We've always been told to value quality over quantity of friendships, but when that was told to me, several questions were still left unanswered. How many friends do we need to be happy? Are close friendships the most important? Are shallow ones or those with people we don't see often important? Do friendships blossom best in bigger group settings or one-to-one meet-ups? Are there different levels of friendships, and do we need them? If so, why? And does quantity count for something in this context, or nothing at all? Or what if the number of friends we have is zero?
Throughout the past few years of my life, I learnt to understand that it is inevitable for us to grow apart from some of our friends as they're mainly there for just a phase in our friends, with school the most common example (I haven't started working) more importantly, I learnt that it's okay to lose touch with some people, and sometimes, we may run into friends who are toxic and only trying to take advantage of us (in such a situation, they don't deserve to be called friends). In other words, they could be nice on the surface, but having a hidden agenda), it will be better if we let them out of our lives. As much as it hurts that they betrayed us, clinging on to them is only going to be doing ourselves a huge disservice; it's like drinking poison merely because you're thirsty - you just hang out with someone around you because you're lonely, but they make you doubt yourself so much that you feel even lonelier.
In the first place, however, are friends a necessity? For the vast majority of us, yes. Friends are the people who make us feel less lonely, stick with us in our tough times, define our priorities, encourage us to achieve our goals and be the people we talk about our life experiences with. In the process, we are able to meet more friends because our current friends introduce us to other circles of friends, making our circle even broader and allowing us to reap more of the aforementioned benefits. That being said, it's important to keep in mind that the above is only true if we are associating with the right friends; the wrong "friends" can end up causing more harm than good.
In fact, having too few - or maybe even none at all - friends can make us feel isolated, depressed and lonely. We're naturally social creatures, so it's a necessity to have others in our lives to share our experiences with.
Hence, many of us have wanted to have many friends, be popular and have cliques or squads of friends. That is due to the way social media portrays friendships, as well as the mindset that was developed in school - that the "happiest" people are the ones with a huge squad of friends and are always at the centre of attention, while those who are quieter are often seen as lonely and had no friends.
Of course, it feels great when we have many friends because the unit of measurement most of us use for our social lives or how happy we are is the quantity of friends we have. It feels awesome when our phone is buzzing with many messages, and it sucks when our phones are silent for long hours and we only get one or two messages a day (I have personally experienced the latter scenario, and it caused me to develop a sense of envy towards those whose phones had countless notifications).
However, it would be wrong to assume that the grass is greener on the other side because they'd be burnt out from having to keep responding to messages and going out with friends. As with all other things, having too many friends isn't necessarily a good thing. One of the things that is neglected when we have too many friends is our relationship with ourselves. We will hence have the pressure to live up to the expectations and make time for others, but we must remember that there's a limit to how much we can do. By spending too much time maintaining friendships, we fail to take care of ourselves and can't connect with ourselves. In fact, if we don't have time to connect with ourselves, we will feel burnt out and this will hurt our friendships in the long-run.
In fact, some of the problems stemming from the burnout that people with too many friends face include having to cancel plans at the last minute because they're so tired from hanging out with others or overestimated how much they can do in a day (sometimes, they may be so tired from meeting so many friends they may just want to head home and have a good sleep), having to cancel on certain people all the time because so many people ask them out (in the process, some of their friendships may be strained because every single time they want to meet with them, they have something else and "sorry, I've got something on" becomes the standard reply), or perhaps not being able to have one-to-one meetups because they have so little time.
On top of that, time spent with their family or by themselves will be drastically reduced, and the importance of such time cannot be undermined. In the process, when we are unable to genuinely make time for others, and psychology (as well as personal experience) has shown that when someone invests more time and effort in a relationship with others as compare to one with us, we get jealous and dissatisfied because we feel that the person cares more about the other person, and hence may want to distance ourselves from the person. This problem has a high danger of surfacing in squads, hence leaving a potential for conflicts because it's hard to give everyone equal treatment and we will inevitably give some more attention than others. As ironic as it sounds, having too many friends may put us at risk of losing some.
A model by anthropologist Dr Robin Dunbar showed that based on the limit our brain can take, we can have five people in our critical top layer, ten more connections with people we are close with and consider dear to us, 35 whom we interact with frequently and would consider inviting to a special occasion, plus another 100 whom we know relatively well but are not particularly close with. As such, even though these numbers are just average numbers and may vary across different people, the point is that there is a limit to how many friends we can have.
Most of the time, the friends that we consider true friends are those whom we will share our deepest, darkest secrets with and we feel the most comfortable around. These deep friendships are the ones that we are more than happy to let into our lives and make us feel less lonely and boost our self-esteem.
Nonetheless, in the process, the value of low-maintenance friends is often overlooked. Too many deep friendships could breed the problems mentioned from having too many friends, and there would be the pressure to maintain them. Unlike high-maintenance ones, we will feel less apologetic for being unable to make time for them because there isn't that strong an expectation on them to be there every single day. They will be less angry when we cancel plans on them because something genuinely cropped up, and there isn't the worry that they will walk out of our lives because we make time for other things; there is a mutual understanding that we will make time for each other, but at the same time, both parties have their own lives to live. In fact, since the time spent together is limited, it becomes sweeter and each moment spent together is savoured so much more and they are truly living in the moment with minimal distractions.
Having friends at social gatherings such as a class or social group can be helpful in a sense because they help us fulfil our need to have social connections and these regular friends will help us feel more connected. As such, we are able to build connections with them and build more empathy and listening to them about their experiences broadens our view of the world and we enjoy our time with them.
At the end of the day, however, it’s important that we be our own best friend because as much as our best friends want to be there for us, there’s a limit to what they can do for us and they can’t live their lives for us. They have their own lives to live. Take the example of a helpful classmate helping us for an exam - they can give us their materials, teach us how to answer the questions, but they can’t sit for the exam instead of us. In fact, that classmate is also sitting for the exam and needs his or her own personal time to study for the exam.
In other words, as well-intentioned and kind our best friends’ actions towards us are, they can’t be there for us all the time. They are humans too and have their own needs, and what if they suddenly decide to migrate to another country or circumstances mean that it’s very hard to meet frequently?
Hence, we have to do the job ourselves to pick ourselves up when we’re down because we cannot expect best friends to be a “constant”. In fact, everything outside of us is not constant and changing, and we are the only person that we have around us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. We have to learn to cultivate a culture of self-love, which means to not bash ourselves up when we make mistakes and realise that they are part of human nature. We also need to learn to handle self-critical thoughts that our inner voice tells us - saying “I’m not good enough” or “I’m a loser” or “This is the end of the world” - by acknowledging them and reminding ourselves that these thoughts aren’t true, and there is so much more goodness inside us.
Another aspect of being our own best friend is to prioritise our needs over that of others. We need to learn to treat ourselves like the way we treat friends, and this means being there for ourselves by ensuring our needs are met. It’s important that we do things for ourselves too that make us happy and allow us to connect with ourselves better - be it having a lazy night in bed, watching a movie by yourself, taking a good rest or treating yourself to a hearty meal.
At the end of the day, it's important to know that we shouldn't compare ourselves to how many friends others have because everyone is a different individual, and each and every one of us have different needs, so it's normal to walk a different path from others. Even the model by Dr Dunbar is just a guide and the numbers would vary from person to person.
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