How Many Friends Can We Have?

This is the second in a series on friendship. I wanted to share with you why and how I developed a ‘tool’ to be more intentional with the relationships in my life–specifically with friends. It’s a tool that I’ve mentioned in passing to a few friends over the years, many of whom provided feedback on early iterations as well as others who adopted some version of it and made it their own but almost everyone was adamant that I share it more widely.

As I wrote about in the first article in this series, friendships are critical relationships for our personal health and well-being. As I continue exploring the topic of friendship, I’d love to hear from you–whether it’s articles, books and podcasts or practices, rituals and tools that have informed your view on or better yet helped you with friendship. In gratitude (and friendship)–thank you!

Summary

Our current environment and the tools we have at our disposable give us infinite breadth so much so that we can connect to anyone in the world and also see how they’re connected. But we don’t have depth–and that’s what I continue to crave and have heard the same from everyone I know. So years ago, I used the upper limit of 150 relationships (based on Dunbar’s Number) as a forced constraint to help me list out and understand who’s important in my life.

And this list is now a tool that I routinely check to help me 1) be more intentional in how and with whom I spend my time with those that I value that do live near me, 2) maintain if not strengthen relationships with friends that don’t live where I do, and even though it’s one of the hardest things to do, 3) let go of those that don’t serve me. It’s my humble attempt to understand not who the friends for a reason or for that matter season are according to the often quoted saying, but who are really my friends for a lifetime.

Late Adopter

I’ve got over 3,000 friends on Facebook. And this isn’t for bragging rights–it’s that when I think about how many of these people I actually consider friends, the number is several magnitudes smaller. I was a late adopter to social networks–mostly from having been burned by Friendster (yes, Friendster). I joined Facebook in 2008 and Instagram in 2012, well after both platforms hit their stride. And I’m not one to argue that social media is good or bad–it’s the intention with which we engage and how we use it that matters more.

Social media has given me exceptional breadth–reconnecting with old friends or more often than not just adding new ones and marveling at how small the world was. When I first joined Facebook in 2008, I was delighted to be able to reconnect with long lost friends from time spent growing up overseas. I’d made these friends before social media was even a thing–and so I was grateful.

But I slowly began to realize that while some of these overseas friends were people I would actually call my friends, most were not. And here I was spending time online with both groups without giving much thought as to who and why. At an even more practical level, I was traveling a lot for work back then and I was asking myself over and over again who I would like to see in each of the cities I visited.

Breadth vs. Depth

So about a decade ago just after I signed up for Facebook, I sat down and just wrote out a list of people. And to be clear–it was literally a list in Notes (iPhone app) of the important friends I wanted to see in every port of call, categorized by location. As the ports of call grew–I was working all over Africa, Asia and later Latin America–the list got longer. And I kept adding to it every so often with professional contacts soon overlapping with personal friendships.

I desperately needed a better system. So I converted the list into an Excel spreadsheet–yes, Type A I know. This helped put my friends into rows (names) and columns (location) but more importantly, helped me better visualize my network. This was definitely a step-up–at a glance, I could quickly look at my spreadsheet and immediately know who to reach out to meet up with in Johannesburg, Bombay or Rio de Janeiro (now that was for bragging rights).

This tool worked for a while, but the more I traveled–the bigger the spreadsheet. Yes, it helped me visually but I faced the same problem I started it. I had a sense of the breadth of my network, but not the depth–or rather, what relationships really mattered to me? Suffice it to say that the list and later spreadsheet no longer served its intended purpose. I was back to square one and none the wiser.

Isn’t There an App For That?

And so I thought there’s got to be an app that allows me to do this (to be fair, I was living in Silicon Valley at the time). Something more robust than a spreadsheet but not a social network. One focused on my most important relationships instead. So I dug in and found out that there are tons of ‘personal’ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps out there. From Friendie to Garden and Keep My Friends to UpHabit, the list goes on and on. But many if not all of these apps were also about breadth–not about depth–of network.

There were no forced constraints–I was looking for less is more, and all of these apps were about more and then some. And no surprise given how the apps marketed themselves as CRMs–the focus was transactional, not relational in nature. Not only was I not looking to just redo my list, later a spreadsheet and convert it into an app–I also wasn’t trying to manage customers or for that matter, close a deal–I wanted to know who the important people in my life were, at a quick glance.

Dunbar’s Number

More than a few years later, I came across Dunbar’s number, eponymously named after evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Through his research, he suggested that there is a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships–relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

And that number is roughly 150. This was the size of a typical community in hunter-gatherer societies and even later villages in medieval times. It’s obviously less so true now given that most of us live in cities but it gave me serious pause. Dunbar argued that as social creatures, we’ve been wired to be able to hold meaningful relationships with about 150 people. That’s 20x smaller than my Facebook ‘friends’ list.

Back to Basics

Spoiler alert–this isn’t where I drop a link to an app that I think will solve these issues (well, not yet at least). I just sat down and listed out in a new spreadsheet (remember Type A?) everyone that was important to me–family, friends and even acquaintances. But this time I did so with the forced constraint of the Dunbar Number, 150. It was easy to start with immediate family and my best friends–which got me to just under ten. And I followed that up by going through my recent call and text history which got me up to about 30 or so.

This is where Facebook came in handy–don’t worry, I didn’t have 3,000 friends at that time so it took some time but not too long. That got me to well over 150, to be honest slightly over 250 in fact. So now what? Well, I sat with that list for some time thinking about how to basically choose between this ‘friend’ or another. And I realized this is basically the process that many of my married friends likely went through in some way for their weddings.

So I thought about a 300 person wedding (note–I’m of South Asian descent so this is a wild underestimate but I’m leaning more on my American side here). And assuming that my hypothetical wife and I would split the guest list (note to married friends–100% positive this is a gross oversimplification but hey what do I know), that would give me 150. So who would the 150 people be that you would invite to your wedding?

And I don’t mean your guest list in the ‘I have to invite them because they’re a third cousin once removed’ but because the relationship actually means something to you and hopefully vice versa. If a wedding doesn’t resonate, think about a major life event you want to celebrate, e.g. milestone birthday, anniversary or for that matter funeral (ain’t no time like the present). And so I went through the 250 and whittled it down to 150. Not an easy task, mind you. To be honest, this exercise gave me a lot of anxiety.

Again, if you’re married or have ever planned a major life event celebration you know how hard this is, but after much hemming and hawing, I got it down to 150. Let me stop right now and state that if you were to do this same exercise, your number may be a lot smaller. It could cap at 50 or less. There’s no right Dunbar number for anyone–it’s highly personal. It’s just keeping in mind that the upper limit is 150. Your number could be anywhere from 1–150 (well, hopefully not one because that would defeat the whole point of any exercise on friendship).

Curated not Exhaustive

So after all of that anxiety-producing work–I didn’t say it was going to be easy–I now had my Dunbar’s Number list. Now what? Well, first I would check the list whenever I was traveling to a different place for work which was the pain point that got me going down this road to begin with. And so I (again) organized my list by location–I literally had columns for New York, DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, etc.–and before every trip, I would ping a few friends.

But this time, the list was not exhaustive–it was curated. So it was much easier to visualize and work with–and no surprise that not only did I have less anxiety in looking at the list, I was more likely to reach out and schedule time with friends on the list because I had done the curation ahead of time. A few years later, I started checking my Dunbar’s Number spreadsheet not just when I traveled but also in those times when I felt lonely or to be frank, low.

It’s not that I wasn’t social during those years–I was probably more social then than I am now but it was the quality of those friendships that felt lacking. I’d be out in groups routinely not just on the weekend but during the week and find myself exhausted from the interactions. And so I’d end up looking at my Dunbar’s Number list every few weeks to see who I felt like connecting with where I was hopefully more confident that the interaction would be energizing, not draining.

From List to Tool

Fast forward to my move to LA earlier this year–I sat down to look at my Dunbar’s Number list–or rather Dunbar tool once again. But this time it was about being intentional and mindful not just about friends in other cities but about friendships in the city I now called home. How did I want to be intentional and mindful in building friendships where I was physically living? In sharp contrast to my early adulthood, I’m traveling a lot less and (hopefully) a lot more mindful about how I spend my time.

And so I check my Dunbar tool every Sunday–yes, every Sunday. I want to get a sense of not only how I spent my time that past week with family and friends but also how I want to spend the following week. Besides making it a point to see my parents every Sunday I’m in town (one of the top reasons for my move to LA), I call or send a text to a few of the friends listed on my Dunbar tool. For some, it’s a simple check-in. For others, it’s a ‘hey, let’s connect in-person’.

It’s not perfect–and it does bring up some level of anxiety–so I go back to Dunbar’s Number principle of an upper limit. So I pick up to five friends–again, note that it’s up to five. And I like to pick a mix of friends in LA as well as friends in other locales. So I’ll pick two to three friends in LA and one to two elsewhere. And for the friends elsewhere, it’s a check-in to see how they’re doing or a simple, ‘just thinking of you’ text.

Let Go to Let In

As you can imagine, there are so many ways to play with this list. On one end of the spectrum, you can check it every week while also committing to reach out to up to five friends and on the other end, you can choose to check it every now and then and reach out to whomever you feel moved to do so with. I’ve also played around with adding in a few relationships that started out professional but later became friendships I valued.

But what’s been the most eye-opening for me is who–over the years–falls off the list. This is a touchy topic–and one where it baffles me that there isn’t more content on–how do you let go of friends that are no longer serving you? Remember, the upper limit is 150 so as you meet new friends, you have to let go of others. We all have friends that are arguably negative or at best neutral for us and we may spend more time with them than we do those that are positive forces.

More on this topic in another post but being intentional and mindful about the relationships in my life–specifically more time with positive if not exceptional friendships and less time with neutral and definitely negative ones has been a game changer. And my Dunbar tool has been instrumental in helping me do so precisely because of the forced constraint–an upper limit of 150. There literally isn’t space on my list for negative friendships.

Next Steps

We are, no surprise, social beings–what is surprising is that there are so few tools to help us navigate our relationships, especially friendships. My hope is that my ‘Dunbar tool’ helps others think and act on their friendships differently, even in a small way. If you’d like to see an example of what a Dunbar tool might look like, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram at dileepansiva.