In this model of relationships as bonds, people are particles. And people have valence: It's called, somewhat fantastically, the Monkeysphere. More scientifically, it's called Dunbar's number. You're welcome to look it up, but it's basically an upper limit on the number of people we can think of as fellow human beings; the number of meaningful relationships we can have. It's a physical thing, and it has to do with the size of a particular part of our brains.
But it also makes sense if you think about it: There is definitely an upper limit on the number of friendships you can have. There's also an equivalent to double/triple bonds, albeit more analogue. You can have many acquaintances, a good number of friends, a few close friends, and certainly not many romantic relationships. That last one isn't just a matter of social norms and/or personally morals. People who fake romantic feelings aside, nobody can deal with a large number of genuine romantic relationships. Thus, the valence of personal relationships.
It's also worth noting than different people have different valencies. Again, it's fairly obvious. Some people make many friends, but struggle forming close friendships; other have insular groups of close friends, but few acquaintances; some couples are so deeply into their relationship that they have almost no friends outside that relationship. And so on and so forth.
Observe what happens when you throw a group of previously unassociated people into a new situation. Pretty much what happened to me when I moved into res at the beginning of this year, but it applies to any situation where you have a bunch of people thrown into a new social environment.
In the beginning, there's not a single friendship or acquaintanceship. You have a whole cloud of particles, bouncing around randomly. Pretty quickly, people get introduced, make acquaintances. Little clumps form, small groups of people. They aren't very stable in the beginning; particles, people, break off, bounce around, find a new group to stick to.
Gradually, patterns start to form; not completely stable, but the changes get slower. You can see the outlines of the groups that will eventually form, even if they're still putative. At the same time, the groups start interacting; the "bridges", people connected to many groups, become apparent. You also see loosely overlapping groups; not quite close enough to form one group, but forming a sort of metagroup encompassing many smaller, still-distinct groups.
It's also around this time that you start seeing the beginnings of fault lines, in large enough populations. Two or more large metagroups form, with a distinct sparsity of bonds between them. Of course, they're basically never entirely separate, but the few bonds that exist will struggle to keep the groups together.
Over time, as a rule, the groups become less insular, and a distinct social network starts to form. Groups are still apparent, but more strongly interlinked, with the exception of the fault lines mentioned above. Bonds still rearrange occasionally, but rarely drastically at this stage. Some friendships wax, others wane, but the network is approaching stability.
Eventually, given a lack of outside disturbance, an equilibrium forms. Now, as any chemist can tell you, equilibria can be static or dynamic, although static equilibria are very rare. In this case, a static equilibrium means a social network that does not change (much). The gradual fluctuations of friendships continue, but the network remains stable.
Then you have dynamic equilibria: We all know that couple (perhaps more than one) who perpetually break up, get back together, and break up again. That's basically what a dynamic equilibrium is: Things are constantly changing, but it's always the same change. That particular example of a dynamic equilibrium is a particularly unstable one which tends to resolve itself one way or another with time, but there are more stable examples. That peculiar type of friendship that fluctuates between conjoined twins and mutual, vitriolic hatred; more "normally", friendships that appear and fade continuously, normally for a very long time.
Social networks are fragile things, though; although they very, very rarely shatter entirely, it can sometimes take only a small change in one part of the network to cause the entire network to subtly rearrange.
Add something new to an existing network; for example, a new romantic relationship between two people in the network. This subtly affects the friendships of their mutual friends, and those changes ripple out until their entire social network is vastly different.
Once again, this is something we're all familiar with from personal experience. In the particle metaphor, a single new bond forms, changing the valency of those involved and affecting the structure of the "molecule" around them. These changes affect the next "layer" of people, and the next, and so on. Often, the equilibrium is entirely broken, and it can take quite a long time for a new equilibrium to form.
The most drastic changes after a disturbance tend not to affect the more stable, tightly networked groups. This makes sense; the close bonds between good friends tend to survive even severe disturbances, instead, the network tends to fragment at weak points; weakly-linked groups separate and form new metagroups, for example. Here, the fault line effect becomes apparent; extremely poorly-linked metagroups break apart very easily. It's here that we see the polarization of groups, the "Them vs. Us" mentality which characterises highly fragmented populations.
All of this has a physical analogue: molecules, especially large biomolecules which best match the large networks people tend to form, tend to break at specific weak points under certain types of pressure.
That's all for now, but this is a pretty interesting idea for me, so more will probably follow.
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