[trowawee]

The thing about parsing your social network down to just a tiny group of close friends is A) it makes it harder to develop more close friends, since friendship tends to work like a funnel where you start out shallow and become better friends through time/exposure, and B) eventually you start to lose friends, whether to physical distance, falling out, life events, and eventually death, and if you only have a tiny group, it's easy for the bottom to fall out of your friend group entirely.

I've watched this happen with a lot of older adults I know, which is one of the reasons I've deliberately made some efforts to keep a pool of shallow friendships. Some of them have already deepened into actual friends, some fall off and that's ok, because that's kind of the point. Casting a wider net is part of a strategy to not end up in my later years with 0-2 total friends in my life.