In times of social networks, friendship seems like a jewel that is impossible to find. Today relationships are as ephemeral as snaps or instastories. We see that there are those who publish messages of friendship and love for months and shortly after we find out that these people are no longer friends. The screens that we carry everywhere are a tool to show parties, leisure days and more, reinforcing what a friendship means.
Maybe that’s why knowing that friendships die fast, we look for lies that make us feel comfortable with what we have and haven’t lost. Perhaps that is the reason why many believe in the fallacy that a friendship, if it lasts more than seven years, is meant to be forever.
We have seen this in Facebook posts, Instagram images, tweets between friends, many motivating images and as a caption in countless photos of parties and meetings with friends. He always says something along the lines of “Psychologists say that if a friendship lasts more than seven years, it will last forever.”
It’s shared among friends, it’s filled with likes and hearts, and seven years later, the same person posts it to a completely different group of people. An irony of social networks. We have been with them for just over 10 years and there are people who have had more than five best friends in that time.
Perhaps the reason why it is shared so much is because of the beginning of the sentence: “According to psychologists” or “Psychologists say”. It reinforces the message as if it has an official endorsement, but who are these psychologists?
Looking for the reason behind the “inspirational” message to “eternal” friendships, we find two points of reference that many use to justify the message. The first is a New Yorker article in which Maria Konnikova wrote about orangutan social behavior and brain power. In it, the writer says that the bigger the orangutan’s brain, the bigger its social group.
That led her to see what was happening with humans. People are capable of having between 150 and 1500 people in mind at any given time, but through social criteria and a simple rule of thumb, the most important people are often significantly reduced.
That is, close people make up a group of approximately 50 people, but we only completely trust five or a little more and they are almost always close relatives. This could be one of the reasons why people round lifelong friendships to seven.
The other article that stands out is this one from the Huffington Post in which a study from Utrecht University in Germany is used. The sociologist who conducted the study interviewed 1,007 men and women about their personal relationships. Seven years later she was able to interview more than 600 people who had answered her questions and discovered that many had changed friends during that time, but that 30% of the relationships that stayed were the ones that had been together the longest.
The closeness and social context in which they found themselves was decisive, insinuating that it was the longest friendships, especially those that began in childhood, that had the opportunity to survive time. However, it is never established that seven years will make a friendship eternal.
To cope with the reality that friendships almost always change if the environment changes, we believe the most naive lies. However, it is better to know the reality and give the importance that those friendships that will always be with us deserve. In the same way, we must treat each of our friends as if they could be for life and not as a person who perhaps in seven years could be a complete stranger.