Most of the research in the topic of human communication is focused on strong and long-lived relationships. Yet, a large fraction of human communication is dedicated to short-lived transient relationships that emerge around life circumstances, possibly aiding in the adaptation of individuals to new stages of life. From a cognitive and temporal constraint standpoint, they may reflect a solution to the problem of optimally allocating attention to friends in a way that best suits individual needs for communication and adaptation.
In this project, to understand the temporal patterns of communication with transient relationships and try to reverse engineer the origin of these patterns, we study the full call records for several populations. This study has uncovered several patterns of communication that indicate that the lifetimes of transient relationships are likely to be predetermined from an early relationship stage (say in the first 45 to 60 days) by homophily. Furthermore, no discernible tendencies exist that presage the end of a relationship but, instead, the end tends to be abrupt and without warning
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