How many friends do we need to be happy? One two? Or twenty? Is it possible to measure friendship by quantity and is it worth getting hung up on the position “One close friend is better than a hundred friends”? The psychologist tells about the peculiarities of our perception of friendship.
«You can’t have too many friends!» we often say. By affirming this, we acknowledge that close relationships require bestowal, occupy a special place in our lives, and therefore there cannot be many true friends. On the other hand, no one seems to have disputed the correctness of the proverb “Do not have a hundred rubles, but have a hundred friends”. Yes, and in this phrase itself — “you can’t have many friends” — you can see the opposite meaning, by analogy with “you can’t have a lot of money”: there are always few friends and you want more. So where is the truth?
“When it comes to life values, any culture will offer you polar attitudes, and deep wisdom lies in this ambivalence: there can be no unambiguous definition of love or friendship,” explains social psychologist Elena Belinskaya. — And about what “many” friends means, everyone has their own idea. It depends at least on age: in some periods of life we are actively friends, in others we lose friends. And also from what we consider the antithesis of friendship. Agree, it is one thing to oppose it to friendship, and quite another to loneliness. A person who is afraid of isolation usually seeks to expand his circle of friends. And the one who rigidly builds boundaries and does not let everyone into his inner world does not need many friends.
It would seem that the reality of social networks, where having 300-500 friends in the order of things, has forever closed the topic of the lack of friendships. But the question of how friends are able to perform the function of friends remains open. If in friendship we value, first of all, the possibility of active participation, then, of course, we will get much more from a hundred friends than from five to ten. If emotional consonance and acceptance, the ability to empathize are important to us, then support in the form of emoticons and hearts is doubtful.
If you are always ready to help, then you will have as many friends as you need to come to your aid.
“I posted a “post of sadness” on the networks, you saw it in a couple of hours and liked it, but my mood has changed during this time,” Elena Belinskaya notes. — Do these signs of support from people who don’t know each other really help, or, on the contrary, fix us on the experienced emotional state? Friendship involves empathy, but it still relies on non-verbal things, on the ability to read a person’s facial expression, the dynamics of his psychophysical state. I think the verbalization of relationships reduces the ability to feel the other subtly.
In friendship, the value component is also important. We need friends in order to be ourselves, to test the value system. And from this point of view, there really are not many friends: we are so internally complex and multifaceted that we need different incarnations of ourselves in others. So how many friends will be enough?
“It’s not about the numbers, but why we need friends,” concludes the psychologist. — Answer the question: what kind of friend am I? And the answer will show who you consider friends and how many of them. If you are always ready to help, then you will have as many friends as you need to come to your aid. If you are always ready to sympathize with another, then there will be those who will offer you emotional support.