How to make friends as an adult: it takes about 50 hours, and here is how to find them
Making friends after school and university feels harder because it is: the time no longer comes built in. A University of Kansas study measured how much of it a friendship needs.
The hours behind a friendship
Communication professor Jeffrey Hall surveyed 355 adults who had moved to a new city in the previous six months, then followed 112 first-year university students through their first weeks. His estimates, published in 2018 in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships:
Approximate hours spent together. "Close friend": more than 200 hours. Source: Hall (2018), University of Kansas.
The kind of time matters. Hanging out, talking and joking count; hours spent working side by side "just don't count as much", in Hall's words.
What that means for your calendar
| Time together per week | Casual friend (~50 h) | Friend (~90 h) | Close friend (200+ h) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | about 1 year | about 1 year 9 months | about 4 years |
| 3 hours | about 4 months | about 7 months | about 15 months |
| 5 hours | about 10 weeks | about 4 months | about 9 months |
Simple arithmetic on Hall's estimates; real friendships do not grow at a constant rate.
Why it feels harder than it used to
The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation found that, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of US adults reported measurable levels of loneliness. It also points to slow structural changes: single-person households have roughly doubled as a share of households since 1960, and fewer than half of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque in 2020, down from 70% in 1999.
How to get to 50 hours
- Choose things that repeat. A weekly class, a running club, a choir or a volunteering shift supplies the hours automatically – the same faces, week after week.
- Turn "we should get coffee" into a date. Suggest a day and a place. Vague plans rarely happen.
- Go second, and third. One meeting is not a friendship; Hall's numbers mean the second and tenth invitations matter more than the first.
- Keep old friendships fed. An existing friend has already banked the hours. A message or a call keeps them.
