Year 2: Thought 3: What are the base units of friendship?

I only have so much time.  24 hours in a day.  168 (*edit* I originally wrote 156) hours in a week. 52 weeks in a year.  I end up spending quite a bit of that sleeping and a depressing amount of it driving back and forth to work.  How much of my time does it take to care for a friendship?

I have known a lot of people over the course of the last 30 years.  Some friendships have been short and intense.  Others have been long but sporadic.  I've grown apart from a majority of the friends I've had in my life.  Statistically speaking I wonder how many of the friends who I am close to today I'll still be close to 5 years from now.  10?  15?

There are a lot of reasons friendships grow less intense.  The biggest one is just a lack of interaction.  I have very few friends that I talk to every day.  It is in fact a small group of friends that I email on a daily basis.  Others I see on a weekly (or sometimes twice a week) basis.

I don't think I'm necessarily closer to the people I talk to more often.  But I do think there is a critical threshold where friendships are on a downward slope.  Daily, weekly, and monthly communication are all significant maintenance milestones.  I can maintain a friendships while only talking to the person once or twice a month.  Anything less than that and the unstoppable flow of time will erode the closeness of the friendship.

Oh we'll still be friends.  When we get together it'll be like old times.  But as my time is taken up by more and more people who are in the here and now there is less time for me to dedicate to preserving and maintaining friendship with more distant people.

So, what is the basic unit here?  What kind of regular communication needs to take place to keep a friendship alive?  I think monthly is enough to sustain a friendship, but what about for it to thrive?  I would think at least weekly communication.

This is a sad reality.  There is a scarcity of everything.  Resources, time, mental effort and energy.  There is only so much to go around and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.  We should try to spend what small coinage we have to the best possible effect.  Does this mean maintaining a small group of friends?  Is there a critical threshold past which can't accept new friends?  I only have 10 friend units and I'm using 2 units per the 5 friends I have per week so sorry, I just don't have any intimacy/friendship to spare?

That seems weird.  It also doesn't quite seem to match up with reality.  Either I'm not at my max friendship usage or there is a growth of friendship.  I only have so many evenings a week but I think I can maintain a friendship with less effort and time than I think.  That could be idiosyncratic to me and the way I approach friendship.

At the end of the day I'm happy with the number of friends I have.  I think I have room for at least one more though.  Hopefully I'll always have room for at least one more.