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The trouble with any discussion of medium friendship begins with the word “friend.”
关于中等友谊的任何讨论可能都有一个问题，这个问题始于“朋友”这个词。
To Americans, everyone from a lover to a work acquaintance is a “friend” — which is “why some people say they have three friends, and other people say they have 100 friends,” explained Fischer, of Berkeley.
对美国人而言，从恋人到工作中的熟人，人人都可以是“朋友”，伯克利分校的菲舍解释说，这就是“为什么有些人说他们有三个朋友，而另一些人却说他们有100个朋友”。
Women, in general, lean on their friends more than men do and more readily share life details, leading to blurrier definitions of friend categories — and more confusion about where people fit.
女性一般比男性更依赖朋友，也更愿意分享生活细节，这导致女性对朋友的定义更加模糊，也让人更弄不清其他人算不算朋友。
Scholars who study social networks have attempted to classify the strata of friendship.
研究社交网络的学者试图对友谊的层级进行分类。
“Best,” “close,” “good,” “casual” and “acquaintance” is one taxonomy they use.
“最好的”“亲密的”“好的”“一般的” 和 “熟人”是他们使用的一种分类方法。
“Support clique,” “sympathy group,” “friendship group,” “clansmen” and “acquaintances” is another.
“提供支持的团体”“表达同情的团体”“友谊团体”“族人”和“熟人”是另一种分类方法。
These scholars have imagined friend networks as a pyramid, with close friends and family at the tip and everyone else ranked and sorted below;
这些学者把朋友网络想象成一个金字塔，亲密的朋友和家人在塔尖，其他人则排在下面；
or as concentric circles, “like ripples on a pond,” said the Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, with the closest people at the center;
或者把朋友网络想象成同心圆，“就像池塘里的涟漪”，牛津大学的进化心理学家罗宾·邓巴这样说，最亲近的人在中心；
or as a convoy, with certain people accompanying an individual throughout life, and others falling back, out of the procession altogether.
或者把朋友网络想象成一个护送车队，某些人陪伴了一个人一生，而其他人则逐渐落在后面，甚至完全退出了队伍。
Dunbar has extensively diagramed friendship, his findings summarized in his book “Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships,” published in 2022.
邓巴全面地用图阐释了友谊，他的研究结果总结在《朋友：理解我们最重要关系的力量》，这本书已在2022年出版。
In a widely cited 1993 article, he posited that humans have the brain capacity to maintain about 150 friendships, with five or six at the very core (including certain family members), 10 to 15 in the second tier, and 30 to 40 in the third tier.
在一篇被广泛引用的1993年发表的文章中，他假定人类的脑容量足够维持大约150段友谊，其中5到6段处于核心位置（包括某些家庭成员），10到15段处于第二层，30到40段处于第三层。
The fourth tier encompasses everyone else you are not embarrassed to greet upon meeting accidentally in an airport lounge in the middle of the night.
第四层包括所有其他人，你在深夜的机场休息室偶然遇到他们时，与他们打招呼不会感到尴尬。
The fifth, gigantic ring is composed of acquaintances.
第五层这个巨大的圈层由熟人组成。
But social science — which has intensively studied how marriage, close friendship, family relationships and acquaintanceship all affect the individual — has seemingly done nothing to investigate the dynamics of medium friendship, leaving us to navigate its complications without a guidebook.
但是社会科学（它深入研究了婚姻、亲密友谊、家庭关系和熟人关系如何影响个人）似乎没有对中等友情的动态关系进行任何调查，让我们在没有指引的情况下驾驭它的复杂性。
“This juggling you have to do among all these people, it’s very complex,” Dunbar said.
“你必须在所有这些人之间进行权衡，这非常复杂，”邓巴说，
“You don’t want to draw very hard lines — ‘No, you’re not in my 15 now, I’m moving you out.’”
“你不能把界限划分得非常严格——‘不，你现在不在我的15人名单里了，我要把你移出去。’”
The silence around medium friendship is intended to protect others’ feelings.
中等友情中的沉默是为了保护他人的感受。
Someone refers to you as a “work friend,” and you privately huff, I thought we were closer than that.
有人把你称为“工作上的朋友”，而你心里气呼呼地想，我以为我们的关系比这更亲密呢。
You learn about a pregnancy on Instagram, and you’re miffed you didn’t hear it firsthand.
你在Instagram上得知了朋友怀孕的消息，你有点生气自己没有第一时间听到。
Such an imbalance confounds and wounds us, leaving us feeling powerless, angry or self-critical.
这样的不平衡使我们感到困惑和受伤，让我们感到无力、愤怒或自我批评。
But we have no recourse.
但是我们无法求助。
“We know that when there is an issue in a friendship, people tend to be really passive, really reluctant to bring up issues that are negative, that might cause conflict,” said Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg.
“我们知道，当友情中出现问题时，人们往往会非常被动，非常不愿意提起可能会引起冲突的负面问题，”温尼伯大学的社会心理学家贝弗利·费尔说。
Dunbar speculates that the ambiguity around the maintenance of medium friendship may be polite, but it is also selfish.
邓巴推测，维系着中等友谊的模糊性可能是出于礼貌，但也是自私的。
His research has shown that people move friends out of the innermost circle extremely slowly, about one per decade.
他的研究表明，人们将朋友移出最内层圈子的速度非常缓慢，大约每十年移出一个。
Especially those friendships established in the college years “seem to be so ground in stone that nothing on God’s earth will ever shift them,” he said.
邓巴说，尤其是在大学时代建立的友情，它们“似乎坚如磐石，世上任何东西都无法动摇它们。”
