Close Friends vs Best Friends
Kottke posted an image from Robin Dunbar’s book, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. What struck me was the differentiation between close friend and best friend; namely, close friend was closer to you than best friend. Doesn’t “best” connote… well… best? As in the top?
Kottke quotes Dunbar (I need to read this book) in The Atlantic:
The innermost layer of 1.5 is [the most intimate]; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of five is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous five, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. They also provide the main circle for exchange of child care. We trust them enough to leave our children with them.
So the 1.5 intimate means you can have a romantic partner and maybe one other just-as-intimately-close person. The shoulder-to-cry-on friends include your partner and maybe that one other intimate, and 3.5 to 5 others. The best friends are those 5 plus 10 more who are trustworthy enough to go on vacation with or—if you have children—leave your kids in their care.
And that includes family. Dunbar makes that clear when speaking about the Dunbar number: “That includes extended family as well as friends. In fact, people who come from large extended families have fewer friends because they give priority to family members.”
I think the whole exercise of looking at your social circle is fascinating.
2 comments
That sounds like a lot of people to count in the core circle. And a lot of people to trust with your hypothetical children! Even if you count family. I do resent the assumed inclusiveness of “our children” in the passage, but appreciate your addition of “if you have them.”
It is an interesting exercise to figure out your layers of social closeness. When we ended our quest for parenting a friend who had survived aggressive breast cancer suggested making a circle of people who could be there for us if we had some sort of ceremony. It was eye opening (and uncomfortable) to evaluate friendships and family connections in this way. Fascinating!
This *is* interesting! For me, I have a best friend (who I’ve known for 25+ years and who has stuck with me through several life changes), and I also have a handful of other close friends upon whom I can rely in times of trouble. (I am excluding my sister, my mother and my husband from this count although they qualify as “close friends”; if I included them, it would be more than a handful.)
I totally understand and agree that there is a limit on the amount of time and energy that one can expend on relationships. Apart from my BFF, all of my other close friends are also moms of minor children, and I think that helps us to relate to one another’s time constraints and lives generally.