Having this number of close friends could minimize your chances of developing depression.
I have been studying friendship in both humans and monkeys for over 50 years. My research has been particularly interested in two areas: the limits on the number of people with whom you can have meaningful relationships, and how those relationships are built and maintained.
While five is the optimum for the number of friends in your close circle, you can have up to 150 meaningful relationships, including with family members. These are the relationships where, if you bumped into them at 3 a.m. in a departure lounge in Hong Kong, you wouldn't hesitate to go up and clap them on the back and say,"How are you doing? Haven't seen you in ages.
This appears to be a cognitive limit—it's almost as though we only have 150 slots in our brain for handling relationships of significant emotional quality. Beyond 150, you get into the world of acquaintances, which might include, for instance, your work colleagues or your friendly local barista. That acquaintance layer runs up to 500 people, so there's a lot of room in there.
If you don't see somebody and you don't have all these stimulating experiences, the friendship will gradually decay over the course of a few months. It takes about three years for somebody to go from being a good friend, whom you used to see a lot, to becoming an acquaintance. The further out you go into the solar system of your social world, the less frequently you need to see people. So you might only have to see people in the outer layer once a year.
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