Researchers who studied how friendships form put a number on it. It takes about 50 hours together to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend. About 90 hours makes a friend. A close friend takes more than 200.
That changes the question. "I don't even know how to make friends anymore" sounds like a missing talent. The numbers say it is a missing supply of hours.
Three more findings follow, and each one is stranger than the last. By the end, the voice that says "nobody wants to hear from me" should sound a lot less sure of itself.
Close friendship is built from hours, not charm
Hall (2018) asked people who had recently moved to estimate their time with a new acquaintance. He then followed first-year students over nine weeks. In both groups, more hours together went with a closer friendship. Leisure activities predicted closeness in the first study, and everyday talk in the second.
The 50, 90 and 200 hour figures are Hall's own estimates, as reported by his university. They come from two studies of a few hundred people in all, so read them as a rough scale. The direction is still clear. Closeness works like a savings account, and every shared hour is a deposit.
School made the deposits for you. Same classroom, same corridor, same lunch break, day after day. Adult life closed the account and left you to fund it on purpose.
Alfred Adler, the psychologist behind Individual Psychology, counted friendship as one of three tasks every life has to face, next to work and love. He also held that the ability to care about other people, which his followers call social interest, has to be developed and trained. If a skill can be trained, then "I don't know how" describes how much practice you have had lately. It says nothing about your character.
So the next time you think "I'm just bad at this", ask how many hours you have actually put in with that person.
Your circle shrinks for almost everyone
Losing friends is not a sign that something is wrong with you.
A meta-analysis of 277 studies by Wrzus and colleagues (2013) found that friendship networks get smaller throughout adulthood. Life events such as starting a job or becoming a parent shift networks in similar ways. Networks had also shrunk over the 35 years of data they covered.
Roberts and Dunbar (2015) tracked whole personal networks across 18 months of a major life transition. Family ties and friendships behaved very differently. Friendships faded, and extra effort softened the decline. For women in their sample, talking more often protected the friendship. For men, doing more activities together did.
A friendship is more like a houseplant than a piece of furniture. Furniture stays put whether you look at it or not. A plant needs water on a schedule, and it does not hold it against you when you forget.
So the quiet drift away from someone you liked is mostly a watering problem. It is not a verdict on either of you.
The person you message is glad you did
Many of us stop reaching out because we count. We always send the message, suggest the plan, remember the birthday. Underneath the counting sits a belief that reaching out makes us a bother.
Liu, Rim, Min and Min (2023) ran a series of preregistered experiments and found that people robustly underestimate how much others appreciate being reached out to. The gap grew when the contact was more surprising, including between people who were not close. The person who hears from you is often pleased, and a little startled that you thought of them.
It goes further. Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark (2018) named something they called the liking gap. After conversations, people systematically underestimated how much their partner liked them and enjoyed their company. It showed up with strangers in a lab, with dorm mates, and with people at a workshop. It lasted for months as dorm mates got to know each other.
Two people can leave the same conversation, each quietly sure the other found them dull. Both are probably wrong, and neither can see the other's side of the scale.
So when you replay a chat and decide you talked too much or too little, remember that the other person is probably replaying it too, and being kinder to you than you are to yourself.
Even strangers on a train want to talk
The last finding is the strangest, because it involves people with no reason to like you at all.
Epley and Schroeder (2014) told commuters on trains and buses to talk to a stranger, stay silent, or commute as normal. Those who connected reported a more positive experience, and no less productive a commute. Other commuters, asked to predict, expected the opposite. Part of the reason was underestimating how interested other people are in connecting. Nobody in those studies had to be fascinating. They only had to start talking.
Put the findings together and a pattern shows up. The belief that stops you from reaching out, or from speaking, is a forecast. Forecasts can be checked, and these keep coming in too gloomy, like a weather app that predicts rain on days that turn out sunny.
So the next "I have nothing to say" is a weather report, not the weather.
What to try
1. Pick a place you can return to, not an event you attend once. Hall's work says hours matter. A weekly class, a running club, a volunteer shift or a regular board game night puts the same faces in front of you again and again, which is what friendship needs. A one-off mixer gives you ten first meetings and no second.
2. Choose something with a shared activity. Leisure activities predicted closeness in Hall's first study, and Roberts and Dunbar found that activities protected men's friendships in particular. Doing something side by side takes pressure off the talking, which helps if "nothing to say" is your problem.
3. Run the experiment on your own forecast. Next time you feel sure you have nothing to say, ask one real question and watch how the other person reacts. Before you go, write down your guess about how it will land. The liking gap research suggests you will usually be pleasantly wrong, and one real data point beats a hundred imagined ones.
4. Reach out on purpose, and keep it small. Send a two line message, such as "Saw this and thought of you." Skip the agenda and the apology for the gap. The Liu research suggests the other person will value it more than you expect. You are making the contribution that starts everything else, which is close to what Adler's followers mean by social interest.
5. If you are tired of being the only one reaching out, test it before you decide. Reach out three times to a person you like, a few weeks apart, and see what you get back. Some people are slow, busy or bad at starting but warm when you do. Others never meet you halfway, and that tells you where to spend your hours. Do not quit on a guess. Quit on a result.
6. Put the upkeep in the calendar. Roberts and Dunbar's finding is a reminder that friends you already have need scheduled time. Set a recurring walk, call or dinner with someone you would hate to lose. A calendar is something you control, even when the new job or the new baby is not.
Start with the smallest one today. Think of one person who made you feel easy in your own skin, someone you drifted from by accident rather than by argument. Send them two lines this evening.
How far to trust all this
The hours figures are estimates from two studies, not a law, and friendships differ a lot in how fast they grow. The reaching-out and liking gap studies show what people tend to do on average, not what a particular person will feel on a particular day. Some people really are slow to reply, and some friendships do run out. That is why the advice above is to test, not to assume.
If loneliness has sat on you for months, or comes with low mood or anxiety that does not lift, talking to a doctor or a qualified therapist is worth doing alongside all of this.
You are not someone who forgot how to do friendship. You are someone with an empty account and a gloomy forecaster in your head, and both can change one small deposit at a time.
In short
- Researchers estimate about 50 hours to make a casual friend, about 90 for a friend and over 200 for a close one.
- Adult circles shrink for almost everyone, and friendships fade without upkeep.
- People are often glad to be contacted, and they like you more than you think after a conversation.
- Even strangers on a commute enjoyed talking more than they expected to.
- Choose a place you can return to, send a small message, and let a real result replace your guess.
Sources
- Adler, A. (1931). What Life Could Mean to You. Little, Brown.
- Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (Eds.). (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. Basic Books.
- Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., and Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742 to 1756. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
- Epley, N., and Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980 to 1999. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037323
- Hall, J. A. (2018). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278 to 1296. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225. The 50, 90 and 200 hour estimates are as reported in the University of Kansas news release of 6 March 2018: news.ku.edu.
- Liu, P. J., Rim, S., Min, L., and Min, K. E. (2023). The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(4), 754 to 771. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000402
- Roberts, S. B. G., and Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). Managing relationship decay: Network, gender, and contextual effects. Human Nature, 26(4), 426 to 450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-015-9242-7
- Wrzus, C., Hänel, M., Wagner, J., and Neyer, F. J. (2013). Social network changes and life events across the life span: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 53 to 80. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028601