Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

by Robin I.M. Dunbar

female brains have much more white matter (the neurons that act as the wiring connecting up different units within the brain) and a larger prefrontal cortex. Female brains also reach adulthood earlier than male brains, paralleling the age difference in social maturity. The white-matter difference has important implications for the ability to integrate processing in different parts of the brain, and so might explain women’s better skills at multitasking.

breakdowns happen either early or late in a relationship, and are much less likely to occur in between. The data suggest that breakdowns with non-family members are likely to happen earlier than those with kin – typically, after three years with non-kin and after seven years with kin, perhaps reflecting the Kinship Premium

Relationship breakdowns with siblings or other close relatives like aunts/uncles and nieces/nephews often seem to happen after the death of the last surviving parent.

Women were more likely than men to have fallen out with an offspring, a romantic partner, a non-best friend and any relative other than a full sibling (brother or sister). In contrast, men were more likely to have fallen out with a full sibling, a colleague or someone they shared a house with.

women were nearly twice as likely to have fallen out with another woman than they were with a man, suggesting that female–female relationships are especially fragile.

They identified six key rules which were essential for maintaining a stable relationship. These were: standing up for the friend in their absence, sharing important news with the friend, providing emotional support when it is needed, trusting and confiding in each other, volunteering help when it is required, and making an effort to make the other person happy.

The three most frequent causes (i.e. as opposed to just drifting apart) were perceived lack of caring, poor communication and jealousy. Between them, they accounted for over 50 per cent of all cases of relationship breakdown.

They concluded that, despite the urban myth, people don’t in fact express gratitude very often, at least for everyday favours. However, almost all of the conversations they examined were between family members or close friends and that is precisely where we don’t use these terms.

Indeed, we often don’t even preface our requests to these people with a ‘please’, never mind a ‘thank you’ afterwards. We simply expect them to do those favours for us out of obligation. Check it out for yourself. Expressions of gratitude are for strangers or less close friends whom we wouldn’t normally expect to behave altruistically.

women had much higher expectations of relationships than men did, especially in respect of reciprocity (of loyalty, trustworthiness, mutual regard and support), genuineness and communion (willingness to engage in self-disclosure and intimacy).

Men, by contrast, had higher expectations than women in respect of only one category which Jeffrey Hall termed ‘agency’ (engaging in physical activities and striving for status).

The divorce statistics tend to reinforce this conclusion. In the UK, nearly two-thirds of divorce petitions for heterosexual couples in 2017 were submitted by women,

both cases, the most common reason for divorce was unreasonable behaviour,

She found that women reported a greater sense of loneliness than men. Individuals with low attachment security, who commonly felt they received less emotional support and were anxious about their relationships, felt significantly lonelier than those who were more secure.

everyone has their price. Part of the problem is that we are all busy people, with our own social networks to worry about. If you force me to devote a disproportionate amount of time to you, it means I have less time to devote to my other friends – who may be important to me. As always, everything in life is a trade-off between alternative options.

One important issue that constantly emerges from the literature on marital breakdown is men’s susceptibility to depression and suicide in the aftermath of separation and divorce.

this may be a consequence of the fact that men’s friendships are more casual, and hence do not provide the emotional support that women’s friendships with other women provide in these circumstances.

men risk ending up with no social network other than their own family after a divorce or the death of a spouse.

we found that subjects’ pain threshold (an indicator of endorphins) increased after rejection, but especially so in people who said they had been bullied in primary (but not secondary) school. Social experiences, it seems, can have a lifelong effect, making us more sensitive to social situations as grown-ups.

The real benefit of crying arises from the fact that we feel psychological pain. It looks suspiciously as though the endorphin system might be involved. And since the endorphin system provides the brain’s own built-in aspirin, psychological pain naturally triggers an endorphin response that both dampens the pain and makes us feel better by giving us a slight opioid high. In other words, the origins of crying may lie in what it does for us directly by making us feel better rather than in what it does for us indirectly by rousing sympathy in someone else.

It seems that close family relationships, as well as romantic relationships, are especially at risk of ending catastrophically. They are also the ones that are most difficult to reconcile, precisely because they end with such an acrimonious rupture.

It seems that if a reconciliation is going to happen, it happens within the first few weeks after the break-up, otherwise it becomes semi-permanent with the two sides not even willing to initiate the process of reconciliation.

we had asked our respondents to tell us about how reconciliation had been achieved. By far the most common behaviour was a simple apology (almost half of all successful reconciliations). The next most common did not involve any apology or peace-making: typically, these involved a frank discussion of differences, financial reparations for a loss, or simply ‘time out’

There was a strong tendency for women’s break-ups to remain unreconciled longer than men’s.

Women were also more demanding than men in what they were prepared to accept as evidence of reconciliation. It seems that women are less forgiving than men.

women’s relationships are more fragile than men’s, perhaps because they are much more intimate and emotionally charged

Shared interest in, and responsibility for, children may reduce the risk of divorce by making the respective parties more willing to put up with a less than satisfactory relationship in the interests of the children’s future.

children gradually acquire successive orders of intentionality until they reach full adult functionality at fifth-order intentionality sometime in the mid- to late teens.

the most common pattern for girls’ friendships was pairs. Boys were much more likely to be found in triads, even if all the relationships were not necessarily reciprocated.

Our childhood experiences set us up for adulthood. Unpopular or badly adjusted children are more likely to appear in psychiatric clinics as adults, to receive bad-conduct discharges from the armed services, or end up before the courts. Around a third of adults with bipolar disorder were social isolates as children (compared to close to zero for normal adults).

Sociologists have been aware for some considerable time that social networks decline progressively as we enter old age.

There have been two rather different theories about this group of key friends: the socio-emotional theory of friendship (which suggests that we become more and more selective as we grow older to focus on those few emotionally valuable friendships) and the convoy theory (that we are accompanied through life by a relatively stable group of supportive friends).

average network size was around 125, with a distinct ∩-shape against age: networks initially increase in size as we age, reach a peak between the mid-twenties and early thirties and then decline steadily into old age

They found that the number of close friends (that inner 5-layer) remained remarkably stable at six individuals, but the number of best friends (essentially the sympathy group 15-layer) declined with age,

men called fewer people as they aged, whereas women typically called more people (at least until they reached old age). In other words, there seems to be a divergence in network size with age between the two sexes. Women became more social, men less so.

Education seemed to have a generally beneficial effect, with people who had had more education having larger networks, especially among men, while, not too surprisingly, women who had largely stayed at home to be homemakers had smaller networks.

Increasing social isolation can have serious negative consequences not just for our wellbeing (as we saw in chapter 1), but also for our cognitive abilities, creating a downward spiral that feeds on itself. We see fewer people, so our cognitive functions decline, and as a result we see even fewer people because we have less to offer in terms of interesting conversation.

interviewed more than 1,500 people aged sixty-five and over living in the municipality of Leganés just outside Madrid, and followed them up over a period of four years. She found that those with few social connections, infrequent participation in social activities, and a lack of social engagement were most at risk of cognitive decline.

people who had recently been widowed had a significantly elevated risk of dying, but this was reduced if they were either physically or socially active. Friendships really do make a difference.

It makes the provision of social clubs and activities for the elderly all the more important as a way of maintaining their mental and physical health.

In reality, online social networking sites are simply where you interact with your offline friends, not where you meet new friends. Facebook is just the modern equivalent of the telephone to our grandparents – a medium of communication and no more. This is not to suggest that people don’t make new friends on the internet.

What these results tell us is that, even when we play games in a virtual environment with complete strangers who could be anywhere in the world, we impose a set of natural patterns on our interactions that reflect the kinds of social structures we use to manage our real-world face-to-face interactions. This suggests that the structuring arises from something deep inside our brains, and hence that it is probably something that all humans share and cannot easily change.

Although texting has a useful element of privacy (after all, you can’t be overheard when you text), it doesn’t have quite the same sense of intimacy that speech-based communication obviously has.

younger people admitted that they were less likely to reread what they had written before sending it. Men were particularly bad in this respect: 40 per cent of women said they always checked over what they had written, but only 25 per cent of men did so.

Half felt that they would much rather see someone face to face when they were in need of support and advice (although a third said they would rather use the phone). Again, there was a strong age effect, with older people preferring face-to-face interactions both with close friends and in times of emotional need.

Interactions that occurred face-to-face or via Skype were rated as much more satisfying and enjoyable than those using any of the other media,

In fact, frequent face-to-face contacts seemed to be what mattered for close friendships, especially for men – you can’t play football or drink down the pub virtually.

The fact that Skype did as well as face-to-face suggests two important conclusions about what makes a conversation enjoyable. One is that these two, uniquely, create a sense of what psychologists have called ‘co-presence’ – you feel as though you are in the same room together.

turned out that interactions that involved some form of laughter were all rated as being more enjoyable, more satisfying, than those that did not, irrespective of the medium.

seems that there is something especially engaging about face-to-face interactions that rises above the purely verbal content of what you have to say. Indeed, there is something intimate about the simple fact that you are engaging with someone else.