Casual friends vs close friends
NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS YOU CAN CALL SOMEONE A TRUE FRIEND ONLY AFTER SPENDING THESE MANY HOURS WITH THEM
You can call someone a true friend only after spending 90 hours with them, research says
Arecent study suggests we need to spend 90 hours with someone before we can begin to consider them a friend. And how did this conclusion come about? The report in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships by Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, lays out the numbers for us.
He analysed 355 people and worked out how long it took them to graduate from acquaintance to casual friend, then friend, and close friend.
On an average it takes 50 hours to trade up from acquaintance to casual friend — the sort of people you are glad to see across a room at parties; 90 hours is the tipping point where you start to carve out time to see one another; and when you get to 200, you’re proper intimates, you see each other often socially and support each other emotionally.
Hall’s study was inspired by the work of Dr Robin Dunbar, the University College London anthropologist who in 1992 published a paper that said the number of meaningful relationships we can have in our lives is around 150, known as Dunbar’s Number.
He divided this into groups of five close friends, 15 good friends, 50 general acquaintances, building to a larger circle limited to around 150 (our capacity to limit ourselves to this number is all down to the size of the brain’s neocortex, science fans).
Research also shows that we reach peak friends when we’re about 25 years old and the numbers drop off after that. That’s the age when we gather around us friends from school and university, from first jobs and from settling into our adult lives. It’s hardly surprising that we make the most friends when we’re trying to work out who we are.
When I was a student I had a friend, a graduate student, who seemed so much wiser and more sophisticated than the rest of us, possibly because he was three years older.
While we were all so sure we were going to be best friends forever, he posited that most of us were geographical friends, close only because of shared necessities.
It seemed quite damning at the time, but of course it’s natural for some friendships to fall away. Cheerfully though, if we believe in Dunbar’s Number, that just makes room for new people to come into our lives.
It can be more difficult to make friends as you get older, because our lives are busier and perhaps we are more rigid in what we expect from those around us. The essential formula for friendships of all kinds is spark plus proximity plus time. What we seek in our friends — loyalty, thoughtfulness, a generosity of spirit, and the ability to make us laugh — is also what can make a good acquaintance.