As I continue making the case for 2025 as The Year for Better Male Friendships, let’s look at just how many relationships a man can and should have. In this excerpt from my book, Get Out of Your Man Cave: The Crisis of Male Friendships, I describe the limits of our social network and suggest the optimal number of friends one should have.
We are Designed for Community
As human beings, we are designed for relationships. As I stated in my last post, Don’t Be “That Guy”, author and pastor, John Ortberg’s book, Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them explains that for all our quirks, sins, and jagged edges, we need each other. In community, we come together as a group of flawed, abnormal people for life-changing relationships.
But how big should your community be?
One of the key parts of my GodBuddy theory is that men need just a few very close friends with whom they can go deep. We cannot, nor should not, have too many friends because they remain mere acquaintances rather than close, intimate relationships. Since we can only manage a limited number of relationships, we must find ways to connect in deeper, more meaningful ways with others.
Greek philosopher, Aristotle, speaks about this deep human need and longing for connections: “The desire for friends comes easy. Friendship does not.” speaks to how hard it is to make a friendship. Especially one that lasts.
Nearly 20% of Americans Have ‘Zero Friends’
According to the U.S. Census Time Use Survey, Americans are spending more time alone and less time with friends than they did a decade ago. Additionally, the Survey Center on American Life reports that 17 percent of Americans say they have absolutely zero friends which is nearly triple over recent decades per a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, especially among adult men who are generally worse at developing and cultivating friendships. These results seem strange in the era of Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, and multitude of social media options.
But friends in our digital galaxy aren’t the ones that matter most to our health and happiness. It’s the friends we spend the most time around and who are most important to us.
Dr. Mark Vernon, author of The Meaning of Friendship suggests that vital friendships have the greatest impact on one’s health and happiness.
“…even one very good friend can improve your life in profound ways.”
–Dr. Mark Vernon, The Meaning of Friendship
So how many friends should you have? Let’s look at the opinion of an expert.
Dunbar’s Number
Work in the 1990s by Dr. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Oxford, studied the brains and social circles of primates. Dr. Dunbar recognized that the neocortex, the part of the human brain critical for higher brain functions, limits the size of a human’s social network. Realizing this, he created “Dunbar’s Number”, which is the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships —relationships in which they know who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. Dunbar explained it informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
Dr. Dunbar theorised that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size […] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, Dunbar proposed that humans can comfortably maintain between 100 and 250 relationships, with the most commonly used value of 150.
Fewer Friends is Better
Dr. Dunbar and his fellow researchers later dug into phone records to determine the closeness of relationships based on the frequency with which people spoke on the phone. Because people are so text-obsessed nowadays, they used records from 2007 when most still talked on the phone. The results showed the average person had “4.1” close friends, so Dunbar safely concludes one can maintain up to 5 close friendships.
“You can only maintain up to five close friendships.”
— Dr. Robin Dunbar
Dunbar ultimately concludes the ideal number is between 3 and 5 vital friendships for optimal well-being.
My conclusion is that 3 very close friends who know you intimately is optimal. Developing close relationships takes time and energy. If you’re trying to spread your finite brain resources and your limited time among more than 5 people, you are not doing friendships well. So keep between 3 and 5 guys as your closest friends. Call them your “personal board of directors.”
My next post describes why men need helpers to become better men.
NOTE: This post first appeared in January, 2019 and updated for this current series on The Year for Better Male Friendships.
