How Many Friends Should You Break Up With?

Occasionally I ask people how many friends they've "broken up with" in their lives – as in, how many people have they explicitly ended a friendship with?

(I think we've all had friends who we were close with & gradually lost touch with, but if you still consider them friends-in-absentia then I'm not counting those).

Obviously if I met someone and they said "yeah I've alienated every friend I ever had in my life", I would be pretty concerned about them.

But equally if I met someone who said they'd never ended a single friendship, I'm not sure (in most cases) I'd believe that's a good thing?

Over the year's I've had a few (former) friends who behaved really badly towards either myself or other people. And I could have stayed friends with those people by tolerating their behaviours, and in most cases it would have been easier to. But I think it would also be worse.

Like many such questions, there's no ideal answer in the abstract – it partly depends on luck, and partly on how many friends you have in general, and partly on how early in life you developed good judgment about other people. Still, the question interests me because I rarely know what answer to expect, or what exactly that answer means.