RELATIONSHIPS
During the peak of the pandemic, the importance of friendship came to the fore. “There’s informal evidence to suggest that lockdown made people reevaluate their friendships," says Robin Dunbar, an emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University. “People didn’t contact some of those less-close friendships and, as a result, they were inexorably weakened." The connections you most likely cut: your 50 or so “party friends," he notes. Because social gatherings were few and far between for a while, you didn't see these friends (who get only a limited amount of your time anyway) as often. But, Dunbar adds, dynamics change in the best of times – old pals move to the outer layers of your circle as new ones rise in rank. Researchers theorise this tendency to prune superficial relationships in favour of meaningful connections only increases as we age because the less time you have on Earth, the more you want to spend with the people who make you happy. It’s the circle of (friendship) life.
Despite the positive impact of a solid network on our long-term wellbeing, building and sustaining one often
