Why dont I have any friends? You asked Google heres the answer | Annalisa Barbieri

The evolutionary anthropologist and author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need ?, Robin Dunbar, has come up with the maximum number of friends any one person can meaningfully hold. That number, aka the Dunbar Number, is 150. Were members of the primate household, Dunbar has explained, and within the primates there is a general concerning the relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the social group. We fit in a pattern. There are social circles beyond it and layers within but there is a natural grouping of 150. This is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation theres some personal history , not only names and faces.

When you are old, you might not have any or many friends because they have moved closer, either physically or because, well, theyve succumbed. Im writing this in a fairly brusque route because it scares me. When I was 22, my octogenarian neighbour said the worst thing about being age-old for him was not panic of demise but all his pals dying. I had no idea what he was talking about. Your friends didnt die, they were always with you, werent they? Now, two decades and unfortunately some deaths down the line, Im beginning to see how scary the landscape must be when your friendship base, as well as your mane, begin to thin out.

In a letter to the New York Times in March, in response to an article about female friendships, a reader called Enid W Rothenberg described how friendships change as you get older. For the very old, the relationships change markedly those of us over 85 have to learn to stimulate new friends when we have less to give and more to lose in a new relationship. Are we being welcomed because we still drive or have the energy to serve wine in the afternoon?

If youre neither too young nor too old, and you dont have any friends, you are able simply be too critical or negative. If “youre leaving” people seeming bad about themselves, or so drained its like theyve to have a pint of blood( but without the biscuit subsequentlies) then they might not want to see you again.

In How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1953 and still in publication( 16 million transcripts sold !), the author, Dale Carnegie, recommends not being critical if you want to make friends. Criticism is futile because it throws a person on the defensive and usually stimulates him strive to justify himself. Criticism is danger, because it meanders person or persons precious dignity, hurts his appreciation of importance and conjures resentment by criticising we do not stimulate lasting changes and often incur resentment.

So although honesty is an important basis for relationship, diplomacy also needs to be deployed.

If you think truth is vital at all costs, at all times, well, count up how many friends you have.( There is a reason my first paragraph rankled so much .)

All of this said, slating other people can cement a relationship. So maybe “youre not” mean enough( this friendship malarkey isnt easy ). Ten years ago there was a report published in the periodical Personal Relationships called Interpersonal Chemistry Through Negativity: Bonding By Sharing Negative Positions About Others. One of the articles authors, social psychologist Jennifer Bosson, explained that its not that we enjoy detesting people, its that we enjoy meeting people who dislike the same people. Bossons advice was to keep talking until you find something about person that you both dislike. Or, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth set it more succinctly: If you cant find anything good to say about anyone, go sit next to me.

If you dont have any friends, you could also be male I dislike to be gender-specific, but humankinds are less likely to have friends. Some years ago there was a four-year learn, conducted by the University of Manchesters School of Social Science, which tracked 11,000 men and women. It found that women induced deeper and more moral pals who stuck by them, whereas mens friendships were more likely to be fickle and based on social booze or playing sport.