Ten friends for happiness?

Being able to count at least ten people as friends makes us happy, say researchers. But those with five or fewer are likely to be miserable with their lot, they claim.

A new study by researchers from the University of Nottingham suggests that happiness depends on the number of old friends we have.

Dr. Richard Tunney, the lead author of the report, quizzed more than 1,700 people about their satisfaction with their lives and the state of their friendships. Ten was the first number at which people were more likely to be happy than unhappy. For women, this meant having 33 friends; for men, the figure was 49. Women tended to have fewer friends than men but formed tighter bonds.

‘People who were extremely satisfied with their lives had twice the number of friends of people who were extremely dissatisfied’, says Dr. Tunney.

Interestingly, the study also adds that childhood friends are no more likely to make us happy than people we become close to later in life.

Dr. Tunney’s study, however, seems to have alternative implications in the Indian social context.

For Rohit K. Dasgupta, a student of Jadavpur University, lasting friendship is rare. ‘The rhetoric of the search for new groups is what I call friendship’, he says. He believes that there are three to four friends he can count on unconditionally, but he definitely does not bank too much on them for a lifetime of happiness.

Law student Prachi Tushar, however, thinks that although we cannot be guaranteed of happiness if we have friends, we definitely would not be happy if we did not have them. For her, five is the ‘magic number’ for friends.

Contrary to Dr. Tunney’s opinion that actively working on friendship in the same way as maintaining a marriage is the prerequisite to happiness, music photographer Sayan Datta, popularly known as ‘Red Bantoo’, says, ‘Good friends, you may have one, a hundred or maybe none. But you are still happy with your wife or husband and kids. The key to life is a pit of variables’.


ilovekolkata