These are the magic numbers
Hey Bright Builders-
I wrote a week ago about my desire to build community this year (and the crazy-negative health effects of not having ENOUGH community.)
Something in that post resonated with you guys because, man, I received a TON of emails.
I heard from a lot of people now transitioning back to the office (voluntarily) because, while they liked working in their pajamas, they missed the connections.
One person had begun hosting dinner parties comprised entirely of people he’d only met on the bus.
Another joined a bowling league because she calculated that it was the least high-contact sport that offered the most time for “maximum chit-chat” with other large groups of people.
A college student told me that this past semester, he’d begun asking for the names of every person he met in his dormitory elevator and handing out “penalty chocolate bars” to every person whose name he couldn’t remember. In other elevators in other buildings, all across campus, people started asking him if he was the chocolate bar guy and demanding he remember their name.
Every chocolate bar he gave out was a chance to learn a new name.
And, incidentally, this was how he met his girlfriend.
Smart.
And, yet hard.
A lot of people emailed me to remind me that it was hard to make connections if you were introverted.
And I get it.
Creating connections requires a surprising amount of time.
And, in fact, there’s some surprising research that backs this up from Jeffrey Hall, who wrote about this in his article, entitled…you guessed it…"How many hours does it take to make a friend?"
This study puts actual numbers to how much time it takes to move from acquaintance to casual friend, all the way to best friend territory.
So what's the magic number of hours to go from, “Hey, nice to meet you to let's grab coffee?”
Well, you might be surprised.
It takes roughly 43 to 94 hours to transition from just knowing someone to being casual friends! And that finding holds true for both adults and college students. In fact, that's like a full workweek of hanging out. It highlights how much effort goes into forming those initial bonds, even at a casual level.
And as you move into deeper levels of friendship, the time investment increases. To go from casual friend to just plain friend the research says around 80 to 100 hours. But to reach that inner circle of good friends or best friends, you're looking at a whopping 119 to 219 hours.
That's a lot of Netflix binging or late-night chats or rides to the airport.
It really does make you appreciate the time and effort that goes into building those close-knit friendships, AND it definitely challenges the notion that strong bonds just appear overnight.
They don’t.
Building genuine connections requires a real investment of time.
You might wonder how researchers actually measured any of this.
Did they just ask people to guesstimate their hangout hours?
Nope.
They actually used a clever, two-pronged approach to get a more accurate picture.
First, they surveyed adults who had recently moved to a new city, asking them about someone new they'd met since relocating. (Makes sense because moving is like a friendship reset button, forcing you to branch out and build new connections.) Then, researchers asked these participants to estimate how many hours they'd spent with this new person and how they'd categorize their relationship: Acquaintance, casual friend, friend, or good best friend.
They also conducted a longitudinal study with first-year college students. They followed these students for nine weeks, asking them about two new people they'd met and tracking how much time they'd spent together and how those relationships evolved over those weeks. They could see those friendships blossoming or wilting in real-time.
The results?
Those students who ended up becoming good or best friends were practically doubling their time investment at each point the researchers checked in.
And it's not just about clocking in hours together.
The types of conversations we have with friends is crucial.
Researchers emphasized something called “striving communication” as opposed to surface-level chit-chat. Think about those times when you really connect with a friend—sharing personal experiences. Having those heart-to-hearts. Joking around, really listening to each other.
Those are striving communications. They build friendships.
An increase in small talk, on the other hand, actually predicted a decrease in closeness between friends. So, all those seemingly harmless chats about nothing might be hurting our friendships in the long run.
Honestly, that last data point made me vaguely anxious as I thought about the quality of my conversations sometimes.
But do I tell you all of this to make you anxious?
Nah.
I tell you this just to underscore that, yeah, we need community, and building the individual friendships that create that community takes a lot of intentionality and time, and a little daring (I’m looking at you, chocolate bar dude!)
So don't beat yourself up if friendship-building is slow-going.
It’s not a race.
It’s a series of meaningful, sometimes hard-won, conversations that add up to something healthy.
And helpful.
Peace,
PS.
Speaking of friends….
Among the many cool people I’ve added to my friendship bucket this year is Isaac French. Before we met in person, we chatted on X for months, and I’d been reading his newsletter weekly. He eventually came out to see one of my properties.
We hit it off.
The man is impossibly young AND impossibly talented. He writes regularly about experiential hospitality, showing, in a no-secrets-kept, clear-eyed way, how to create destination properties for travelers.
Check him out.
He’s easy to read and always insightful. And the eye-candy pictures of cool places to visit don’t hurt :-) This article is one of my favorites!
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