The impermanence of friendship

One of the oddities of growing up is that friends cease to be people you see every day and start to become people you remember liking and really should meet up with sometime soon. This state of affairs can last for up to ten years, and you’ll still consider yourself to be ‘keeping in touch’ as long as there’s the occasional Christmas card and a memory of drunken nights out before you had kids and responsibilities.

I recently met up with a friend in Australia who I hadn’t seen for twenty years. That’s a long time to not see someone and still consider them a friend, but the fact is that as soon as we started talking, it was as natural as though we had never been apart. The reasons for our original friendship had not been diminished by the intervening years – we simply had more to catch up on.

In the 1990s, Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, suggested that human beings can cope with a social circle of about 150 people, also known as the monkeysphere. That is all the people we come into social contact with on a regular basis, people we would say hello to if we passed them in the street, but not those we would be shocked and delighted to see, would exchange frantic pleasantries with along the lines of “well, well, well. Fancy seeing you here. It’s been… ooh… we should really meet up for a drink sometime” and then promptly file into the ‘never going to contact’ section of your brain.

Thing is, when you’re young, 150 is a lot of people. At school, you probably had about 30 people in your class and most of those you didn’t get on with. As you progress through the school, however, you get to know people from other classes, from other years, and you circle expands. You start to reach the limit of your monkeysphere.

Then you go to university and suddenly, you are in a community of a few thousand. You start to make new friends, but you’re still trying to keep in touch with all those friends from school. Your social group now consists of your school friends, your new friends, your family, your professors, and a bunch of people who look cool and interesting and who would definitely make great friends. Your monkeysphere has just been blown.

What’s worse, you’re now realising that a friendship that may have worked when all you reference points were the same doesn’t seem the same when you’re on different sides of the country. You suddenly have nothing to talk about, and you realise that shared experience is all your friendship was based on. For the first time in your life, you find yourself wanting to ditch friends. You don’t have room in your head for all of these people. It’s a depressing experience, that first period of loss. When you’re young, you think friendship will last forever. It’s hard to discover that, for some people, friendship doesn’t survive being in a different room.

There is a consolation prize, however. The friendships that do survive are strong. These are friendships that can weather a few months apart, and having a different circle of friends to talk about. We adjust, we learn to filter out friends that don’t make the cut, and keep the friends that we actually like. We see our new friends in the term time, and our true friends in the holidays.

Then come our 20s. These are amazing. With work comes new friends, but suddenly we also have free time and, more importantly, money. We can go out every night, which attracts even more friends, but also the opportunity to coalesce social groups, and renew our social contact on mass. Seven nights a week, with groups of up to thirty people a night allows our monkeysphere to extend to it’s limits, maybe even up to 250 people who we would say we knew well. We are kings of our world.

Watch out. There’s a new change waiting round the corner.

At some point, you may find yourself with a partner. If you’re lucky, you may end up with children. While this is clearly a blessing, which is something you’ll keep telling yourself at four in the morning while wielding a dirty nappy in one hand and a now empty packet of baby wipes in the other, it does rather cut into your social life. Whereas before, you could go out on a nightly basis, now you’re restricted to times when you can organise a baby sitter. Not only that, but all your friends have partners and children too. Now, your thirty strong club nights are reduced to three couples sitting in a pub, looking bleary eyed at each other and discussing the cost of nappies. It’s not even six of your social circle either. For a start, one of them is you. Of the remaining five, two of them are the partners of your friends rather than your friends themselves and, while you get on with Gary’s partner Marla, and Julie’s partner Derek (despite that thing he said about foreigners when you were all a bit drunk), they’re not friend friends. Just friends of friends, and so your monkeysphere has to expand a little bit more.

It can be hard, going from socialising with hundreds of people a week to socialising with just partners and work colleagues. Once more, weaker friendships start to be culled, while even the strongest friendships start to move to Facebook updates and occasional phone calls.

Which all leads me to say, I’m sorry. To all my friends who I haven’t seen for a while, it’s not because I don’t want to. It’s not because I don’t intend to. You are all simply on my todo list.

But, if I can see a friend after twenty years and it still seem like yesterday, then all my friendships are still alive. Julio Inglesias once sang “To all the girls I’ve loved before.” I say, “To all the mates I’ve had a beer and a laugh with.” Don’t give up on me, just because I don’t get out much. You are still very much in my heart. After, all it’s been years. Fancy seeing you here. We should really meet up for a beer some time.