How many hours does it take to make a friend?

Making friends as an adult feels endless, and that's not just an impression. In 2019, communication researcher Jeffrey Hall (University of Kansas) published a study with a literal title: “How many hours does it take to make a friend?”. It provides orders of magnitude, and above all a nuance that almost everyone misses, even though it's the most useful part of the result.

What the study measured

Hall ran two complementary studies. The first surveyed 355 adults who had recently moved to a new city: they estimated the time spent with someone met there, and where the relationship stood. The second prospectively followed 112 first-year students for nine weeks, about two people met at the start of term.

The thresholds vary by population: among students, roughly 43 shared hours to go from acquaintance to casual friend, 57 hours to become a “friend”, 119 hours for a close friend. Among relocated adults, the thresholds climb: about 94, 164 and 219 hours. The university sums it up in ranges: 40 to 60 hours for a casual friend, 80 to 100 for a friend, more than 200 for a close friend.

The real finding: not all hours are equal

The most interesting part of the study isn't the hour counter: it's what makes it tick. Hall also measured the type of time spent together and the type of conversation. Two results stand out.

• Shared leisure hours (hanging out, joking around, playing, eating together) move the relationship forward. Hours spent working side by side count far less.
• Meaningful conversations (catching up, joking, sharing personal things) predict closeness. Small talk, on the other hand, was associated with a decline in closeness toward the end of the study.

In other words: hundreds of hours of hallways, meetings and “how's it going?” do not manufacture a friend. That's consistent with the rest of the literature: in Aron's “36 questions” experiment, 45 minutes of structured, progressively personal exchange created more felt closeness than 45 minutes of chit-chat.

Why we no longer get those hours

The adult problem isn't motivation, it's structure. School and university provided, for free, the three ingredients research identified long ago: repeated physical proximity (as early as 1950, the MIT housing study showed that the distance between two doors predicted friendship better than personality), frequent unplanned crossings, and shared leisure time. Work life provides hours, but mostly the wrong kind.

Add the mere exposure effect, documented since 1968: seeing the same faces again makes them, on average, more likable. Familiarity isn't friendship, but it lowers its cost of entry. Recurring formats (same place, same rhythm, same people) work in your favor.

What this changes for an event or a community

If you organize gatherings (a community, a club, company events), Hall's study translates into three concrete decisions.

• Create recurrence. A one-off evening crosses no threshold; a monthly ritual with a regular core accumulates the hours that count.
• Maximize the density of each hour. One hour of structured personal conversation is worth more than three hours of silent side-by-side activity. That's the lever chance never pulls on its own.
• Help the same people cross paths again. Bonds are built through repetition: if every event restarts from zero with strangers, the hour counter never adds up.

This is exactly the logic of the 2E model that structures affina: a relationship advances when shared emotional experiences and personal expressions accumulate. Hours are only the container; those two ingredients are the content. An hour that carries both moves the relationship forward; an hour that carries neither doesn't count, which is precisely what Hall's study observed.