Ya gotta have friends

I read with interest an article from the BBC about the average number of friends a person has (What’s the ideal number of friends?). They say it averages out to about 150. They arrived at this number by suggesting we have 5 core friends, 10 close friends, 35 friends on the next level. That’s the first 50 and it would be about that number that you would send Christmas cards to. Beyond that, about 100 friends would be just this side of acquaintance.

This got me thinking. On the social networking site Facebook, I only add people I actually know and would probably want to know about, people who are basically actually friends. But there are more than 230 people on that list. So I have too many friends, but not nearly as many as the several hundreds some have.

So as a small experiment, I decided to see if I could categorize my friends into five groups – core, close, near, outside, and those that are there purely for networking reasons. I wanted to see how my numbers compared to the averages.

My core friends I trust completely, that I know I could call at any time or tell them anything. The membership of this group has changed a bit over time. But it seems like my numbers for that group seem to match pretty close to the average.

The close friends are those I like and want to keep up with the basics on. These are the people I would invite to my Christmas party (the core friends are invited too). This number seems to fluctuate more than the core number. I’m thinking part of that was my move last year. It’s a smaller group than it was two years ago. But the number is still similar to the average.

My move seems to have affected the third group the most. I think I would define this group as the people I do care to know about on a regular basis, but monthly is just fine to get a general overview on their lives. The average is supposed to be about 35 on this one. As I look at my friends, this group is either much larger than the average or much smaller. This is an oddly fluctuating group for me.

But it is the fourth and fifth groups that blur the most. These two groups are people I know, but I really don’t need them knowing everything about me, and I really don’t care to know everything about them. The difference between the fourth and fifth is that the fourth is people I pretty much like, and the fifth group, while they are okay people, they are there for networking purposes and not much else. These two groups are definitely the largest.

I was also looking at whom I would put in each group and thinking about the movement between groups. Unlike school tracking, my friend groups seem to be rather fluid. You are not stuck in one spot. But it does seem like it is easier to move backward than forward. Forward is generally one step at a time while I can point to one or two examples who jumped back more than one step for various reasons.

It’s been an interesting self-evaluation exercise. Why are some people my friends? What do I look for in friends? How easy do I make friends? Why do some friends drop back? Was it them or me?

What about you? How do you look at your friends? What do you have your friends for? How would your groups compare to the average?