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200 hours makes a close friend
Jeffrey Hall, a researcher at the University of Kansas, tracked relocated adults and college students over time to measure how much contact each stage of friendship takes. The work appeared in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Roughly 50 hours moves two people from acquaintances to casual friends, and about 90 hours moves them to friends. Over 200 hours of intentional time together builds a close friendship.
Those numbers are more doable than they sound. Seeing someone for an hour a week reaches 50 hours within a year. Close-friend status arrives after about four years of consistent contact, and that figure describes very deep intimacy. Some people meet someone and feel deeply close to them within six months.
Plenty of people act as though the 200 hours were already logged by the second time they meet someone. Real closeness takes far longer than that, which is why a friendship can look stalled when it is simply early.
How does steady contact build closeness?
Psychologists Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor described the process in their social penetration theory. They compared a personality to an onion, with outer layers of basic facts and inner layers of values, fears, and private feelings. Relationships deepen as two people trade disclosures that move gradually from the outer layers toward the core. The theory appeared in their 1973 book Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships.
Why does Dunbar say close friends are so few?
Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, describes social life as a set of nested circles of roughly 5, 15, 50, and 150 people. The innermost circle holds the closest relationships, and each larger circle gets less time and emotional attention. Time and mental effort are limited, so the inner circle stays small. Dunbar estimates that about 40 percent of a person's social time goes to the innermost five people.
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