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A lot of women pride themselves on having a solid core group of friends. Our girls keep our group chats lit, they ride out with us when we are upset, and celebrate with us when we win. While we tend to put deep confidence in all our friendships, are the feelings reciprocal?
A study shows that a lot of people you may consider friend don’t feel the same about you.
The report from scientific journal PLOS ONE gave 600 students a questionnaire to determine how many of their friends were their real friends.
According to the research, only about half of your friends think of you as a friend. So if you consider yourself having 10 good friends, in reality you probably only have five, yikes.
“It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are,” Dr. Erez Shmueli, one of the study’s authors, told Complex of their findings. “If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact, that’s not the case.”
Since we are naturally bad at judging character, how do we discern our real friendships from our fake ones? It can be hard to sift through a relationship and take inventory of whether the connection is one sided or not.
Shmueli said that there is one sure fire way to figure out if your friendships are mutual. If you and your besties have mutual friends, it is more likely that your friendship is solid.
“The difference in the number of friends of the two individuals” is a good way to figure out if your friendship is real. Shmueli told Complex. “The higher this difference is, the lower the likelihood of the friendship to be reciprocal.”
So, take a look at your group of friends and analyze from there.
