There will never be more than 24 hours in a day or 168 in a week.
In adulthood, myriad competing priorities mean we spend less time with friends.
Every age group also associated thepresence of friends with pleasure.
What made people happiest was to be with both spouse and friends.
But when time is limited, our relationships are, too.
When time is limited, it doesn’t matter how many people we know.
Jeff Hall wondered something basic: How much time does it take to make a friend?
To find out, hesurveyed 355 adults who had relocated within the last six months1.
He asked each person to identify a potential friend they had met when they moved.
Where did you meet?
How much time did you spend together last week?
In a typical week?
What kind of friendship or acquaintanceship would you say you have with this person?
What do you do together?
Do you hang out, work, talk?
In a second study, Hall caught freshmen and transfer students before they had a chance to make friends.
Three weeks after arrival, he asked them to name two new people they had met other than roommates.
How people spent those hours mattered.
By itself, time is not enough, nor is proximity.
Hanging out and eating together were good for turning acquaintances into friends.
The ways that people talked to each other mattered.
You catch me up.
Consider how many people you don’t bother to ask.
You wander into the office, you say hey, and that’s that."
“It doesn’t have to be intimate,” he says.
It’s not that self-disclosure doesn’t matter.
It is that other things do, too."
Even playing video games appeared to bring college students closer together, as did watching television and movies.
I confess to having been very judgmental about video games.
“I think it’s about both/and.
Both are friendship-developing activities.”
Is 50 hours really what it takes?
Fifty hours struck me as a high bar.
Surely there were people I had bonded with more quickly?
Then I remembered Aristotle’s observation that friendship takes time even if the wish for friendship comes quickly.
What does 50 hours look like in real life?
“Accumulating 30 hours is not hard if you are a college freshman,” Hall says.
I’m right there with you, I think.
Hall has a theory that the conversations that bond us to others require emotional energy.
“They also take time and they come with risk,” he says.
We are willing to take that risk, Hall believes, to make it satiate our need to belong.
Once that evolutionary need is met, we begin to conserve energyto talk less, engage less.
It isn’t enough to want friendships.
“You have to spend time investing in people,” Hall says.
“It’s important to keep it in mind as a priority.
