The length of time it takes to make friends

On Friday morning I came across an article on Business Insider . It was based on the results of a study called “How many hours does it take to make a friend?”, which looked into how long friendships at different levels of closeness take to form.

The “how” of making friends is something I’ve thought about a lot over the last ten years, so as soon as I read this article I knew what my next blog post would be about. I was excited to find some hard numbers to go with my musings on the subject.

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So… how many hours does making a friend take?

The study mentioned mentioned at the start of this post, by Jeffrey A. Hall of the University of Kansas, looked at two groups of people: adult Americans who had moved to a new city in the US in the preceding six months; and students who had recently started their courses at a particular US university. By means of surveys, samples of the two groups were asked about friendships they had recently formed, and in the case of the students these friendships were then tracked over a short period of time. Inter-personal relationships were split into four categories: acquaintances, casual friends, friends, and good/close friends. The main things the study measured were the time, in hours, that people spent together, and what that time consisted of (working together or social occasions? activities or talking? talking about what?).

The study goes into things like differences between a student population and a general adult population, how to define different types of social activity, whether statements in surveys are likely to be under- or over-estimates, and so on. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m only really interested in a few of the results:

• Timescales. Not all acquaintances turn into friends, but where this happens the study found:
  
  • to go from acquaintances to casual friends takes something like 40-60 hours spent together.
    
  • to go from acquaintances to friends takes between 60 hours over 3 weeks (students) to 160 hours over 3 months (general population) spent together. Because of the way statistics were collected, the value of 160 is likely to be an over-estimate; a kind of “average value” for making a friend is something like 80-100 hours spent together.*
    
  • to go from acquaintances to good/close friends takes something like 120 hours over 3 weeks (students) to 220 hours over 3 months (general population) spent together. The average value for making a good/best friend is estimated at over 200 hours for relationships that form over six or more weeks.*

[*These figures are totals, i.e. for students 120 hours spent together in 3 weeks could be enough to go all the way from acquaintances to good friends.]

• How time is spent together matters. Simply spending time in the same place (e.g. for work or study) is not associated with closeness of friendships. Choosing to spend more time together socially is.

• It matters what you talk about. In relationships that become closer, people spend time catching up and joking around – as well as talking about more deep and meaningful things. Time spent in small talk (e.g. about the weather) is negatively correlated with increasing friendship closeness.

The number of hours involved in making a friend is large. 100 hours spent together over 3 months might not sound much over that long a time period, but it is an average of about 8 hours a week!

This sounds to me still quite a high “social intensity” (average hours per week). Where social intensity is lower, I think it is reasonable that the total number hours taken for a friendship to form is likely to be higher. For what I want to talk about in the rest of the post this is the case, so I am going to take a round 50 for the number of hours to form a casual friend, and a round 100 for the number of hours to form a friend.

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Putting these numbers to use

Here’s why I find having some numbers on this subject interesting: it gives a way to assess an activity and calculate a rough estimate of how long it might take to make a friend through it.

So, for example, pre-Covid I went to a social drawing evening once a month. Some of the same people were there each time – say 10 out of every 12 evenings – and I spent 2-3 hours there a time. This gives a total of about 10 x 2.5 = 25 hours per year spent with some of the members of the group. This is about half of the time needed to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend – the process might be underway, but isn’t complete. After going to the group for about a year, I think this would be a fair description of the “status” of my relationship to those people I know only through this group and with whom I get on reasonably well. Making casual friends from this activity might take about 2 years in total.

This approach obviously isn’t in any way precise, but only a kind of ball-park estimate. However, I think it’s a useful way of analysing social situations and thinking through how friendships might develop.

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Musing about how this could be used to think about church

Those who follow my blog will know that I often write about church culture and Christianity. Here are a couple of suggestions about how the kind of estimates described above might come in useful.

How long does it to make a friend at church?

I’ve often heard talks that mention making church a welcoming place for new people. And rightly so! But I can’t remember anyone ever making an estimate of how long it takes to make a friend within a welcoming church. This might be quite a useful thing to know.

When it comes to friendship formation, the church meetings/services I’m used to occupy a kind of intermediate category, somewhere between working/studying and a fully social occasion: they are something adults choose to go to, but a meeting mostly involves interacting with either those leading the service (e.g. by listening to a talk/sermon) or God (e.g. through prayer), rather than directly interacting with the people you’re sat next to. So attending church with someone may be a positive influence on friendship formation, but few people will make friends through going to services alone.

What about after a meeting/service? Most churches have some kind of social coffee time. In my experience of UK churches, coffee time tends to be pretty similar from church to church, typically taking about 30-45 minutes. I find I usually talk to a few different groups of people each week, and it is rare that I talk to the same person several weeks in a row. And generally I tend to attend church 2 or 3 Sundays out of 4. So, taking some ballpark figures, I might speak to someone I naturally get on well with once (maybe twice) a month after a service, for about 15 minutes at a time. Over a year, this adds up to around 3-6 hours time spent together – much less than the average 40-60 hours needed to make an acquaintance into a casual friend. So, even where a church is welcoming and people are friendly, a bit of basic maths shows that it is quite difficult to make a new friend through Sunday mornings alone. (Even if one were to speak to the same person for half an hour every week, a realistic estimate is that it might take a couple of years to develop a casual friendship.)

Most churches encourage people to go to a mid-week home group of some kind as well as coming to church on a Sunday morning. Home groups tend to involve the same people week-to-week, happen once a week for a couple of hours, and are semi-social occasions (a mixture of Bible study & prayer, and eating, drinking & catching up). How good are they for forming friendships? Well, assuming one attends for fifty weeks of the year, after one year this adds up to about 100 hours spent together (50 weeks x 2 hours per week). Assuming that a group has someone you hit it off with, six months of a mid-week group may be enough to make a casual friend, and a year enough to make a friend.

When I think about the house groups I’ve gone to and the people I know only through them, I think these estimates are not unreasonable. However, there is considerable variation between mid-week groups in group composition, style and how often they meet. Also, their nature means that some people often find them much easier to socially navigate than others. And shift-based employment or parenting needs can lower the frequency with which it is possible to attend. So while some people may form friendships in less than a year, for others it might take longer.

What do I make of this?

Summing up, according to this analysis, through Sunday mornings and mid-week groups alone it might be possible to make a casual friend in less than a year, and possibly even a friend – though this could also take considerably longer. To make a close friend in a single year would require spending considerably longer together outside of these activities, either socially or through something done together like volunteering.

I think this is interesting. To me it’s a surprisingly long time. Even in a friendly church, attending every Sunday and meeting with the same home group every week, after a year one might only have made a few casual friends – and making friends and good friends could easily take a couple of years.

Here are five thoughts / observations / consequences that occur to me –

• A couple of years is a long time to go without Christian friends nearby! For some groups of people, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, this problem can be exacerbated by the need to change location multiple times for study and employment. I’ve lived in four different places as an adult myself (I’m mid-thirties now), and because of the distances involved I’ve had to make new local Christian friends in each place – taking several years each time.

• This is bound to have implications for things like mental health and spiritual formation. These implications need not all be negative. For example, someone who’s used to living as a Christian without friends locally might develop a faith that’s resilient and has a positive kind of independence (even when other people aren’t available, God really is still with you!) There may also be implications for how a church utilises the gifts and talents of the church body – without getting to know someone fairly well, it can be hard to get a realistic idea of both what they can do (strengths) and what their limitations are.

• While I have focused more on making friends within church in this post, I think the same kind of rationale can be used to think about making friends outside of church. If making a friend in one year takes over hundred hours, this equates to spending an average of something like 2 hours a week together socially. This is actually quite a lot – an evening each week. For people who have long work days and commutes, and already have families, regularly making new friends might be quite difficult – let alone close friends.

• The length of time it takes to make a friend, whether in church or without, is largely limited by how long people have available to spend together. Lots of things affect this, not least the structure of our society. Structural factors are things like it is common to work in a different town to where you live. There is nothing right or wrong with these things per se, but they have knock-on effects. So, for example, one consequence of the need to commute is that it places a limit on how much time is available for social activities, which affects how quickly friendships can form, which in turn can affect things like mental health. One thing that might come out of the current crisis is an assessment of the viability of an increase in remote working: could this help free up time spent commuting so that people can spend more time together socially?

• The time it takes to make friends may have implications for church outreach. Church outreach is currently often based on an invitational model – invite people you know to come along! But if the timescale for making friends is too large, this kind of outreach might run into the problem that few people actually have someone new to invite.

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What do you reckon? Is this way of analysing social situations useful? Can you think of any other consequences that the lengths of time it takes to make different types of friends might have? Do you know of any other simple estimates that can be used to analyse another aspect of society or church life? If so, do leave a comment, I’d be interested to hear about them.

Until the next post!