I just came across a New York Times article which asked, “How many friends do you really need?”

Oh, great. The question stopped me cold in my tracks. I had never thought about friendship in quite this way — as something you OUGHT to do. Like finishing homework or taking vitamins.

As if I didn’t have enough “ought to’s in my life already! And almost all of them are numbers. Already, I’m supposed to worry about my goal weight; my goal number of sleep hours; my goal of 10,000 steps every day; and my goal Body Mass Index (the real goal is getting that down to merely Obese from Morbidly so). I’m supposed to keep track of my LDLs and my HDLs, my triglycerides and my A1C. And then there’s my credit score — yet another completely invisible and possibly imaginary thing that didn’t even exist when I was back in high school.

And now I have to monitor how many friends I have?

I wonder: Can I count imaginary friends into the total?

But I mustn’t scoff; this new study is about real and important stuff. “There are health implications,” The Times article warns. “A meta-analysis led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University in Utah, concluded that loneliness is as harmful to physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”

Of course, the analysis doesn’t say how dangerous it is to your health if all of your new, carefully acquired friends turn out to be smokers.

Certainly, having zero friends might not be ideal. Living alone, with or without a pandemic, I can imagine you might wonder how long it would take someone to find your body if you died in your sleep. (Yes, I will always be Morbid whether or not I’m Obese) So having at least one friend is probably important. “Going from zero to one is where we get the most bang for your buck,” says Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas.

But beyond that, it’s hard to quantify scientifically even what a friendship is, let alone what role it plays in our health. Is a friend someone who takes your calls? Who answers your emails? Who makes you come out for a walk? Or, perhaps, is it someone who is considerate enough NOT to make you come out for a walk in the pollen-filled air?

One un-sung benefit of the pandemic was the complete absence of people coming to visit and saying, “Gee, Judy, just exactly how often do you dust anyway?”

The Times article also asks, “How can you tell if you need more friends?”

Well, do you feel lonely? That’s one clue, the article says. Do you feel left out of things or isolated? That’s another.

The article acknowledges that ultimately it is quality rather than quantity that matters most in a friendship.

But there are other factors, too, that may be at work.

In 2007, a study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that when one member of a network of friends did something like gain weight, others in their network often did as well.

This came from an analysis of data collected in the longitudinal study called the Framingham Heart Study. Using new software methods, creating diagrams that plotted both obesity and the relationships between people in the study, researchers from Harvard and the University of California San Diego reached the surprising conclusion that “on average, having an obese friend made a person gain 17 pounds” and increased the second person’s chances of obesity by 57 percent.

“We were stunned,” says James Fowler, one of the study’s authors, “to find that friends who live hundreds of miles away have just as much impact as friends who are next door.”

They don’t say this, but the next logical conclusion is that maybe the way to shed pounds is to also shed your overweight friends—and make your six new friends from among folks who’ve been losing weight instead.

So that’s my plan.

Unless, of course, the skinny folks figure out that I’m the one making everyone else fat and dump me first.

Maybe I need to go on those walks after all. Rats!