Dunbar’s Number, or the Care and Feeding of Human Connection

This was the weekend of the big drive, from Montana back down to Texas, of me returning to still-hot weather, supersize grocery stores, and leashed dogs walks. It has also been a week of hard news and even harder losses.

On my way south, I stopped to see some people that matter a great deal to me. One of them works with people who are in end-of-life, palliative care situations, and a client had passed away two days earlier. The news of that client’s death hit this person particularly hard. You see, during the previous week, this person had received hard news of their own. They had opted to pull in a bit, focusing on immediate family and what they needed rather than being on call for others. While this action, that of inward focus and surviving an immediate, personal crisis, was one so many of us would have taken, it haunted them. They blamed themselves for not returning that call, for not having that client in their inner circle of intimates even as the client included them in that first and closest ring.

It had been a hard week for me, too. My husband called last Monday with the impossible news that an old friend had passed in April. We hadn’t seen him since our wedding twenty years ago. I’d last texted with that friend a couple of years earlier, sending a photo of two grad-school girlfriends and me, laughing as we caught up at a swanky Chicago cocktail bar, celebrating the survival of a particularly crap year. Knowing that he was gone, that I could never see the sparks of his genius or hear his crazy adventure stories gutted me in ways I had not expected. I wound up sobbing during breaks between coaching sessions, ashamed that I had let this connection fade.

And this leaves me with these questions: how do we hold onto connection? How do we honor relationships without losing ourselves in the process?

Dunbar’s Number

We all have circles. Family circles. Friend groups. Social-media connections. Play circles for our children (or dogs). Work friends and gym friends and hobby friends and neighborhood friends and friends that defy labels. LinkedIn even has a way to quantify our social-selling index, which is just another way of putting metrics on connectedness. Some circles bump into one another and overlap while others remain closed, impermeable. No matter how you look at it, we have circles for the people in our lives.

Dunbar’s number is the number of people with whom we can comfortably be in relationship (and again, a big shout out to Wikipedia for that definition). Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist, and he devised that humans can be in social relationships with 150 people at any one time. He came up with the number of 150 relationships as the zenith of what we’re able to support as that was the size of Neolithic farming villages, Roman armies, and Hutterite colonies. His postulate that language developed in non-primate humans as it was a “cheap form of social grooming” has me wondering just how quickly I can get the University of Texas library system to cough up his text Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language.

But why am I thinking about Dunbar and social circles after that particularly personal opening paragraph? Simple: connection. Dunbar circles are about connection. For me, Dunbar’s number brings to mind concentric rings, the ripples in a pond as rain drops splatter the surface. That inner ring, the tightest and most intimate circle is people in our immediate family and those we hold closest to our hearts. As the circles widen, the strength of the connection weakens as the number of people in that circle increases. If we try to hold too many people too closely, relationship is crowded out. Relationships and connection need space to breathe.

Back to the Questions

And this brings me back to questions. If we consider what questions are, the flippant, easy answer is that questions are how we seek information, seek knowledge. Yes, questions are those things, but in truth, they are so much more than that. A good question shows that someone is paying attention, they’re thinking about you, that they’re honoring your space in their circle. A good question shows care, interest, our dedication to maintaining that relationship. Good questions are the care and feeding of human connection.

Let’s return to those opening paragraphs. To my thinking, the person that I stopped to see on my return to Texas, this individual was there for their client in every way possible. They helped them to navigate and resolve family estrangement, they had helped them to make peace with what was inevitably coming. Because of their work, the client was literally able to go a bit more gently into that good night. On the other hand, I’m still thrashing in grief, grief with a side of shame. I had a friend, and the connection slipped. The connection broke, and I didn’t question that it happened.

As a coach, I am (I hope) more conscious than most asking good questions and waiting, listening for how they are answered. The people of whom you ask good, powerful questions—those are the people that are in your circle. We cannot and I will argue should not wedge everyone into that inner circle, but we can honor our connections with everyone with whom we are in relationship simply by asking a thoughtful question.

What is your ripple effect? How will you use questions to breathe life into your circles?