The secret ingredient for deeper friendships

Scientists have figured this out

Credit: Disney

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Making friends as an adult is difficult. This is widely understood. It’s so difficult that just last week Saturday Night Live parodied the challenges of making friends by suggesting we need parks for men in the same way that we have parks for dogs. Dogs have better social lives than men. Dogs. And if you want a sense of how that sketch resonated, scroll through the 3,000+ comments; a good number of them are from people saying they’d love to have a “Man Park” where they could make friends.

This newsletter is about the failure of the nuclear family to provide an adequate (social, economic, etc) support network for people. And as I’ve explained in previous posts, the modern idea of the nuclear family arose as people’s idea about acceptable social relationships narrowed significantly. The nuclear family was meant to replace a more varied menu of friendship types, and we’re seeing now how that’s working out (it’s not).

But researchers are still working to figure out what makes friendships work, and while watching that SNL sketch I immediately thought of a passage I recently read in Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships — a fantastic book from Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar. In it, Dunbar points to research that found “friendships draw heavily on time.” He continues:

[Psychologist Jeffery Hall] found that it took about forty-five hours spent in each other’s company after first meeting for someone to progress from being an acquaintance to becoming a casual friend. People who averaged only thirty hours together over nine weeks (the equivalent of just 15 minutes a day) remained acquaintances. To move from being a casual friend to a meaningful friend called for another fifty hours spent together over the course of three months, while those who advanced to be best friends took another 100 hours to be spent together. In effect, to make it to the most intimate category of friendship required something close to two hours a day to be devoted to the friend, day after day, for some considerable time. Friendship does not come cheap¹.

That friendships take a lot of time will probably surprise no one.

But I did find this research interesting because A) researchers had managed to pinpoint such specific quantities of time that go into friendships, and B) because that quantity is so huge. It’s no wonder many of us formed strong friendships in grade school and college, when classes, dorms, sports, etc. forced us to spend a lot of time together, but struggle to do the same once we’re out in the “real world.”

In other words, the secret ingredient to friendship is a massive amount of time. There are certainly other factors. Multiple unplanned interactions are an important one, for example. But without the time component (and my own anecdotal experience is definitely in line with the research), you’re maybe doomed².

There are potential solutions to this. An interesting piece from WBUR that’s currently making the rounds, for instance, suggests more planning and intentional interactions. The findings about time themselves are in a way also a solution: If you want to increase your network of friends, force yourself to spent more time with specific people.

I will say, though, that Dunbar’s writing on time makes me skeptical there is a solution at all; I don’t have an extra two hours a day to spend on anyone, nor do I imagine any of my acquittances have two hours to spend with me. So, the odds are that I will never move an acquaintance into the "best friend" category, or even the “meaningful friend” category, again in my life.

I’ve made peace with that fact, and with the fundamental difficulty of making new friends as an adult. But more importantly, all of this suggests that the solution to waves of isolation and loneliness for many people is not going to be better or more friendships³. Broadly speaking, the friendship paradigm in today’s reality doesn’t appear to be working much better right now than the nuclear family paradigm. So, we’ll need something else.

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Headlines to check out this week:

You're not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard

“Sociologists have kind of identified the ingredients that need to be in place for us to make friends organically, and they are continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability,” says Franco, who is writing a book on making friends as an adult. “But as we become adults, we have less and less environments where those ingredients are at play.”

If we continue to expect friendships to happen naturally like they did when we were kids, we run the risk of waiting for something that might never come. Being intentional is essential, she says. Research shows those who view friendships as something that happens because of luck are lonelier later on in life, she says, “and those who see it as something that happens based on effort are less lonely years later.”

1. Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Robin Dunbar. 2001. Page 155-156.

2. I also suspect the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated this. While some people actually found themselves with more time during the pandemic thanks to lessened commutes etc., you basically couldn’t spend time with anyone. It would be interesting to talk to people who did make friends during the pandemic to see what those friendships look like. My guess is that there are a lot more people making friends with immediate neighbors, or that people in “pods” may have grown closer because all other social engagements disappeared. If you’re aware of research on this topic, or had a relevant personal experience, let me know.

3. This isn’t to say that friendship itself isn’t working well for a lot of individual people and friend groups. I know plenty of people who have great social circles and who do make friends as adults. Anecdotally speaking they seem to be in the minority, but I know they (you?) exist. But the SNL sketch and ensuing comments — not to mention actual research on loneliness — suggest that broadly speaking the friendship paradigm is also failing people.