You can know an insane number of people and be close to hardly any of them. People can have hundreds of followers, coworkers you’d grab a drink with, and a group you meet up with for lunch sometimes, and still struggle to name five who really know what’s going on in your life. Sadly, that’s normal.
Sociologist Robin Dunbar, whose work led to the idea of Dunbar’s number, found that people can maintain around 150 relationships at a time. The innermost circle is much smaller, usually around five people. A separate 2018 study from University of Kansas researcher Jeffrey Hall found that becoming close friends can take around 200 hours of spending time together.
Two hundred hours is a lot of time to spend with someone before you even consider them a close friend. That’s the equivalent of spending a little over 8 days straight with them.
It Takes About 200 Hours to Make a Close Friend
Aristotle thought about friendship long before anyone had hundreds of contacts in their phone. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he described three types: friendships based on usefulness, pleasure, and character.
The first is basically transactional. You like each other because you help each other in some way. The second is about enjoying someone’s company. The third is the one Aristotle valued most: friendship built around who the other person actually is at their core.
That type asks more from both people. A close friend isn’t only the person who listens while you complain for an hour and tells you you’re right. They’re also the person who tells you, very gently or maybe not very gently, that you’re being an idiot.
Burton writes that “a real friend does not simply accept us as we are but recognizes our potential and helps us become what we could be.”
Honesty like that requires trust, and lots of it. You have to know someone so well that when you hear something uncomfortable from them, you don’t immediately assume the friendship is over.
Adult relationships can make it harder to find time for those friendships, too. Romantic partners now carry enormous expectations. They’re supposed to be your partner and your best friend, the person you vent to, hang out with, travel with, and talk to about basically everything. Friendships can end up getting whatever time is left.
The people who know you best are usually the ones who’ve seen enough of your life to know when you’re full of sh*t.
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