True Friends Can Be Counted On One Hand
The number of true friends can be counted on one hand. This is not a surprise to most people when we have reached a certain point in life and gathered many different experiences through the ages.
Usually we try to build good relationships and to really form a bond between us and other people. We are looking for people who understand us, and people we can trust. We crave friendships that embrace the soul, and that give us a wide range of emotions that we can explore.
However, it is not often that we achieve this. Most of our friendships end up being there for the sake of convenience, or at least not as deep as we might wish they were. In other words , we do not have as many “soulmates” as we might like to think we have.
Only half of the friends we consider to be soul mates are actually soul mates
Think of the special friends you have and give them a particularly loving title in your heart, and count them. Then divide the number you came up with by two, and the number you come up with here are the “true friends” you really have.
This was confirmed in a study conducted at the University of Tel Aviv and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: only half of the friends we consider soulmates are in fact soulmates.
A team of researchers from these two institutions created something resembling a ” friendship machine” that, using an algorithm, could evaluate the two-way communication and reciprocity in our social relationships.
In other words, this algorithm tries to find out if the people we consider our true friends feel the same for us as we do for them, and place us on the same level as we have placed them.
The results obtained by the friendship machine indicated that only half of the friends we consider to be our soulmates feel the same for us as we do for them.
This study was conducted on 84 people, and subsequently, surveys were also conducted on students in Israel, the United States and in Europe. As the leader of this study, Erez Shmueli stated that:
True friendships are rare
True friendships are rare. This surprises no one, right? However, it is a bit worrying. We can not really generalize and say that the same thing happens to everyone, but it is true that it actually happens to most people.
Maybe it’s so that certain situations in life bind us together, and after a while they remove us from the people we consider to be our friends today (or considered to be friends yesterday). So it’s really not a question of quantity, but of quality. As time goes on, and we gain new experiences, we will learn to love our companions in life even more, but the number of friends we have is noticeably reduced.
This is not stupid or strange in itself; That’s simply how life works. As time goes on, our feelings become more intense towards the people we trust and who give us good vibes .
There is often an instinct and a willingness to approach someone. If you believe that someone is going to be good to you, you will trust them more and feel better with them. This brings you closer to the people you like, and it develops into sincere, healthy and “true” friendships.
Illustrations by Kristina Webb
