Unlike what happens in childhood, making friends from a certain age is not easy . The difficulty in reconciling social and work life, the appearance of relationships and lack of time are some of the reasons that explain why many adults have real difficulties in expanding their circle of friendships.

In addition to the age-determining factors, there are other factors of a biological nature that also prevent us from infinitely expanding the number of members of our list of friends. That is what a group of researchers from the University of Oxford has discovered in the United Kingdom, through a study that concludes that, no matter how much effort we put, adding more than five real friends is practically impossible.

As can be seen from the research carried out by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar and the rest of his team, there is a direct relationship between the size of the primate brain and the social groups they end up forming. That is, the larger the neocortex, the wider the community that ends up forming.

As the work of the English, human beings, points out, although evolution has given us a brain with more capacity than the rest of the species, we have strong limitations when it comes to increasing our social capital.

Given the dimensions of our cerebral cortex, we can hardly develop any kind of relationship with more than 150 people , we are trained to create a close bond with more than 35 subjects , we can consider more than a dozen individuals close and we will be able to accumulate more of five real friends .

Only half of your friends like you

To top it off, according to other research, in this case carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , we only like half of our friends. That is, at least, what emerges from a study in which the friendship links of 84 people between 23 and 38 years old who shared a study room were analyzed in detail.

Subjects who were asked to graduate their friendship bond with each of the individuals that made up the class, scoring from 0 to 5, where 0 meant "I don't know that person", 3 "friend" and 5 "good friend ". The first conclusion reached by the Americans after collating the forms could not be more lapidary: the feeling of friendship is not usually reciprocal .

And, although 94% of respondents expected to find reciprocity in their friendship, only 53% found it. Percentage that shows the existence of a perception gap in the relations of friendship that American scientists attribute to the difficulty that the vast majority have when defining friendship.

Beyond what each one understands by friendship, and regardless of whether we can build a reciprocal and sincere relationship with one, two or five people, what we should focus our efforts on is not to lose it. And, as the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst found out, if we manage to keep it for seven years, we will make it for a lifetime.

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