Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

mentalising when thinking about the social world is a great deal harder work for the brain than thinking about physical-world relationships such as understanding causal relationships between, for example, clouds building up and rain, or between striking a match and its tip bursting into flames.

Ranked in order of most to least frequent in their responses, they were: lack of caring, poor communication, drifted apart, jealousy, problems with alcohol or drugs, anxiety about the relationship, competition from rivals, ‘stirring’ by other people, tiredness, misunderstandings and cultural differences between the couple.

It seemed to spark a spontaneous realisation that this number had real everyday-life meaning, and a flurry of culling followed as people tried to reduce the number of ‘friends’ on their pages.

the time we give to one friend is time that cannot be given to another.

Exchanges have meaning only when there is an existing relationship to give them meaning.

it is the women that ultimately decide whom to go with.

As many other studies have noted, they found that this condition was often co-morbid with (or expressed as) depression in girls, but more likely to be externalised in boys (e.g. by lashing out at others).

the community divided into small clusters of honest people and it was the liars who provided the links between these cliques that maintained the community as an integrated whole.

In short, the victim preferred to believe what they longed to be true, rather than the evidence that had been put in front of them. Friendships work in much the same way, but the stakes are usually lower and less emotionally damaging when we find we’ve made a mistake.