Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

In reality, online social networking sites are simply where you interact with your offline friends, not where you meet new friends.

the more someone idealised their partner (i.e. switched off their reality check) at the outset of the relationship, the longer they continued to be satisfied with the relationship.

Another aspect of language for which mentalising is crucial is that we almost never say exactly what we mean, but instead rely on the listener to interpret what we say correctly

Family considerations just overrule everything else, because there is much more at stake.

the second by the avoidance dimension of the Attachment Scale (a measure of how immersed you feel in your local community and how empathic you are).

Around 40 per cent of break-ups were reconciled within a week, but after that the proportion fell dramatically to only 1 per cent of those that had lasted a year.

The more you trust someone, the more likely you are to look favourably on their request to use your phone as a way station. In most cases, that trust is based on past knowledge.

One was a clear recognition that not all the friends on Facebook were real friends.

social world of ours is highly structured into a series of circles, or layers, that also have very distinct sizes, each of which is associated with very specific frequencies of contact,