“What Made You Realize Your Best Friend Was Actually A Complete Jerk?” (30 Responses)

In fact, history knows many examples when former friends became bitter enemies. Suffice it to recall at least Julius Caesar, whose murderer Brutus not only organized a whole conspiracy against his former close friend, but is also considered by some researchers to be Caesar's biological son. However, big politics and friendship, unfortunately, are often not just incompatible things - they are completely opposite things.

"When you open up to a friend, you make yourself vulnerable to that person," says Holly Roberts, a psychotherapist with the relationship charity Relate, in an interview with The Guardian. "That's what makes it hard. Because you've bared yourself emotionally to that person and been hurt by them." And it is even sadder that what has been created and maintained for months and years can be destroyed literally in a moment or so.

Indeed, according to a recent study by Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, it takes about 50 hours of continuous conversation to call a stranger your friend, and 200 hours to become a close friend. At the same time, our communication resources decrease with age - for example, according to the same study, the average American spends only about 41 minutes a day in conversations with people.

“With age, we really reduce our level of communication, but not because we become less sociable - there is just a certain limit of active social ties, and we simply cannot physically maintain a greater number of relationships that can be classified as friendly,” says Irina Matveeva, a psychologist and certified NLP specialist, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for a comment. "This limit of social connections is commonly called the 'Dunbar number', after the British anthropologist who was the first to describe this effect."

"According to various methods of calculation, the level of Dunbar's number ranges from 150 to 300 people, but this, of course, also depends on how active a person's social life is. Therefore, with age, it becomes more and more difficult for us to make new friends - it's just that our brain does not process new incoming information so easily anymore. And the destruction of any old friendship is perceived more and more painfully," Irina notes.

Be that as it may, there are certain situations in which you can really understand that the person whom you previously considered to be your bosom friend is now not (or, even worse, never was). So please feel free to scroll to the very end of this list of sad and instructive stories and be sure to add your own, in case you have something to share under your belt.