Make sure you keep seeing your mates, says Charles Handy

It’s three years since I had my stroke, during which time I’ve lived in solitary confinement in my own apartment. A very comfortable prison. But I have discovered, as if I hadn’t already known, that in order to be fully myself I need other people, particularly other friends, people who have known me a long time, and know me better than I know myself. They can remind me of who I used to be and who I still am, I hope.

Was it Mark Twain who said something like, “A good friend is someone who knows all the worst things about you and still wants to have lunch with you”? That’s me and David, my oldest and best friend, who I first met at university 50 years ago. We meet for lunch once a month, taking turns to name the restaurant and pay the bill.

Over lunch we share our worst secrets, our failures and our few successes. After all, what’s the point of succeeding if you don’t have somebody to boast to?

David knows everything about me, including my worst faults and temptations. He’s always there to help if he can. He’s also a very distinguished doctor, so if I fall over he knows which specialist to run to, which hospital, and that is incredibly useful. When I nearly died after my stroke in a hospital in the Hague, I was delighted but not surprised when I came round to see David standing by my bedside.

Alerted by my family, he had flown straight there to be with me. Of course, that’s what I would have done if it had been him in the hospital bed and not me.

My favourite of Shakespeare’s sonnets is the one you may well have heard at marriage services. It goes like this:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

Actually, I think Shakespeare was talking about friendship, not romantic love. When he uses the word love, please think of it as an affection between brothers, or between really good friends. A relationship of total trust and total truth. In fact, I think that good marriages always end up as a marriage of true minds, as a marriage of friends, of partnership trust and equality.

Though, as my late wife constantly reminded me, with friendship you are two individuals, together but with space in the togetherness to be yourself. She even carried that through to the design of our houses; good marriage requires one bed for togetherness, but two bathrooms and two workrooms or studies, so you can be yourself when you need to be. There must be space in the togetherness.

I think she’s right. It certainly worked for us. To have a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf put it, is essential in a marriage, no matter how many wonderful nights you share.

Nowadays I couldn’t live without my friends, people who knew me before I was ill, who assure me I’m the same person they used to know long ago. Who bring me tears from the old world that we inhabited, and together we can put the world to rights, even if nobody seems to notice.

We all know each other’s birthdays, each other’s children. We share a history and hopefully a future.

If you have friends like that, grapple them to you with bonds of steel, or with at least a lunch every month. They are worth their weight in gold.

One of my favourite books is called How Many Friends Does One Person Need, which is a sort of academic book but very pleasant to read, by Professor Robin Dunbar of Oxford University.

He studied groups of people, working groups, down the ages from our hunter gathering predecessors to Roman legions, even down to Facebook groupings in modern life. And he maintained that, when we’re younger we can only have five best friends because our brains are too small to cope with any more. But as we get older and our brains get bigger, we can raise that to 15, which is the size of a good dinner party.

You then go up in multiples of 15 until you get to 150, which is the absolute maximum that any normal human can cope with, in terms of relationships involved. And that became known as the Dunbar number by many organisations who design their project teams around a number of 150.

In my experience that is too large. I think seven is the perfect “younger” number. So seven sevens are 49, and that’s my maximum size of an organisational group. If I were to design my own organisation, it would all be in multiples of seven.

Seven is the perfect number: it gives you enough variety of skills and talents that you would need in any group, but it’s also small enough so that if you all remain, you could become great friends.

The best teams on the pitch, it seems to me, are always such good friends who know intuitively where each other is, and where to pass to, almost without looking.

I think the same applies at work: the best groups are friendship work groups. They like and know each other, can trust each other and help each other. So I encourage work groups to socialise after work, to know each other very well.

I also believe they don’t need to have job titles because they all know what they are and what each other does.

One of the happiest “work” places I know is a primary school. All of the kids there are budding with happiness because they’re all friends. I’m amazed that my grandchildren adore their schools. I said to them, “When I was young, I hated school.” But they say no, they love it, because that’s where their friends are – and where your friends are, that’s where you want to be.

So friendship is invaluable and I hope you have just the right number, certainly one best friend. And if you can’t live with them, lunch with them.

Charles Handy (1932-2024) was one of the giants of contemporary thought. This piece was dictated to his carer in 2022.

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