[photo: my best friends - Tom, Little C and Coco.]
Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday. Lots of family, lots of eating, plenty of time to ponder what you are thankful for, quality time with friends, appreciation, thinking…
What am I grateful for this year? So much. I’m very grateful for my family. My family-family and my wonderful new family. I’m very thankful for my friends. My friends are my family.
I was having an interesting conversation this weekend…
In your late 20′s you discover who your true friends are. You learn that it is difficult to continue and maintain the types of friendships you had throughout most of your life – like when you were in high school and college. With an adult life you are pulled in numerous directions and you don’t have the emotional availability to nurture as many friendships as before. Friendships, like any relationship, require nurturing, communication and a little bit of work. Effort. Effort is important. There are certain friendships you work on, outside factors can sometimes influence a friendship and you make sacrifices and work harder to maintain that connection.
Whether you like it or not, some people drift away. It’s difficult, but necessary.
I’ve spent over 6 years thinking about how adults maintain relationships. I have theories and notes and essays on the subject. It started when I read Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Dunbar’s number plays a central role in Malcom’s arguments about the dynamics of social groups. [Dubar's number is is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.]
Malcom wrote: “To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting. At a certain point, at somewhere between 10 and 15 people, we begin to overload, just as we begin to overload when we have to distinguish between too many tones. It’s a function of the way humans are constructed.”
I really like this idea and it made sense to me.
I could relate. I started writing a handful of thoughts on the subject.
I watched and observed people in my life. I have friends that focus on family. I have friends that focus on work. I have friends that balance friends and family. I have friends that overload themselves with trying to maintain almost a hundred relationships simultaneously. It cant’ work.
Malcom Gladwell introduced another term to me: A Sympathy Group. He said, “Take a minute to make a list of all the people you know whose death would leave you truly devastated. Chances are you will come up with around 12 names. That, at least, is the average answer that most people give to that question. Those names make up what psychologist call our sympathy group. Why aren’t groups any larger? Partly it’s a question of time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list, they are probably the people whom you devote the most attention to = either on the telephone, in person, or thinking and worrying about. If your list was twice as long, if it had 30 names on it, and, as a result, you spent only half as much time with everyone on it, would you still be as close to everyone? Probably not.”
Most of life can be drilled down to numbers. There are only so many hours in the day, there are only so many days in a week… There are only so many people in your life that you can maintain a healthy and stable relationship with. It’s just a matter of emotional availability.
Find the good people. The kind folk. The positive relationships that you have. Take care of them, take the time to make that friendship even more powerful.
Friends and family.
They are all we have.