Victim of Culture

Losing half our friends every seven years

Here’s a story sure to cheer you up.  Consider who are your closest friends.  Got a mental image?  Good.  Now, consider that half of them will be replaced within the next seven years.  No, this isn’t science fiction, but social science instead.

Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst of Utrecht University in the Netherlands found in a recent study that most people replace half of their closest friends every seven years.  The good news, of course, is that they are replaced and not simply lost.  In fact, his study found that our social circles don’t really contract with time, as previously thought, but instead stay relatively stagnant.  Oddly, this perhaps explains why most television shows can only sustain themselves for seven years before we lose interest with their characters.

Still, it brings up the question of why?  Why would be change our most intimate friends in less than a decade?  There’s lots of obvious reasons ranging from moving to changes in work/school to simply diverging interests over time.  Everyone retains those one or two very close friends from high school or college, but how many retain an extended network of tight-knit friends?  It is just changes in your own personal life that incite these changes, but those of your friends as well.

Long term, however, one wonders how the age of the Internet might change this study’s findings?  Will social networks like MySpace and Facebook make it easier for people to remain close as their personal lives change?  For example, I can now keep in touch with high school friends who live hundreds of miles away in a convenient manner that was difficult pre-Internet.  Whereas those bonds would begin to fray without constant phone or mail contact, I am not instantly updated that a friend living three states away is having a baby.  Does it change things?

From my perspective it does not.  Social networks give the false illusion of intimacy with friends, but the truth is reading status updates is no different than getting a Christmas card once a year with an updated family photo.  Voyeurism is not equivalent to intimacy, even if at times it feels that way.  Even with Facebook I find moving for a new job so definitively separates me from old acquaintances that it isn’t long before those bonds not only fray but untangle entirely.  I am likely somewhat more informed of their lives, but not anymore connected.

At least the cold harshness of science gives me hope for replacing them.

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