The document discusses the challenges of making new friends as people get older and have more responsibilities like work and family. It notes research showing that socially, people tend to focus more on close relationships as they age rather than large, diverse social groups. While making new friends requires effort like initiating interactions and finding shared interests, it can provide benefits like new perspectives and opportunities for growth. The document also discusses "Dunbar's number", which suggests humans can only maintain about 150 close social connections due to brain limitations, with closer family and friends being around 5-15 people.

1. 120 ELLE.MY
BEAUTYPsyche
A
few weeks ago, I was kidnapped by my friend. While
this wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm (I have no prior
experience with kidnapping, but I assume blindfolds and
rough handling would be involved), I wasn’t happy to
find that while I thought we were driving towards an
evening of chatting together over drinks about life, love
and our latest hair disasters, Iylia had other plans. Five minutes
picking me up, she received a phone call.
“Sure,” she said to the mysterious caller. “We’ll see you there!”
“See who?” I asked suspiciously.
As we get older, it’s harder to
nurture new friendships. Is the
emotional investment worth it?
By Samantha Joseph
The
friend
limit
“Oh it’s just Poots. She’s great!”
I groaned.
“And two other people.”
I attempted to open the car doors. Locked. “We can turn back!”
She rolled her eyes and launched into a spiel about how
making new friends was a great experience, but all I could hear
was her forcing me to expend unnecessary energy to converse with
strangers. My kidnapping was the result of a discussion we’d had
about the difficulties of making friends since we began working.
No time, limited activities outside the office to meet new people,
something very interesting – that our brain has limitations when
it comes to close connections. He inference, based on the size of
the human brain, is that the average number of people you could
sustain in a social group is 150, and your closeness decreases by
divisions of three, so that your closest group of friends and family
would be around five. These numerical limits are called Dunbar’s
number. The next number is 15, slightly less intimate but still close
friends, and so on and so forth. As you might expect, the closeness
drops as the number increases.
If you’re like me pre-kidnapping, you would think, look, here’s
a scientific explanation not to invest so much time and energy into
making and keeping new friends, because not only do you not
have the time for it, you don’t even have the cognitive abilities
for it. Talk about an argument ender. (You can pick your gauntlet
of friend-making up from the floor now and eat it, Iylia.) At the
same time, Dunbar’s number is just a ballpark figure, and for each
person, the friend making limitation
may be different. It’s okay, you’re not
a freak if you have 10 best friends.
Despite my protestations, I went
along with Iylia and met up with
her friends (whom she had inherited
from another friend). I had a good time. I actually wanted to see
those people again – I wanted to go out and do things with them,
embarrassing things and fun things, and create shared memories.
I decided I’d been wrong and should always keep an open mind.
“It’s usually beneficial to have new friends, especially if these
new friends encourage and influence our self-development,”
says Risky. “Having new friends also allows us to see the world
from a different perspective, which will help us to tackle our own
ignorance or unconscious ethnocentrism.” That’s right, I was
fighting ignorance and making friends.
A couple of weeks later, I went for another event involving
a different friend, and while socialising with her friends, all I felt
was – a fizzle. You win some, you lose some. 
“Having new friends allows
us to see the world from
a different perspective.”
PHOTOGRAPHY:CORBIS
and in my case, convincing myself I had enough
friends and wasn’t interested in new people.
My friend was not impressed.
We weren’t the only people in this friend-making conundrum.
As people move on from carefree college days and onto the
responsibilities of adult life, work begins to take up the bulk of
our time. Then we start pairing up and juggling spending time
with the significant other and hanging out with existing friends.
Eventually some of us will have families, and that will reduce the
time spent outside the home and office even more.
Social Network Changes and Life Events Across the Life
Span: A Meta-Analysis, a study published in 2013 backed up this
reasoning, explaining that as we grew older, our focus changes
from an ‘information acquisition’ form of socialising where we
mingle in large groups with diverse people and orient ourselves
on our place in the world, to ‘emotion regulation’ when we become
adults, where we become focused on emotionally investing in close
relationships like family, and close friends. Our social satisfaction
comes from different places as we age – when we are younger, we
value discovery, and as we get older, we seek out stability.
If I’m honest, I miss that sense
of adventure when you first meet
someone, risking the first small
emotional investments as you wait to
discover if they will turn out to be a
socially awkward weirdo secretly in
love with your professor, or a nutjob who wears tighty whities
to tan on the beach. (I’ll always love you, Kit.) I also had normal
friends. We would go together to the beach, the clubs, and the
hospital if someone was ill. But they are also the exact same people
that I now go to the beach, the clubs, and the hospital with if
someone is ill.
So how do we go about making more friends? It’s not as simple
as deciding you’d like new friends. First off, I’m told, you have to
approach interactions with an open mind. And secondly, like any
good relationship, some chemistry is involved. “If you feel that
you have to make new friends, it’s always good to find people
with similar interests as we are naturally attracted to those who
are similar to us,” says Asst Professor Risky Harisa Haslan of the
University of Nottingham Malaysia’s Division of Organisational
and Applied Psychology. Once you’ve found someone who tingles
your chemicals, it doesn’t stop there.
“Effort is definitely needed, especially once you start working.
People have their own plans and work is often in the way. Being
the one that initiates interaction is important. Once interactions are
made, it is easier for people to open up about themselves and only
then friendship will happen ‘organically’. Initiating interaction is
also a good way to find out whether or not we are compatible with
this other person,” advises Risky.
It seems like a lot of work if you ask me. Staying out past ten
on a weekday is a chore as it is, and my weekends are reserved for
family and waking up (really) late. At this point, I’m just making
excuses. But research by anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests
Risky’s Friendly Advice
Not everyoNe Needs to have more
frieNds. Focusing on the ones that you
already have might be more relevant to some
doN’t feel pressured to coNform
to New frieNds. keeping your
individuality is just as essential
the quality of the relatioNship that
you have with your friends is more important
than the quantity of friends