Good friends help to make life more meaningful. While everyone would always love to have a bunch of few good friends around, we often find that good friendships are difficult to maintain over the years.
While we meet a lot of new people and make friends with most of them, we tend to lose touch with them due to busy schedules or other reasons, and a good friendship is lost as a result. You can follow these tips to sustain a good friendship when you get one, and try your best to make friends for life.
According to Good Housekeeping, Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, and author of the book ‘Friends’ said, “The quality and quantity of your friendships can be the biggest predictor of mental and physical health”.
He stated that regular communication and prioritizing friends by taking out time for them could help in slowing down the rate of decay of friendships.
From his research, Professor Dunbar has found out that the optimal number of close friendships is five. “Any less than that, it can start to bite. More than five can also have a negative impact because you’re spreading your social load thinly, so the quality of the friendships declines”.
He even added that consistency is important to maintain any kind of long relationship, and the modern world scenario has made that task even more challenging for us.
We have started relocating more often due to various reasons, and that doesn’t allow us the time to invest in friendships which has caused our networks to become fragile over the years.
Shasta Nelson, friendship expert and author of ‘The Business Of Friendship’ agreed with Professor Dunbar’s views and says that practising mutual vulnerability allows both friends to know the other person better and form more solid, meaningful bonds. She also advises us to manage our expectations in friendship and be patient with our friends.
With the right intentions and steps, we can sustain friendships for a lifetime.
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