Staying close to friends isn’t always easy. From calling out flakiness to singing together in a choir, experts share their advice on how to keep the spark alive
There is no getting around it, you have to make time to be a good friend. According to Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford and author of Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, we need to spend the equivalent of nine minutes a day to maintain a healthy relationship with our closest network of friends, which he admits is “barely time to raise your coffee cup to each other”, so one meet-up a week is more realistic. If you fail to do that, “the friendship starts to decay”, says Dunbar.
More Stories
Brisk walking linked to lower risk of heart rhythm problems, study finds
Revealed: Chinese researchers can access half a million UK GP records
Resurrected pools, remnants of last ice age, attract wildlife in Norfolk