How Do I Make Friends? (We Never Really Stop Asking)

Some of you know my youngest kid has gone off to university this year, and bless her heart, like a first grader, the first question out of her mouth to her residence mentor was “How do I make friends?”. I appreciated her sweet youthful candor and readiness to make friendship a stabilising priority in her life and it started me researching and pondering…

As we get older, a strange gap develops in how most of us think about relationships: we can usually say exactly how many years we've been partnered, or count up the years date nights, but ask how many actual hours we've spent with our closest friend this year, or how many hours we’ve spent making new friends and almost no one knows. We treat romantic time as something to track and protect, and often look at friendship time as something that just happens naturally or just doesn't.

A communication researcher Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas decided to count up the hours. Across two studies, one following adults who'd recently moved to a new city, another following first-year university students over their first nine weeks (yes I’ve sent this research over to my kid!)Hall tracked how many hours it took for relationships to move from acquaintance to casual friend, to friend, to close or best friend. The rough answers: somewhere around 40–60 hours together to become casual friends, another 80–100 hours or so to become real friends, and past 200 hours before something like a close friendship reliably takes hold. Most of that closeness was built in the first couple of months of knowing someone,  after that, more time together stopped moving the needle much.

What mattered even more than the hours was what filled them. Time spent obligated to someone,  a coworker, a classmate, barely predicted closeness at all. Small talk, even a lot of it, was associated with relationships cooling off over time. What actually built closeness was almost embarrassingly ordinary: hanging out with no agenda, actively listening to one another, catching up on each other's day, joking around, saying something affectionate. It is not sharing big events or experiences, although those make for great memories together, but simply the connection, unglamorous and repeated connection in the mundane everyday. 

Closeness isn't a feeling you either have or don't. It's something you accumulate, in hours, mostly by showing up in small, low-stakes ways. A lot of contemporary culture pulls in the opposite direction. We're taught to expect closeness to arrive effortlessly, to find "our person," and, as Esther Perel has often pointed out, to ask one romantic partner to be everything a whole village used to provide. No one hour count can carry that kind of weight alone. It's no wonder many people then depend on our main partnership for everything; finding “your person” often coincides with midlife, and from your 30s to early 50s humans find themselves in the toughest stretch for building new friendships. The time when our careers, parenting and caregiving responsibilities all tend to peak. We end up isloated in the moment we could really use support and laughter from friends.

Therapists see this show up constantly in the room. In relationship work, part of the case is often widening the lens on the system, a partnership tends to be healthier when it isn't the only source of connection, resourcing and novelty either person has. With folks doing trauma or identity work, we talk about chosen family and community as part of long term recovery, not a nice“extra” once the "real" work is done, something writers like Kai Cheng Thom beautifully describe as a form of collective, not purely individual, healing. And with anyone feeling isolated, the research above offers a genuinely useful, almost mechanical starting therapeutic experiment: closeness is downstream of hours, and hours are something you can actually choose to prioritise. This really pleases my behaviouralist side as a therapist but also my personal desire to belong to a collective of people who take part, simply putting in a couple of hours each week to knit us closer together into a community.

So here's a small invitation for a goal for the season: is there one relationship,  a friend, a friend of a friend, a sibling, a neighbour, a gym buddy - or anyone else you can think of - you'd like to spend a few more hours with this autumn?

Not a grand gesture. Just adding up more ordinary time together, on purpose.

Hall, J. A. (2019), "How many hours does it take to make a friend?" Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Read the study.

Perel, E. (2007). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. Read here

Thom, K. C. (2019). I hope we choose love: A trans girl’s notes from the end of the world. Read more from her here.