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
Newborns treated with antibiotics respond less well to vaccines, study shows
As a geneticist, I will not mourn 23andMe and its jumble of useless health information | Adam Rutherford
Don’t weaken online safety laws for UK-US trade deal, campaigners urge