Meet regularly, invest time – and don’t hold grudges: 10 ways to revitalise flagging friendships

Staying close to friends isn't always easy. From calling out flakiness to singing together in a choir, experts share their advice on how to keep the spark alive

There is no getting around it, you have to make time to be a good friend. According to Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford and author of Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, we need to spend the equivalent of nine minutes a day to maintain a healthy relationship with our closest network of friends, which he admits is barely time to raise your coffee cup to each other", so one meet-up a week is more realistic. If you fail to do that, the friendship starts to decay", says Dunbar.