Watch out, you early-to-mid-20-somethings. Your circle of friends is probably as big as it's ever going to get.
This is the time you're most likely to be living that NBC sitcom popular with your older siblings, if not your young parents: Friends, the venerated show about the adventures of a group of male and female New Yorkers in their mid-20s who hang out together in a coffeehouse or in each other's apartments.
But that'll change. Just as romantic couplings and breakups and marriage and babies and moves come between the friends' close-knit relationships, eventually you'll lose or jettison friendships as you marry and have children. Once you reach middle age, your circle of friends most likely will have dwindled down to nil.
According to a recent study, people start losing friends after they hit the middle two-ohs. Researchers from Aalto University in Finland and the University of Oxford in England, who used data from 3 million mobile phone users to determine that people are "socially promiscuous" until they hit 25 ... then the friend roll call quickly shortens "with women losing them at an initially faster rate than men," according to Meera Senthilingam, writing for CNN.com. "The average 25-year-old woman contacts about 17.5 people per month, while a man contacts 19 people. ... This decline continues for the rest of your life, or at least until retirement, where it plateaus, probably due to reduced data among this age group."
The suspected reason: priorities, which heavily involve women's quest to hook up with life partners. "People become more focused on certain relationships and maintain those relationships," study co-author Kunal Bhattacharya, of Aalto University, is quoted as saying. "You have new family contacts developing, but your casual circle shrinks." Once women find a partner, for instance, they invest more time in that relationship. And when the children come along, grandparents, close friends and family members are valued by women. As for the men, "initial numbers of contacts during younger years are higher ... but by these later years, they soon drop contacts faster than women, and their totals become lower."
"You see this [reduction] in them about seven years later," Robin Dunbar, the Oxford researcher, is quoted.
Of course, there's a good chance at middle age that you'll be too stressed out from getting your young-adult children through college, playing with grandchildren or nursing an aging/infirm relative to care about outside friendships. If you're not, you're unfortunately subject to find yourself more frustrated at having no close friendships than grateful for your lack of responsibilities.
I've written before about the elusiveness of friendships once one ages. In my July 13, 2014, column, I lamented the fact that Dre and I, who have no offspring and are not caregivers for other family members, had found it pretty much impossible to cultivate friendships with other couples. I mentioned in passing that we each were pretty short on close buddies.
If you one day find yourself in our shoes, young people, you'll show yourselves friendly, only to find everybody's too busy. You'll play the "let's get together sometime" game with people, only sometime never comes. Sometimes, you'll be stretched so thin and so worn out from your responsibilities -- job or otherwise -- you'll be the one dropping the ball. You'll see a group of friends caught in midjump on a beach in a picture on Facebook -- that social medium on which we put our best faces forward and arouse the envy of connections ironically referred to as "friends" -- and we'll wonder how all these people managed to not only maintain a friendship but get their travel desires, their time and their money coordinated to take a trip together. You'll sigh and be grateful for that one pal who's always good at least for an occasional trip to a favorite restaurant or to the movies.
If you find yourself in this boat, consider what I've considered: Perhaps your middle age isn't meant to be a time to cultivate new buddies or sulk about the lack thereof. Maybe it's the time that Providence wants you to spend otherwise free hours getting in touch with your spiritual side or writing that memoir. Or finding out what you can do -- or what more you can do -- to enhance the lives of others, whether or not they can hang out for an evening or cruise the Balkans with you.
Maybe you'll realize that the best friendship is the one you have with yourself.
Email:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 06/12/2016