Making friends as an adult is mostly a matter of turning up again

One number explains most of what goes wrong when adults try to make friends, and it has nothing to do with apps, clubs or evening classes. It is roughly fifty.

In a study published in 2018, the communication researcher Jeffrey Hall asked adults who had recently moved to a new city, and students in their first term at university, how much time they had spent with the people they had met and how close those people now felt. His estimate was that it takes somewhere around 50 hours together to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, around 90 to become a friend, and more than 200 before someone is a close friend. Hours spent working side by side counted for less than hours people chose to spend in each other’s company.

Fifty hours is a lot. At one two-hour lunch a month, it takes the better part of two years. Ninety takes nearly four.

That is why friendship at school and university felt as if it happened by itself. The hours were built into the timetable: the same corridor, the same kitchen, the same bus. Adult life removes the timetable and leaves you to supply the hours yourself, from a week that is usually already spoken for. Most advice on how to make friends as an adult is about where to meet people. Meeting people is rarely the difficulty. The difficulty is the second meeting, and the fifth, and the fifteenth.

Choose something that repeats

The most useful question to ask of any plan is whether the same people will be there next week. A talk, a party or a friend’s birthday drinks are pleasant ways to meet someone and poor ways to get to know them, because nothing guarantees you will see them again.

A weekly class does the hardest part for you. So do a choir, a running club, a Sunday league, a volunteering rota, a book group, or the same table at the same café on the same morning. They supply the hours without anyone having to ask for them.

Choose for repetition first and interest second. A reasonably interesting thing that meets every Thursday will do more for you than a fascinating thing that meets twice a year. Then keep going for longer than feels natural. The first few sessions are when everyone is a stranger; the people who stop coming in week three never discover that week six was when it became easy.

You are probably liked more than you think

Here the research is unusually encouraging. In a set of studies published in 2018, Erica Boothby and colleagues had strangers talk, then asked each person how much they liked their partner and how much they thought their partner liked them. People consistently underestimated how much the other person had liked them and enjoyed their company. The researchers called this the liking gap. They found it between strangers in a laboratory, between students getting to know the people they lived with over several months, and between adults meeting at a workshop. Part of the reason, they found, is that people judge their own side of a conversation far more harshly than the other person does.

The liking gap is what quietly cancels the second meeting. You leave a conversation replaying the one sentence that came out wrong, decide you seemed strange, and do not follow up. The other person, meanwhile, thought it went well and is waiting for you to suggest something.

A workable rule: if a conversation felt pleasant to you, assume it very probably felt pleasant to them.

Make the second invitation specific

Adult friendship tends to stall at “we should get a coffee some time”, which both people say and neither acts on. “Some time” is not a plan. It is a polite way of ending a conversation. A specific invitation is easier to accept and harder to lose:

• “I’m going to the late opening at the gallery on Thursday. Do you want to come?”
• “Same time next week? I’ll save you a seat.”
• “I’m walking the long way round the park on Saturday morning, if you fancy it.”

Each of these is something you were doing anyway. An invitation to an existing plan asks less of the other person than a plan invented for their benefit, and it takes the sting out of a refusal, because you were going regardless.

Expect some refusals. Adults decline for reasons that have nothing to do with you: childcare, shifts, an ill parent, a week that has simply been too much. A no is not a rejection; it is information about their Thursday. It becomes information about the friendship only after two or three with no suggestion of another day.

The small conversations count

It is easy to treat the man at the dry cleaner’s, the neighbour with the dog and the colleague from another floor as not really counting. They count. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn found that people felt happier, and had a greater sense of belonging, on days when they had more interactions than usual with acquaintances, the people researchers call weak ties, and not only with close friends and family.

Those small exchanges are worth having for themselves, and they are also where a good many friendships start. The difference between an acquaintance and a friend is often a few dozen hours nobody planned. So say the extra sentence. Ask the name you have been too embarrassed to ask for months. Suggest walking to the station together.

Let it be uneven for a while

New friendships are rarely symmetrical at the start. One person suggests more; one person usually messages first. Keeping score in the early months ends more friendships than rudeness does. If you are the one doing most of the organising for a while, it is usually because you happened to want it first, not because the other person does not care.

It evens out, or it does not, and if after a long time it plainly never does, that is worth noticing. Friendships can also end without a fight, and a friendship that asks all of the effort from one side is often one of them.

The hours matter, but so does what fills them. Friendships deepen when someone risks saying something true, that the job is harder than they admit or that Sundays have become lonely, and the other person meets it. You do not have to do that in the second week. At some point, though, one of you has to go first.

If it is taking longer than you hoped

Plenty of adults find this harder than they expected, and it is more common than it looks from the outside. A move, a break-up, a new baby, a new job or the slow drift of old friends into different lives can each leave someone with fewer people than they had. None of it is a verdict on whether you are likeable.

That is the reassuring thing about Hall’s numbers. They do not measure charm. A shy person and a magnetic one both need their fifty hours; the magnetic one is simply invited to spend them more often. If you are not the one who gets invited, you can be the one who does the inviting. Pick the thing that repeats, go back, and make the specific suggestion.

Sources

• Hall JA. How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019 (published online 2018).
• Boothby EJ, Cooney G, Sandstrom GM, Clark MS. The liking gap in conversations: do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 2018.
• Sandstrom GM, Dunn EW. Social interactions and well-being: the surprising power of weak ties. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014.