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Do low-maintenance friendships exist?
Science says every friendship cools without contact — so how do you explain the friend who returns intact after months of silence? This Radar starts from Robin Dunbar's research, from the co-regulation that happens in the body when we're near someone we trust, and from Harvard's eight-decade study to land on a question almost everyone has asked themselves late at night: do low-maintenance friendships really exist, or is it just a story we tell ourselves to quiet the guilt? The answer, by way of Aristotle, is more reassuring than it sounds.
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Who it is for
For anyone who lies awake feeling like a terrible friend over an unanswered message, who turns another person's silence into proof of rejection, or who suspects they've been calling "lightness" what might really be a fear of opening up. If friendship sometimes weighs more like an obligation than affection, this Radar offers less of a ruler and more of a permission — to understand what actually holds a bond together, and to stop measuring care by how often the messages come.
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