Making friends gets harder after school because the settings that used to produce friendships automatically — classrooms, dorms, recess — disappear. Research on how long friendship actually takes to form, combined with national survey data on who people name as close friends, points to specific, repeatable steps adults can take instead of waiting for connection to happen on its own.
How Long It Actually Takes to Become Friends
Communication researcher Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas tracked two groups to measure how friendship forms over time: 112 first-year college students surveyed every three weeks during their first nine weeks on campus, and 355 adults who had recently moved to a new city, according to a summary published by Greater Good Magazine at the University of California, Berkeley. Participants reported how many hours they spent with a given person, what they did together, and how close they felt.
The study found adults needed far more cumulative hours than students to reach the same level of closeness with another person, likely because students see the same people daily in shared living and class spaces, while adults have to schedule contact deliberately.
Total hours of shared time linked to each friendship stage| Stage reached | College students | Adults who had relocated |
|---|
| Acquaintance → casual friend | 43 hours | 94 hours |
|---|
| Casual friend → friend | 57 hours | 164 hours |
|---|
| Friend → close/best friend | 119 hours | 219 hours |
|---|
Hall's research also found that not all time together counts equally. Time spent on meaningful conversation, joking around, relaxing together, or activities like watching a movie or playing video games moved adults toward friendship. Small talk about the weather, pets, or TV shows, along with time spent together only because of work or school obligations, did little to build closeness, per the Greater Good summary.
Why Fewer Adults Have Close Friends Today
The Survey Center on American Life, a research initiative of the American Enterprise Institute, published a 2021 survey showing a long-term decline in close friendships. Forty-nine percent of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends, up from 27 percent in 1990, while 12 percent said they had no close friends at all, compared with 3 percent in 1990. Fifty-nine percent said they had a best friend, down from 75 percent in 1990.
The same survey found that 48 percent of women said they had shared personal feelings with a friend in the past week, compared with 30 percent of men.
The same survey asked people where they met the friends they currently have. Work was the most common setting, cited by 54 percent of respondents (through their own job or a spouse's), followed by school (47 percent), an existing friend's network (40 percent), the neighborhood (35 percent), a religious organization (21 percent), a club or other organization (19 percent), a child's school (10 percent), and online (8 percent).
Steps to Meet New People as an Adult
- Join an activity that repeats on a schedule — a sports league, class, volunteer group, or club — rather than a one-off event, since repeated exposure to the same people is what allows the hundreds of hours tracked in Hall's research to accumulate.
- Make the first move. A research synthesis published by SimplyPsychology notes that people consistently underestimate how positively others respond to a social invitation, which discourages the initiation that friendship formation depends on.
- Favor activities that involve real conversation, attention, or shared relaxation over side-by-side obligations like a work meeting, since Hall's data found the former builds closeness and the latter largely does not.
- Share something personal and let the other person reciprocate. SimplyPsychology's summary of friendship research describes gradually escalating self-disclosure as a documented way to accelerate bonding between near-strangers.
- Put contact on the calendar instead of waiting for it to happen naturally, since adult schedules rarely produce the spontaneous repeated contact that school environments once did.
Keeping a Friendship Going Once It Starts
The Survey Center on American Life survey also measured how people stay in touch: within the prior 24 hours, 54 percent of respondents had texted a friend, 30 percent had called one, and 16 percent had emailed one. Younger adults leaned more on texting (61 percent) while older adults used email more (29 percent of seniors versus 10 percent of young adults).
Age also affects how often new friendships form at all: 56 percent of young adults said they had made a new friend in the past 12 months, compared with 41 percent of seniors in the same survey. Researchers summarized by SimplyPsychology point to one consistent theme across studies: a small number of close, emotionally reciprocal friendships tend to matter more for wellbeing than a large but shallow social network, so maintaining the relationships that already show mutual effort can matter more than constantly seeking new ones.
Questions
- How many hours does it take to make a close friend as an adult?
- Jeffrey Hall's research, summarized by Greater Good Magazine (UC Berkeley), found adults who had recently moved needed about 94 total hours together to become casual friends, 164 hours to become friends, and 219 hours to become close or best friends.
- Why is it harder to make friends as an adult than it was at school?
- College students in the same study reached each friendship stage with far fewer hours (43, 57, and 119) than adults, likely because daily shared spaces like classes and dorms create repeated contact automatically, while adults must schedule it themselves, according to the Greater Good summary.
- Where do most adults meet their close friends?
- According to the Survey Center on American Life's 2021 survey, 54 percent of Americans met a current close friend through work, 47 percent through school, and smaller shares through their neighborhood, religious organizations, clubs, or online.
- How many close friends does the average American have today?
- The same 2021 survey found 49 percent of Americans had three or fewer close friends and 12 percent had none, compared with 27 percent and 3 percent respectively in 1990.
- Does texting count as maintaining a friendship?
- Survey data shows texting is the most common way adults stay in touch with friends day to day (54 percent had texted a friend in the prior 24 hours), though researchers note that the quality of contact, not just its frequency, is linked to wellbeing.
This piece was prepared with artificial intelligence and passed an automated source check before publication. If you see an error, ask for a correction. Request a correction or reply · How we make this
