Understanding friendships, your own included

Retirement removes at a stroke the main context for encounters in adult life. Surveys show very different trajectories by situation.

The literature on repairing relationships is almost entirely marital or workplace-based. What exists on friendship amounts to few studies.

Neighbour relationships have receded in personal networks since the 1960s. That retreat mainly concerns one precise kind of use.

Systematic reviews exist and their conclusions are cautious. The main difficulty is not the effectiveness of the schemes but the quality of their evaluation.

Both events reduce the number of active relationships, but not in the same way nor for the same people.

Contact frequency predicts the duration of a relationship poorly. Available work points to properties less easy to count.

It is not only the number of relationships that differs, it is their reach. A 2022 analysis of massive data put figures on what surveys had suggested.

Call records and proximity sensors have produced results questionnaires could not reach. They also import biases of their own.

Surveys find consistent gaps in network composition and in the nature of exchanges. Their interpretation is more disputed than their existence.

Counting help actually received and asking whether someone feels supported give divergent results. The paradox has an explanation.

Whether they replace or complement offline relationships was asked as early as the 1990s. The answers have changed twice.

A 2010 meta-analysis produced a striking comparison with smoking. Its method and limits are less well known than its conclusion.

The fall in the number of relationships after fifty is consistent across all data. One theory holds that it is partly chosen.

They rarely stop by decision. The accounts collected most often describe a gradual halt nobody ever put into words.

Depending on the method used, the answer runs from three to several thousand. Those figures do not contradict each other: they measure different relationships.