Authors: Rachel Bertsche
Hannah grew up forty minutes outside of the city. It becomes clear, as she tells me about her recent move, that she already has plenty of friends in town. “So, you know a ton of people in Chicago?” I’m not happy with where this is going.
“Yeah, about a million.”
A pause and then I hear myself saying, “I wish you didn’t have so many friends.”
Um, that was weird. Did I just say that? That’s not what I meant. Well, it is what I meant, but I didn’t mean to say it
out loud.
At least I caught myself before saying, “How many, exactly?” That’s what I really want to know.
It may sound like the question of a crazy jealous stalker, but it’s actually a logical inquiry. A person can only maintain so many social contacts. Facebook may trick us into thinking we have five hundred friends, but research shows there’s a saturation point for actual interpersonal relationships.
It all goes back to the chimps. When British anthropologist Robin Dunbar was studying the behaviors of primates in 1993, he noticed their social groups were generally limited in size. Chimps, for example, could not maintain tribes of more than 50. For any species of nonhuman primates, Dunbar found the “mean group size is directly related to relative neocortical volume.” In English, he’s saying the size of your brain determines how many relationships you can maintain. Chimps can have about 50 friends. Since human brains are bigger, we can keep up a wider social network. The exact number Dunbar proposed was 148.4, but the Dunbar Number, as it has come to be known, is 150.
Social network means something different today than it did back in the nineties. Dunbar didn’t care about the number of people who follow you on Twitter. He was talking about relationships “that depend on extensive personal knowledge based on face-to-face interaction for their stability.” Reading someone’s status update doesn’t count.
When I came upon Dunbar’s Number, I realized it was time to do some math. People don’t have to be close friends to qualify as part of the 150. They just have to fit into your social group, even if you haven’t spoken in a while. If you saw them, you might “have to do a lot of catching up, but they know you fit into their social world and you know they fit into yours,” Dunbar told the
Wall Street Journal.
“You have a history.” I whipped out my wedding invite list. Once I removed the guests who are exclusively Matt’s friends, and the significant others who have since broken up with my friends or vice versa, I determined that I had sixty-four invitees who fit into my Dunbar web. Then I checked out the Facebook friends who didn’t make the guest list. There were thirty-six people with whom I have communicated in the last year, or who I would actually stop and talk to if I saw them on the street. I’m generally a social person, but I’ve been known to run in the other direction to avoid small talk. Family falls under the Dunbar umbrella, too, if you maintain independent relationships with them, so I added another thirty—I’ve got a lot of cousins. That put me at 130. Twenty spots left for my new BFFs. I considered wearing a sign:
20 VACANCIES, NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS!
You can see why I want to know exactly how many friends Hannah has here. If she has a big family and a large network
of buddies in both NYC and Chicago, she may have already hit her 150. If she has reached friendship saturation, what am I doing here?
Three girls about our age sit down at the table next to us. As if trying to prove just how popular she is, I see a spark of recognition flicker across Hannah’s face.
Suddenly, “Hiiii!”
One of the girls who just sat down is squealing at the sight of my date. Hannah looks at me sheepishly (“I wasn’t kidding!”) and gets up to greet this long-lost friend. As they briefly catch up, I stare at my food. I can’t help thinking of an article I just read about a British journalist. She struck up a friendly conversation with a man who then told her he had no vacancies for friends. He maintained a one-in, one-out policy. Six months later, she got a card notifying her that the guy was now open for friendship. But Hannah agreed to this dinner, so she must at least
think
she can handle a new friend. A new
best
friend? We’ll see.
Once she settles back into her seat, Hannah tells me about her recent breakup. She’d gone to law school in Boston while her boyfriend was in Manhattan. After graduation she moved to New York City to be with him and took the state bar, only to have him dump her a year later. “Does Matt know any single guys I might want to date?” I rack my brain. Most of the people we know here are coupled off. There is this one guy …
“Who is he?” she asks. “I bet I know him.”
I tell her David’s name.
“Who are you? Who are you and where do you come from?” Those are her words, and I fall a little bit in friend-love. She’s witty! She’s quick! Could this search really be so easy?
My friend David, it turns out, is her close family friend. They’ve known each other since the womb. The setup is not
an option, but the coincidence has us laughing. Ever since she moved to Chicago, her friends have been trying to set her up. “I told them I had a girl-date tonight … ’cause this is a girl-date, you know?” Uhh, yeah, I know. “They keep telling me ‘Screw girl dates. You need to go on
boy
dates.’ ”
I wonder if this will be a common theme. Single women my age are more interested in meeting potential boyfriends than potential best friends, though I would argue the latter’s a lot harder to come by and plenty more emotionally nourishing. A husband is wonderful, and Matt makes me laugh. He makes me feel beautiful, loved, protected, cared for. But when I need to talk my feelings to death, really sit and analyze why I am confused/lonely/ecstatic, he’s just not up to it. It’s not for lack of trying, but men can only go over the same thing so many times. They don’t understand that, as women, we crave having someone validate our feelings. And then do it twice more.
When I first moved to Chicago, I took a job that turned out to be a disaster. I was to be the senior editor at a new luxury magazine. The job, and the magazine launch, kept getting pushed back until the company decided to have me “train” in their Florida office so I wouldn’t up and quit. For six weeks, I spent Monday through Friday in Miami, working as a glorified intern and utterly miserable. I had just relocated to end a long-distance relationship and here I was, in a city I hadn’t signed up for, and farther away from Matt than ever. When I finally decided to quit, I needed to run the idea by anyone and everyone whose opinion I valued. Matt’s response was “I can’t tell you what to do, but I will support your decision regardless.” A textbook answer. Such a good guy. But what I wanted was someone to talk it out with me for hours. To say, “You should quit” or even, “You shouldn’t.” Callie, who herself
had quit a job recently, stayed on the phone and walked me through the different scenarios, letting me talk out how I would make a living if I put this Miami disaster behind me. Sara said, “Of course you should quit. You’re miserable! You’re young! Work at a bakery.” I needed someone who would listen as I repeated myself in case a new thought came up. Someone who would tell me what they already knew I wanted to hear so that I would be more confident in my decision. Though Matt said everything right, I got the emotional support I needed from my friends.
I don’t tell Hannah about my search—I haven’t yet worked out the ethics of disclosure—but when we talk about leaving Manhattan I deliver my usual line: “I don’t miss the city, but I miss my friends.” I explain that while I do know some girls in Chicago, I haven’t made close friends like the ones I had in New York. In the three years I was in our common book club, the nine of us became extremely tight. We’d gone from casual acquaintances and reading buddies to real-life let-me-tell-you-my-problems friends. That’s what I miss, I tell her.
The good news, which she told me when we first emailed, is that Hannah was recently invited into a book club and got me an invite, too. In the meantime, she says, I should come to her friend Leah’s house for dinner on Wednesday.
“
This
Wednesday?”
“Yeah, she’s having some girls over for a get-together.”
It’s Monday. Wednesday seems a little quick. Doesn’t the two-day rule say no post-date communication for forty-eight hours? Seeing each other again that soon must be a definite no-no. But friend-dating doesn’t have the same rules as romantic-dating. In fact, it doesn’t have any rules at all. I can
probably write my own. Still, tomorrow night is yoga and Thursday I have plans with my Mom, so Wednesday is my only weeknight to go home, watch
Modern Family
, and spend some quality time with Matt. On top of that, being the only stranger at dinner with a group of girls who are already close friends doesn’t sound appealing at all. I’ll have to pretend to laugh at stories I don’t get about people I don’t know. I’ll probably stuff my face just to have something to do while they all gab about their ninth-grade English teacher or some other inside joke that makes me feel like an outsider. It’s hard to know how to behave in those situations. You can jump right in, asking “Who?” and “Where was this?” or you can sit back and let them have their laughs. I almost always opt for the latter, sometimes to my detriment. What I think is letting them have their fun, they might take as she-thinks-she’s-too-cool.
I think back to my stack of research. In the “How-To” pile, I have three different instruction manuals for how to make a best friend. Thank you, Google.
EHow.com
says I need to join clubs and online social networks (I’ve got the upcoming new book club and am already knee-deep in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter); go to after-work functions (I always do, but they happen rarely); move to a new neighborhood (not going to happen, we bought our condo six months ago); participate in my child’s school (
definitely
not going to happen soon); and make the first move (pretty much what I’m doing this entire year). It says nothing about being the new kid in an already established group. WikiHow
does
say that in order to make a best friend I should get to know her friends, and
PsychCentral.com
suggests stealing other people’s friends. Wednesday’s dinner could be a great site for friendship burglary.
I decide to not decide now. I’ll see if Hannah actually follows up and make the call then.
As the friendship manuals go, I’m really into wikiHow. It bills itself as the “The How-To Manual That You Can Edit” and is definitely the most spot-on of the three. It’s very explicit in its instructions to be friendly but not too friendly, lest you be perceived as creepy. “Get their phone number and call them once in a while,” it suggests of trying to make someone your BFF. “Don’t call on the same day every week; try to pick a random day or keep it unpredictable.” Noted. “Ask if one day they can come over to your house, or do something fun together. Make sure you’ve known this person awhile first, though. If you know someone for a day or two, then you ask them to come to your house, they may find this a bit strange.” So true. “Do not go for the ‘popular girl’ in class. This is a given, and looks like you’re trying something.”
I’m starting to think the “You” that has edited this manual is in middle school. My suspicions are confirmed when I read the world’s sneakiest trick, one that could have only been conceived by the most conniving of adolescents—a seventh-grade girl. “Tell the person a secret that you wouldn’t mind too much if they revealed, since sharing secrets builds trust. If the person tells the secret, you will not have lost much, but you will have learned that they cannot be trusted as your best friend. If the person keeps the secret, you can tell them a slightly larger secret. Soon, your friend may build a track record of trust by keeping all your secrets, and you will know that this is a person you can share your deepest thoughts with.” Wise stuff. I need to get me some secrets.
I make a mental note to implement these steps. Middle schoolers have all sorts of weapons in their arsenal, both for
making friends and getting rid of them (which, you never know, I may have to do this year). My father was a middle school principal. Oh, the stories I’ve heard.
When dinner is over, I give Hannah a ride home. We play some more of the name game—it’s like “how’s the weather?” talk, an easy silence filler. When I drop her off, she says she’ll email me about Wednesday (we haven’t exchanged phone numbers yet). “It was a great girl-date,” she says. “Next stop, boy dates.”
I call Sara on the way home. Then Callie. Neither pick up. I run into the house. “I made a friend!” I tell Matt about the hug, our many mutual friends, that she likes to play poker and loved
American Wife
, that she is a family advocate lawyer and only ever missed one book club … and it was because she had to visit a client in the psych ward at Bellevue! I mention, too, her possible friendship saturation and calling us out on our girl-date. Matt seems to think it’s funny, so I pretend to as well.
Come Wednesday, I haven’t heard from Hannah. I’m relieved. Now I can go home to
Modern Family
without feeling guilty. I’ll see her in three weeks at the book club anyway, so this friendship is just getting started. Being new together at the meeting will forge a bond. We’ll be comrades-in-arms, equipped with
Loving Frank
and plenty to say about it. I envision picking her up on my way from work, driving together up to Andersonville. It will become our monthly ritual.
At 4:06
P.M.
, a bolded message in my inbox: “Tonight?” She invites me to her friend Leah’s for baked ziti with five other girls. I’ve already planned my dinner and told Matt I’d be home. Excuses, but I take them. I’ll blame my no-show on the office. That’s always an easy out. Plus, wikiHow specifically
says that one should “try not to visit your best friend like every day, she may find it annoying and may think you’re getting in the way.” (Of what, I’m not sure.)
“I DO want to come!” I write. “But unfortunately, I’m stuck at work. Booo. Sucks. But the other night was so much fun (this is really starting to sound like a post-date email). Let’s definitely get together soon!”