friendship (postulate #1)

a good friend will bail you out of jail.
a true friend will be sitting next to you, saying, "boy, that was fun!"

in the big world of web 2.0, there are tons of social networking sites around, such as linkedin, facebook and twitter. i have friends on these sites, but am a rather passive friender. if you find me and want to be my friend, i'm very happy to be your friend. otherwise, i'll just see you in real life.

i have this theory that everything obeys the laws of physics. i'm sure you've heard me blather on about this before, and now i'm going to apply the laws of physics to friendship. to start, let's postulate that each person has a set amount of time and energy available to them on any given day.

next, let's acknowledge that there are different levels of friendship, and that each level of friendship requires a different level of energy.

friend type: acquaintance
characteristics: talk to them at the club; have a beer with them after a ride
energy requirement: minimal (quantified as 1)

ft: actual friend
c: we have gone out to dinn'r; i have invited you to my home
er: moderate (2)

ft: good friend
c: i've driven your drunk ass home; i've picked you up when you were in a bind; i probably owe you money, or you owe money, but neither of us keeps track (except for razzing purposes)
er: high (3)

ft: true friend
c: you've slept in my bed, perhaps because we had sex, or perhaps because i was too drunk to drive your drunk ass home
er: higher (4)

for simplicity, let's make this analysis time-independent. time has all sorts of significant effects on friendship, and good experimental design is based on isolating a single variable. if you're not the scientific type, just trust me on this.

let's say that you have 8 units of time/energy in a day. with minimal math, you can see that if you only had acquaintances, you'd have time for 8 of them. if you had only true friends, you'd have time for 2 of them. from this, we can conclude the following:

friendship postulate #1: the number of friends one can have is inversely proportional to the quality of the friendships.