Time to make friends. It is a great honor to be called someone’s best friend. You just have to see how the characters in comedies like Friends and How I Met Your Mother argue about which of the gangsters is their best friend. But the criteria for someone to fit into the role of «BFF» are difficult to define. However, a researcher at the University of Kansas believes he has cracked the code.
In a new article published in the March on Social and Personal Relations magazine, Communication Studies professor Jeffrey Hall defined how long it takes to make a friend and how long it takes for people to go through the different stages of friendship. In his previous research, he discovered that a person’s brain is capable of handling approximately 150 friends at a time.
Hall and her colleague developed an online tool to assess how close people were to their friends. In the first part of the study, they analyzed 355 survey responses from adults who had moved in the past six months and were looking for new friends. They were asked to think of someone they had known since they moved in and how their friendship had developed. They had to disclose how close they were and how many hours they spent together; as well as where they would rate the relationship in one of the four categories: acquaintances, occasional friends, friends or close friends.
Thus, researchers could estimate the number of hours that people can level up at different stages of friendship.
Time to make friends
In the second part, the 112 KU freshmen were asked about two people they had known since they started school two weeks earlier. The researchers followed up after four and seven weeks to see what friendship achievements had been unlocked. The results show that it takes approximately 40 to 60 hours to form an informal friendship; 80-100 hours for you to become a friend; and about 200 hours to become «good friends».
«We have to dedicate that time,» Hall said in a statement. «You can’t snap your fingers and make a friend. Maintaining close relationships is the most important job we do in our lives; most people on their deathbeds agree.» Young people find it particularly easy to make really good friends, Hall said. In other words, they fall in love with tough people. «When people transition between stages, they double or triple the amount of time they spend with that other person in three weeks,» he said. «I found freshmen who spent a third of all waking hours in a month with a good friend.»
You can’t force someone to be friends with you and of course no relationship can boil down to numbers alone. But if you want to be someone’s best friend, the best way to do this is to spend more time with them. «Make it a priority to spend time with potential friends,» said Hall. «If you are interested in a friendship, change the context. If you work together, you go to lunch or have a drink. These things indicate to people that you are interested in being friends with them.»