You can actually have "too many friends"

Think about your five closest friends. Could you imagine not chatting with them every day? The people who know you inside and out. Maybe it is your mum whom you ring on the commute home, or your flatmate who can tell exactly what sort of day you had just by the way you shut the front door. These individuals are the bedrock of your social world.

Reimagine your social life as a solar system, with you as the sun. Your relationships do not just float at random; they orbit you in distinct, expanding circles based on emotional closeness. According to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, human beings are simply not built to be everyone’s best mate. The limit to our social universe has been linked to the direct function of our relative neocortex size — the highly folded outer layer of the brain involved in conscious thought, language, and complex social processing. 

Dunbar’s research suggests that we can comfortably maintain around 150 stable relationships at any given time.

Dunbar famously described this 150 limit as the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a pub. In your social solar system, the gravity holding these orbits together is time and emotional bandwidth. Research shows we spend roughly 40% of our total social energy on our innermost core group of five. Beyond that is your sympathy group of around fifteen — close friends perfect for a cosy dinner —  your 50 good friends — ideal for a birthday celebration — and finally, your wider network of 150 friendly acquaintances.

Beyond even this final orbit lies the background radiation of your social universe: the barista you buy coffee from daily, or the bloke who walks past you every morning. While they do not make the official 150 cut, these familiar faces can still provide a sense of social stability. Because the brain registers them as predictable and non-threatening, these familiar faces require minimal cognitive effort  patterns, allowing us to feel socially anchored without demanding active social bandwidth.

Because our social bandwidth is limited, our rosters can often feel full. You may find yourself saying, ‘I have enough friends,’ or you may have faced the same phrase during a romantic rejection. It is not necessarily just a polite brush-off or a feeble excuse. It is a neurobiological reality. Because maintaining relationships requires finite amounts of time, attention, and emotional investment, strengthening one relationship can come at the expense of attention given to others.

Romantic relationships, however, can throw a massive spanner in the works. When romance strikes, your brain is flooded with a powerful chemical cocktail of dopamine (the reward neurotransmitter) and oxytocin (the bonding hormone). The result can be an intense focus on a new partner, with time and attention redirected towards the relationship.Your brain does not magically upgrade its memory card to accommodate this intense new bond. Instead, your social priorities can begin to shift.

Dunbar and colleagues have found that entering a romantic relationship is associated with losing roughly two people from a person’s closest social circle — a result of what Dunbar identifies as a strict cognitive limit capping our core support clique at five or so. 

A romantic partner begins to fulfil some of the needs that were previously met by close friends or family. Specifically, Dunbar’s research indicates that the two individuals are displaced from the 5-person support clique into the 15-person sympathy group orbit. The mate who used to hear about every minor workplace inconvenience is suddenly pushed into a wider, more distant orbit. 

So the classic cliché of ‘losing’ a mate to their new partner may have some scientific basis.

Image from Wikimedia Commons