I'm reading "The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship/I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for 'The Friendship Files.' Here’s what I’ve learned" by Julie Beck (in The Atlantic).
I don't know about all "six forces" but the first one is terribly daunting:
The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that....
It's good to have friends, but it's essential to have time. Do you have enough time that you could give 40 hours within 6 weeks to someone new that you meet today? The clock starts running. You're in the first 6 weeks. You need to put 40-60 hours into that relationship just to make a casual friend, and 80 to 100 to have a close friend.
I know. It's just "one study." That can't be right, can it? Well, it would explain why it's so easy to make a lot of friends at college and much harder after that.
Posts
42 comments:
You're right--it does explain why you make lots of friends when young and struggle to make friends later in life. I'd have a hard time making 10 hours available in the first 6 weeks, I can't imagine giving 40-60 to one person I just met. I've also noticed that young people will often call each other up for no reason, whereas adults need an agenda. That could also be described as a time issue--I don't want to waste my time or theirs and so need some justification for getting in touch.
My husband's friends are all "project friends". They collaborated on something that threw them together for an intense period of time. The trick is, when the project's over, what do you do now? Chat on facebook every few months, apparently.
Friends are overrated.
Churches with active community life are a great solution too.
As the Old saying goes... A Friend With WEED, Is a Friend INDEED
If you haven't made more friends, quit bogarting
The numbers are at least plausible. As you say, it means school and work are the easiest places to make friends, and that's true in my case.
I'm out of free Atlantic articles, and I haven't bit the bullet and subscribed. Does she count "internet time?" What would she say about Althouse and Meade?
I don’t understand any adult who sets about to make friends. Friendships just happen. They are definitely more likely to happen if you belong to social groups. For me church provided all the friendships I need. My neighborhood provides casual friendships. And people from my pre-retired occupation— teachings— left me with some others.
But I agree with Ann: be aware that every friendship you acquire comes with an opportunity cost of time.
Be a blessing to someone today!
Compatibility + time to earn trust.
Thinking about this lead me to look up the idiom, fast friends. I've been wrong in taking it too literally, thinking fast friends are two (commonly young) people meeting each other and quickly becoming friends. A common example would be a summer camp situation. The demographics are favorable based on the situation. It is advantageous to seek out allies. Activities, adventures are more fun, etc. There should be a word for this type of friendship, but apparently it isn't fast friend. I still think I've heard it used that way though.
Ann asked, "Do you have enough time that you could give 40 hours within 6 weeks to someone new that you meet today?"
In my experience many friendships grow out of school or work where we are exposed to potential friends far more than 40 hours within 6 weeks -- a possible shortcoming of "working from home" :)
Bob_R said...
As you say, it means school and work are the easiest places to make friends
Actually, it means Troopships are the easiest places to make friends.
Cooped up with a bunch of guys; 24 hours a day, for a couple of weeks.
The only thing that could make the friendships More lasting, would be watching about 10% of you get brutally killed... In that case, y'all will probably be friends for life
Long ago and far away, pre-Oprah and pre-social media, I discovered that accidentally learning another women's shameful secrets (of the bourgeois sort) was a shortcut to friendship. Once you knew she and her husband had split you became a bestie.
In support of the time spent together theory, many of my friendships formed in planes, buses and cars getting to ski slopes and then on ski lifts. In fact, long car rides together can be very bonding.
There are many reasons why it's easier to make good friends in college and harder as we get older. Obvious reasons. Such as...when older, we're responsible for things other than making it to class. We have jobs that require our attention and a clear head in the am. Yes, we have to get up in the am. We have kids. 'Nuff said.
But we also have less time and energy for people on the fringe. In college we play around with all sorts of people and many of them made pretty poor judgements and did some crazy things. In adulthood, you are not typically going to give those people much time. Also- when you get a few years on yourself, you can figure out pretty quickly who's a fit for you and who's not. And they can too. So it's easier to make friends when you're older in that regard. But you have to want it and remember to call them up from time to time to make plans.
Though 6-10 hours a week is preposterous. Someone should do a study on how ridiculous most studies are. But, hey...I guess it's a living. Doing studies, that is.
An interesting thing about living here in Florida is that all of my neighbors are from somewhere else. Everyone around town is from somewhere else. So everyone is engaged in meeting others and getting to know them. And, no- we're not all retired. We have more friends here, in the 5 years we've been here, than we had in 30 years in Atlanta. Sure, we knew more people in Atlanta, but here we've made actual friends. Why...it's almost like being in college again.
i'm pretty sure that 'fast friends' are Stuck on each other. You know; they hold fast
After college, many people get married, so they sort of have a live-in friend (or enemy) already and don't need to make new ones. It's probably a good idea to spend 40-60 hours together before getting married. 80-100 hours might put you off the whole idea.
"Yes, it's good to eat a friend, my friend... And when the duck comes down with the magic word, what is the word, the word is food. And we ate him. EAT!"
A somewhat interesting article -- somewhat, that is, since it is only a summary of her many previous ones on the subject of friendship that must carry a lot more detail. But her tone gives me pause. She is a little too in love with the subject. "Grace," really? A religious concept applied? And then her confession that despite her fascination with the subject, she is not too great a friend herself.
OK, you don't have to be, and maybe that is why you wanted to explore the topic in such detail. But then there's also this, near the end:
"Many of the people I spoke with—who, in many cases, love each other so much that they nominated themselves to be interviewed about their friendship.... "
Are we sure this isn't about love, then, really? Not philia, but agape. The author's tone suggests neediness, to me, and once that is present, the reliability of all the information has to be treated a little more skeptically even than the average piece of reportage or opinion. So -- I read it, and I can see how some of the ideas apply, but this is far, far, far from the last word on the subject and may be so personal as to be useless, informationally. But I haven't read the individual components, so perhaps there is more there of interest than I can glean from this one.
It's easier to make new friends in a college or military situation where you are spending a lot of time with the same group of people in order to accomplish a particular goal, whether it's getting an education or defending your country. You're thrown together with people of diverse backgrounds and develop an affinity for those with whom you share interests and experiences. However, those friendships tend to be transitory, because especially in the military, people are constantly coming and going. You arrive at a new unit, you make friends, you're there for two or three years and there's a lot of turnover. That was my experience, anyway. In the time before social media, you wouldn't see most of those people again, as you went your way and they went theirs. It's now a lot easier to reconnect with old friends you knew decades ago.
As Kate said, guys do well with "Project" friends. Many of us aren't the "let's get lunch" type or inclined to spend hours on the phone sharing the details of our day.
Guys do well with getting together occasionally for fantasy football, game night, helping on a construction project or any other shared objective. A few groups like that are sufficient. If a stand-up guy has more time, he can get invited into another guy's group.
How many close friends do you need? How many can you sustain? Two or three seems like plenty.
Liberals sure seem hung up on counting friends.
If the author wrote up many individual friendships in detail, especially ones in which the friends had nominated themselves for coverage -- did those friendships change after publication?
The difficulty in having many good friends is that in order to be a good friend you have to accept your friend as they are and expose yourself as you are. The acceptance has to be reciprocal. This process is almost all gut when you are young. My experience is that one friend will be willing to commit and accept the close friendship but the other may not. So, they don't get passed the acquaintance phase. Word came back to me several times that I was weird, but in a good way.
It’s hard to make time these days just to spend time w/someone. It’s sacrificing time w/one for another. So worth it, though.
I do have 2singing friends I didn’t mention before. We have been together almost 20years and are close in a timeless sense. We only saw e/other for practice and then our Mass, but it’s been about 4yrs that our Mass was let go- so our time together is sporadic. It’s a funny thing- you know how it’s so easy to pick up where you left off w/an old friend? Like closing a book w/a bookmark and then picking it up again and not being lost?
Same w/good friends.
Like you’d never put the book down.
So, let's see--what's most like college and camp in the lives of Althouse regulars? Where do we interact, more or less, with random people for extended periods of time--people we get to know better over the years, who share some of our interests, and whose opinion we value? Just sayin'.
"I'm out of free Atlantic articles, and I haven't bit the bullet and subscribed."
I find if I just put the browser in "reader view" I can see the whole thing.
"Does she count "internet time?" What would she say about Althouse and Meade?"
If you count the 6 weeks from the first time we met in person, we spent over 80 hours together, despite living — and having work commitments — in cities that were an 8-hour drive apart. And we only drove. No flying.
In the last couple of weeks I have gotten together with friends from college (graduated in 1981). Spent many hours with them and it’s like we really haven’t been apart. I have 2 kids in college now and feel awful about the last couple years they have experienced because of Covid rules on campus. Dorms required doors to rooms to always be close. Restricted to small groups, limited visitation, closed workout facilities, remote classes and on and on. They do not seem to be developing the few longer and deeper friendships that might last through their lifetimes like I was able to do in college. And my daughter is home for a summer internship and had to request to go into a professional office 2 days a week for the experience. The rest of time is remote. Don’t see long term friendships being developed over zoom projects. It does make me sad the position our institutions and government have put them in.
My wife and my dog are my 2 best friends.
I used to think I was an introvert, but I'm probably more of a misanthrope now.
That time requirement certainly gives insight into why many of the strongest friendships come from schooling, even more so when, like residential college, it is a "world away.". Similar results seem to come from those in military units, especially when deployed to operation where when not operating the soldiers are essentially confined to the operating base. Intense, 24/7 projects can do the same.
The key seems to be a world away from the cooler climes of commercial/family life. Not a lot of individualistic distractions so people mix more to occupy their time.
But are these places becoming fewer. The modern residential college is no longer "a world away" where students end up in intense, sophomoric, discussions of some topic of their classes. Now, the students can be out in the world, even from their dorm room, gaming, social media, etc. And no longer are students essentially restricted to campus (although gas prices might change this), but can escape in the evening to distant venues or the weekend to distant cities. My niece went for a time to a rural college for it's vet program, but was unhappy as the campus was a ghost town on weekends as almost everyone en masse raced off campus, either home or to the good sized city a hundred miles away.
From M. Jordan:
I don’t understand any adult who sets about to make friends.
I'm an adult who has, several times, set about to make friends. Each time we've moved, we've tried to create situations where friendship was possible - we've joined churches and clubs and associations, we've talked to other parents at bus stops when our kids were school age, we've sat outside with our weekend coffee in plain view of the neighbors walking by. And once we've made an acquaintance, we've invited the person or people to socialize with us, asked them for favors a la Benjamín Franklin, given them relevant and useful information ("Did you see the notice from the neighborhood association?" and stuff like that).
If we hadn't done these things, if we'd waited for friendship just to "happen" without giving it some fertile ground, we would have been stuck with only one another. Instead, we've gained some wonderful friends (and a lot of acquaintances in the "weak ties" vein whom we can call on for contractor suggestions, news about job opportunities, and do forth).
We married for love, but also for life - it's good to have other people in your life, at least so you and your spouse have not-always-shared experiences to talk about.
It is easy to do, making that amount of time, but it requires you do something with your free time that doesn't involve television or the internet. You could try joining sporting leagues, hobby groups, go to church, etc. Like the word differences between "need" and "want in another post, we have the differences between "can't" and "won't" here.
Proximity, longevity, equal and complementary relationships are also a recipe to mitigate social progress (e.g. divorce) among couples.
I played basketball and softball/baseball in organized public leagues from age 27 until I was 45- made quite a few long term and good friends in those.
My parents had country club friends. Not for me. I worked on very big litigation cases my first decade out of law school and made friendships there. Wonder what WFH does to building friendships.
@WK
Agree 100%. Facing my 50th college reunion this fall. Looking forward to it, esp to see fraternity brothers. We are naturally closest to our own class in the House, since we spent most of 4 years living with them, went through Rush, pledgeship, and initiation, etc with them. But yesterday talked to one of my fraternity classmates, and a bunch of the guys from the previous class had been in town for a memorial for one of their classmates. This friend didn’t attend, because he doesn’t like them. But did get together with several of them. That was mostly good, but one guy from the class after mine was there, and seems to be suffering from advanced dementia - possibly Alzheimer's. I roomed with this guy when I was president and he was VP of the chapter, and he was one of the most dynamic people I have ever met. I couldn’t get the members to do much of anything, but discovered that I could accomplish things by just getting him behind me. He would then go downstairs, yell “Rally”, and the guys would jump up from their bridge game, or watching the Cubs lose again, etc, March out, and engage in whatever we wanted them to accomplish. Rooming with him was, of course, a double edged sword - hearing him at 2 AM yelling “Rally” to keep the party in the room going was not always appreciated. This last year has been hard, with the loss of maybe 3 fraternity brothers, and another guy who spent a lot of time in the House, and esp in my room. At least 2 of these deaths are probably, more likely than not, the result of COVID-19 vaccinations. It could just be our ages (I am 3 months older than Ann, and was a year ahead of her in school). But I hope that was why it was so bad.
My daughter got married last Labor Day. Her friends there, including her bridal party, were mostly accumulated in school. 5 showed up from HS, including both her Matron of Honor and her runner up. They were in her small HS friend group, which also included a guy who was in the Marines, and managed to make it. A lot of kids from college, including sorority sisters - but that was where the happy couple met. One of her sorority sisters officiated the wedding. On his side, he had some of his football buddies, and his Best Man had played Center (to his Guard), plus kids from HS, and a lot of family. Then she picked up much of her research group in grad school,along with her advisor (his wife, another prof in the same dept, had just had their 2nd kid and stayed home with them). I had met most of them at her PhD defense. It was just surprising that so many from both HS and grad school traveled over halfway across the country (CO to VT) to attend. But pretty much everyone who showed up from out of state had gone to school with her. That’s maybe the difference between a PhD, and the MBA and JD programs I did - 5 years of dealing with the same people 5 days a week, sharing a lab and an office, and they mostly became good friends. I came away with no long term friends from my grad school programs. my long term friends are from HS, college, and the IP committee for the engineering society I have long belonged to.
Via our local swim team, I've made a couple dozen new friends and acquaintances 3-years into moving to New England. Most of them are younger women. The time to become friends was always spent swimming hiking biking winter sports... The ultimate Covid cure: get outside interact with nature, be physically active, spend time with your human tribe, rinse, repeat.
@Jamie
Touché.
The study is wrong. I've made tons of friends as an adult and never by putting in ten hours a week!
Put in three hours a week. Fin.
Jamie- you sound like you would be a very good friend, indeed.
This is why college Greek organizations are so critical. The time is baked into the process and so many times, young men and women end up with life long friends. There simply isn’t time after college to regularly have the chance to make great friends.
So many people from my time in college have life long friends because they joined a Greek organization. People focus on the animal house party scene but that’s not the reality for most members.
Seems like a variant on the 10,000 hours of practice idea.
Fast friends are fastened together for good. It has nothing to do with how fast they became friends. My daughter travels hundreds of miles to visit her old sorority sisters and sometimes travels hundreds of miles with them on trips. She graduated 50 yrs ago. I have no friends except my wife.
Correction, My daughter graduated 30 yrs ago.
A person with whom I've developed a deep friendship with is someone I've never met in person. We "met" through a gardening comments forum and, for some reason, a spark of interest beyond our passion for landscaping happened and our cyber conversations out of the boundaries of the comments board "blossomed". We might email back and forth on a daily basis but there are never any expectations of an immediate reply. We both are amused that our husbands can't understand how we have so much to share with each other. It took a while for enough trust and camaraderie to develop before we let politics slip into our commentary. I'll admit that it felt validating that we're pretty much on the same page in that regard. I'm not sure I ever want to meet her in person. I like things just the way they are.
Post a Comment