THE FORMULA FOR FRIENDSHIP
A recent study suggests we need to spend 90 hours with someone before we can begin to consider them a friend. This seems like quite the deal, considering Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes natural aptitude plus 10,000 hours of practice to master a new skill.
Friends feel like a bargain by comparison. 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 analyzed 355 people and worked out how long it took them to graduate from acquaintance, to casual friend, to friend, then close friend.
On average, it takes 50 hours to go from acquaintance to casual friend — the sort of people you’re glad to see across a room at parties. Ninety hours is the tipping point where you start to make time to see one another. 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 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 about 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, 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 who seemed wiser than the rest of us, possibly because he was three years older. While we were all sure we were going to be best friends forever, he contended that most of us were geographical friends, close only because of shared bathrooms.
It seemed quite damning at the time, but it’s natural for some friendships to fall away. But 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’re more rigid in what we expect from those around us.
Some of us can be quite reticent about being the one to make the first move, to suggest that coffee or drink. In some ways, it’s worse than dating as there are concerns the other person will think you’re weird, and none of the conventions to protect your ego. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This desire for closeness and fear of rejection is probably responsible for the explosion of book clubs in the past 20 years, the vast majority of which never seem to crack a book. It’s about trying to find a group of likeminded people.
What opened up my life was getting a dog. As I walked our terrier around the park, I created my own pack of two-legged dog friends.
Having a common interest — dogs — makes it easier to chat about everything else. In the past decade, my dog crew’s been through everything: births, marriages, deaths, divorce.
The formula for friendships is spark, plus proximity, plus time. What we seek in our friends — loyalty, a generosity of spirit, a sense of humour — is also what can make a good acquaintance, too.
“She’s an acquaintance,” sounds so dismissive, and yet our acquaintances can add happiness to our everyday lives, too. Having five close friends is rich indeed, but sometimes just a friendly chat in the supermarket adds to our days.
There’s a reason we love TV shows about groups of friends, from Golden Girls to Cheers to Friends. Our friends make us feel like the best versions of ourselves: funnier, more clever, more interesting.
And it’s never too late to make a new one.