interactions with an open mind. And secondly, like any good relationship, some chemistry is involved. “If you feel that you have to make new friends, it’s always good to find people with similar interests as we are naturally attracted to those who are similar to us,” says Asst Professor Risky Harisa Haslan of the University of Nottingham Malaysia’s Division of Organisational and Applied Psychology. Once you’ve found someone who tingles your chemicals, it doesn’t stop there.

“Effort is definitely needed, especially once you start working. People have their own plans and work is often in the way. Being the one that initiates interaction is important. Once interactions are made, it is easier for people to open up about themselves and only then friendship will happen ‘organically’. Initiating interaction is also a good way to find out whether or not we are compatible with this other person,” advises Risky.

It seems like a lot of work if you ask me. Staying out past ten on a weekday is a chore as it is, and my weekends are reserved for family and waking up (really) late. At this point, I’m just making excuses. But research by anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests

Risky’s Friendly Advice

Not everyoNe Needs to have more frieNds. Focusing on the ones that you already have might be more relevant to some

doN’t feel pressured to coNform to New frieNds. keeping your individuality is just as essential

the quality of the relatioNship that you have with your friends is more important than the quantity of friends