This is a very boring talk, so I wouldn't be surprised if this chap
didn't have many friends either and could only write about them
Few of us could cope with living completely isolated on a desert island with no prospect of rescue. Even the rather disagreeable Scottish seaman Alexander Selkirk (the original on whom the Robinson Crusoe story was based) was overjoyed to be rescued after spending four years alone on what is now officially known as Robinson Crusoe Island.
Loneliness takes its toll on us; we feel more relaxed when we know we belong; we feel more satisfied with life when we know we are wanted. As Robin Dunbar writes in his book "Friends - Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships", "Friendship and loneliness are two sides of the same social coin, and we lurch through life from one to the other."
In the 1990s, after studying the relation between primate brain size and social groups, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that human beings can comfortably maintain about 150 stable relationships, with an inner core of about five people with whom we spend about 40 percent of our social time and 10 more with whom we spend another 20 percent. "In other words, about two-thirds of our total social effort is devoted to just 15 people." (for more on this, click here) This became known as Dunbar's Number, or the limit on the number of friends you can have (although that was well before Facebook and its friends of friends of friends of friends).
He arrived at that number by using Christmas-card lists. Before the days of email and WhatsApp, sending Christmas cards to old friends is a genuine exercise in maintaining friendships. As December gets under way, most of us begin to think about whom to send a card to. Did they send us a card last year? Have we lost touch with them? Did they move and bother to send us their new address? And then there is the cost of the card, not just to buy the card but to pay the postage. Sending Christmas cards is something that happened once a year on a very regular cycle. A year without contacting someone seems to be a natural Rubicon.
Had Robin Dunbar included me in his sample, his number would have been substantially lower. For most of my life I have never send Christmas cards - well, except for a few short years in Canberra, click here - and I'm not the "hail-fellow-well-met" type as I don't make friends easily and am far more comfortable in my own company than others.
When I did have friends, it may have been just one very good friend, at most two, with the rest simply being acquaintances such as my dentist or the friendly man who comes around once a year to dip our septic tank.
The one very good friend I had for thirty years died in 1995 and I see no reason why I should send my dentist a Christmas card; however, should you read this, Liam, have a Merry Christmas and I see you in February.
