Relationships in large tulpamancy systems

Most tulpamancers end up with 1-3 tulpas. In this situation, it’s rather natural for all system members to have a meaningful relationship with each other. But systems with 10+ tulpas exist too.

Dunbar’s theory

Invoking Dunbar’s number is tempting here. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed once that humans can maintain about 150 relationships that are beyond just acquaintanceship, including 15 close friendships. ¹

Dunbar’s theory faces some criticism though and even if it is completely right, there is no basis for applying it directly to internal relationships.

Time limits

There are physical limits of time we can spend on maintaining our inner relationships though and there is a computable number of inner relationship in the system that comes from graph theory. If you have 10 tulpas (not including the host), there are \( \frac{11*10}{2} = 55 \) possible relationships between everybody.

For systems that big it’s likely that not all of tulpas will build a relationship with each other. The more tulpas you have, the less likely is for them to have a meaningful relationships with everybody. The graph of your meaningful relationships will look more like a star with some smaller cliques and a few additional edges than a complete graph.

Of course, you can always imagine everybody having some interactions in fictional time. But if you just assume it without materializing it later in real time retrospection, no meaningful interactions really happened and no meaningful relationship exist.

Example

Some real life example of relatively large system that’s definitely not mine anonymized:

As you can see, in this system there is 20 meaningful relationship between identities out of 55 possible. The host has a meaningful relationship with everybody while the tulpas don’t really have such relationships with all other tulpas but usually have one or a few relationships with other tulpas too.

Summary

The bigger your system is, the less likely it is for everybody to have meaningful relationships with each other.

Relationships maintained purely in fictional time are just purely fictional. If you want your tulpas to have meaningful relationships with each other, make sure they interact in real time (materializing fictional events through retrospection counts).