When you purchase through contact on our site , we may earn an affiliate commission . Here ’s how it cultivate .
Best friends are n’t forever , at least if earphone records are any indication . A woman ’s No . 1 contact during her 20s is most often a male , but by age 45 , she ’ll most in all probability be call another woman — in all probability her daughter — more than anyone else , a novel subject area finds .
military man show a much more consistent pattern , with a leaning to be join to a female " right friend " their full lives , researchers report Thursday ( April 19 ) in the journal Nature Scientific Reports . The investigator suspect these patterns reflect women ’s strategic societal tie-up , which seem to be focused on their mate during the reproductive years and thenshift to childrenlater in sprightliness .
Women’s closest contacts change as they age, new research finds.
" What this look like to us is a strategic investment in societal capital on the part of women that men just do n’t do , " say subject field researcher Robin Dunbar , an anthropologist at the University of Oxford . " You have a limited amount of clip , effort and emotion that you may commit in your relationships , and women lean to invest very heavily in single individuals . " [ Top 10 Warrior Moms in story ]
friend and category
It ’s not well-heeled to track personal relationships across the total living pair , so Dunbar and his colleagues plow to telephone set records . Using a database of the peregrine phone calls and texts of more than 3 million Europeans over seven month , the researchers looked at patterns by long time and gender . They intend the most - contacted person of each mobile indorser as the " best friend , " using headphone inter-group communication as a stand - in for fundamental interaction .
The psychoanalysis revealed that starting at age 18 for char and 22 for men , people commonly have an opposite - sexual urge " best friend . " Aman ’s best friendis most likely to be a woman across his entire liveliness span , but char show a different pattern . They keep up the male - best - champion pattern for about 14 long time ( until an average long time of 32 ) , after which their vocation pattern turn more female - favorable .
" The male person , who is presumptively ab initio the swain and by and by the husband , is alternate out into 2nd place , replaced with what we take to be a girl , " Dunbar told LiveScience . ( The investigator did n’t have information on menage relationships , but they did have a go at it that the age of this new " best friend " is about a generation younger . )
Keeping up with kin
The differences could be evolutionary , Dunbar said . woman might focus on their own reproduction and then , once they have girl , pour their vigor into tolerate them andany grandchildren . Women also tend to have strong relationships than humanity , whose relationship are often weak and more " of the import , " Dunbar said .
" You see this reflected in the phenomenon known as ' kin - steward ' as well , the people in family who are often responsible for conserve the flow of data around the family web , " Dunbar said . " It ’s nearly always cleaning woman . "
The larger goal of the enquiry is to understand howromantic relationshipsare form , Dunbar enounce . The researchers are now looking into nous natural action in response to different relationships and how that brain natural process may vary by gender .
