How Friendships Die
- Notes
To continue the thought from my previous post, Robin Dunbar explains how friendships die:
Friendships die when we do not see the people concerned often enough to maintain the relationship at its former level of emotional intimacy—and especially so when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. So the tendency is for such relationships to fade quietly, almost by accident rather than design. The road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again, and no doubt a good bit of guilt—we must get together sometime… but somehow sometime never comes because too many other priorities intervene.
There’s that energy I mentioned before. Friendships die when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. Don’t want friendships to die? Do something about it.
This reminds me of this New Yorker cartoon from this week’s issue:
