When It Comes to Friendship, Who's Counting?

When it comes to friendships, it's not how long, how close, or how good. Instead, people seem to be focused on how many. But no one is quite sure how many friends you need or how many you can have.

Given the number vacuum, some members of social networking sites like Facebook, My Space, or LinkedIn are accreting new friends like kids collect baseball cards -- acquiring impressive numbers of online "friends" that approach the hundreds and thousands.

Such excess raises the question -- How many friendships -- real, virtual or a combination of the two -- can any one person reasonably handle? My opinion: It depends on who you are and what it means for you to befriend someone. Are your friendships casual or close? Are they intense or intermittent? Are they brief or long-standing? What priority do you place on your friendships?

Every woman I know has a finite amount of time for friendship (which varies based on how she chooses to balance her social needs with the rest of her life). Additionally, some women are naturally more adept than others in both making friends and keeping them.

British anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar has conducted research that concludes that humans are functionally hard-wired to handle a maximum of 150 friends at a time. That number, 150, has been dubbed Dunbar's Number. The term was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point and has been cited recently in a spate of news articles.

Carl Bialik (AKA the Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy) suggests that technology may actually allow us to expand the number of friends we can juggle simultaneously. He points out that social networking sites help us maintain contact with people at the outer fringes of our circle of friends. Cell phones, emails, and IMs similarly expand our capability to reach out and touch someone with extreme efficiency.

"Prof. Dunbar isn't sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated," writes Bialik. "The research, he says, 'made us realize people don't know what these wretched things called relationships are -- and that helps explain why we're so bad at them.'"

Irene S. Levine, PhD is writing a book about female friendships that will be published by Overlook Press in January 2009.