What Kind of Friend Are You?

Because of the fourth bar, and because friendships have no structure holding them up. A marriage has a shared address; a job has a calendar; a friendship has only whoever decides to send the message. Three of the four behaviours here happen when you are already together, so they cannot rescue a friendship that has stopped having occasions. This is also why the fix is so much smaller than the loss feels - a friendship that faded through absence usually restarts with one message, and the only real obstacle is the embarrassment about how long it has been.

It is not bad and it is not free. Somebody has to start things, and in practice that is nearly always the same one or two people in any group - the ones who do it are usually the reason the group still exists. Where it goes wrong is when it becomes invisible even to you, and the resentment arrives years later disguised as a general feeling that nobody cares. The simplest correction is not to stop, which punishes everyone including you. It is to ask once, plainly, for someone else to pick the date.

There is no number, and the ones that circulate are not findings. What the research does support is that these four behaviours take real time, so the number of genuinely close friendships anyone can run is limited by hours rather than by warmth - which is why it tends to fall after a demanding job or a small child arrives, and why that fall is not a verdict on anybody. Two or three people who get all four behaviours is a rich friendship life. Twelve people who get the first and fourth is a pleasant one.