Falling in love has a price. Specifically, it costs the loss of two close friends , according to a study by the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) that has been presented at the British Science Festival held in Birmingham.
"People who enter a relationship, instead of having an inner circle of five people as usual, have four," explained Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford and co-author of the study. "And taking into account that one of them is the new person who has come into your life, it means that they have had to give up two others," he added, adding that it is generally a relative and a friend. According to Dunbar, this happens because the focus is on the romantic partner , to whom more time is spent, allowing other relationships to begin to deteriorate.
At the beginning of the year, Dunbar released another study in which he calculated that, for our brain, the limit of friends that we can handle is 150. His research indicated that in human groups greater than that amount there is no cohesion and the relations.
