What age do we hit ‘peak friendship’? Scientists believe they may have found the answer.

There is a specific age when a person will be at their ‘most popular’, according to new research, with the amount of friends we have decreasing once we are past it.

Our social networks shrink from the age of 25, the data reveals, with the pool of friends a person has getting smaller and smaller as the years go by.

The phone records of more than 3.2 million mobile users in Europe were analysed for the study by researchers at Aalto and Oxford universities.

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They found that those aged 25 and under talked more to friends than any other age group, looking at who how often they called a person and the length of each call, with our social circles decreasing with age.

Older people spent more of their free time socialising with a small group of family or friends, the research added.

“Age and gender are two important factors that play crucial roles in the way organisms allocate their social effort,” researchers explain in the study published in Royal Society Open Science.

“Our results indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age and gender such that younger individuals have more contacts and, among them, males more than females.”

They found social circles tend to decrease until the age of 45 when the number stabilizes for about a decade. After 55, there is again a steady decrease.

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So bad news if you are already past the age of 25, but good news if you are already over that age and don’t like socialising very much.

Dr Sarah Gomillion, a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, said the research “echoes other research on face-to-face social networks that suggests that our social networks shrink as we age”.

“The big life events that usually come with age, such as marriage and parenthood, lead people to invest more of their time socialising with just a few close family members and friends,” she explained on The Conversation.

“Later in life, retirement, health issues and the death of partners and friends can leave people socially isolated, although this can sometimes inspire older people to engage more with their community through volunteering and religious participation.”

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