When the children tried to organize a friendly meeting for him , journalist Tim Lewis thought , they do not the majority of middle-aged men.
I realized that I might really have few friends when my children advised me to get out among the people more often and offered to arrange a “play date” for me. But who to invite? My four-year-old daughter settled on Patrick and Stanley. Both are good options. Both are good guys. There are only two small problems: Patrick lives four hundred miles from me, in another country, and Stanley also lives for four years.
I have never had a lot of friends, but I didn’t have to complain about the lack of them either. Most of my relationships with friends have been shallow rather than deep. I haven’t had a “best” friend since I was eight, when I quarreled with my friend Ben over an album with stickers, which we were gradually filling out together – I considered his contribution to the collection insufficient and, frankly, I am still confident their correctness. I was never asked to be best man or godfather; If you think about it, this is rather sad, but at the same time for the better, since the status of best man or godfather imposes considerable obligations, and the offer to become a godfather is a Trojan horse at all: the godson’s parents will one day certainly ask you to arrange him as an intern in your company (thank you humbly if I will become such a cynic as to hire someone by pull,
In short, the covid was raging in the world, and I never went on a game date with either Patrick, or Stanley, or anyone at all. But this incident got me thinking: where did I go wrong? What are so many middle-aged men doing wrong? Because I know that I am not alone (that is, alone, but in a different sense).
At the age of twenty or thirty, it was easy to be friends: there were always roommates at hand, after work you could have a drink with colleagues, and every weekend someone celebrated a birthday. I had so much free time that I walked to art galleries and watched test cricket matches. And when I was about forty, I had children. It is fashionable to blame children for all their problems; perhaps they really are to blame that I do not grow in the service and have grown a belly. But the decrease in the number of friends on them is not so easy to blame. The older you get, the more effort it takes to nurture and nurture friendships, and at half past nine in the evening, after work and cleaning the house, after which it seems as if there was just a minor robbery, I prefer to watch “Nathan Hurries to the Rescue.” I have enough friendly squabbles on social networks (and even then I act exclusively as a voyeur). No party I go to now is complete without a dead-eyed theater student portraying Harry Potter.
You don’t have to dig deep to realize that by letting our friendships in the real world fade away, we are ruining our lives. This is not an exaggeration: the reach and saturation of our social networks can predict the likelihood of our premature death, divorce, or successful recovery from surgery. By some estimates, social isolation does as much harm to people as fifteen cigarettes a day. Obesity, a sedentary lifestyle – Research shows that none of this compares to the detriment of not having friends.
The luminary in this area is Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. According to his theory, over a lifetime, a person can have an average of one hundred and fifty friends (the so-calledDunbar number) – people who will be invited to his wedding or funeral. Roughly speaking, we usually have one or two soul mates, five close friends, fifteen best friends, and fifty good friends. To maintain that relationship, Dunbar recommends connecting with closest friends, whether in real life or remotely, every couple of days. You can chat with the next five friends on a weekly basis; another fifteen will be enough to see each other every month, and for the last fifty it will be enough to meet once every six months. With the remaining seventy wedding and funeral guests, it is enough to meet once a year.
Take it easy, Dunbar! Show me those who chat with friends every couple of days! Dunbar would probably answer that such people exist and they are happier and healthier than me; these people do not get divorced and easily recover from life-threatening surgeries. The number of Dunbar explains the quantitative composition of the Air Force patrols (four people) and the limitation of the quantitative composition of companies in the British army (no more than one hundred and twenty soldiers).
Malcolm Gladwell celebrates the progressive, Dunbar-inspired atmosphere at high-tech sports fabric company Gore, which has one hundred and fifty parking spaces for each of its offices. As soon as there are no more places, Gore simply builds a new office.
Perhaps I have a lot to learn. I decided to “interview” one of my oldest friends about our relationship – I wanted to get an assessment like the ones we desperately avoid at work: where am I doing? What’s worth fixing? When I called him, it dawned on us that we had not spoken on the phone for four months, but had met in person even before the pandemic. Quite a sinister start.
The next morning I received an email from him with a thousand words of feedback. It was not very pleasant to read: it all boiled down mainly to the fact that I was “withdrawn”, and during joint outings I often look “bored” or “nervous.” He recalled in detail how twenty years ago I lent him a ski suit, and then for several months I was angry that he returned it with a broken zipper (yes, bad, but don’t worry, I managed to survive this blow of fate).
However, this is what the “interview” reminded me of: no matter how dysfunctional your past behavior was, friends are friends to give you another chance. I’m not going to bang on Danbarism at all, but organizing a meeting every two weeks is quite realistic; you can even spend it not without pleasantness. Moreover, the alternative is very dull – loneliness and poor health. But first of all, let’s put an end to the covid, and when the dust settles, we will have a grand binge with the boys. I’ll just ask Stanley away from his mom.
