Value your friendships? This is how many hours it takes to make a best friend

23 April 2018

By Fashion Quarterly

Time’s not only money…

Just like investing your hard-earned cash, choosing to invest time into friendships is likely to bring some sort of return. Of course, naturally, the risk doesn’t always pay off but if you’ve done your research, found a sure investment or made friendships that are good for everyone involved, then chances are you’ll coming out winning.

And now there’s research to back it up. A study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships has revealed that it takes a fair amount of time and effort to reach any level of friendship status, let alone best friend status.

According to said study, you’re dreaming if you think close friendships happen without face time, with the research indicating that it takes roughly 200 hours or 8 and 1/3 days interaction to form the very close relationship we define as a best friend. Casual friendships take around 50 hours of interaction to form while a standard friendship takes roughly 90 hours.

The results came to light via a University of Kansas study which conducted two surveys analysing friendship development in two different settings. The first looked at the time spent together and the personal closeness across a range of 350 adults moving to a new town. The second looked at the relationship developments between 100 first year university students.

Quality over quantity, of course, is still key, with the study’s manager Jeffrey Hall revealing that “when you spend time joking around, having meaningful conversations, catching up with one another, all these types of communication episodes contribute to speedier friendship development.”

Yes, we understand that takes a bit more effort than simply clicking the ‘add friend’ button on Facebook. But in reality, if you enjoy hanging out, it won’t feel like hard work anyway!