After tracking how people formed new friendships, a researcher estimated the hours it quietly takes — about 50 to feel like casual friends, but more than 200 before someone becomes a close one

After tracking how people formed new friendships, a researcher estimated the hours it quietly takes — about 50 to feel like casual friends, but more than 200 before someone becomes a close one

More than 200 hours of hanging out, talking, and doing ordinary things together before someone starts to look less like a regular friend and more like a close one. That figure stopped me when I first came across it — not a metaphor but an actual budget of time you have to spend with another human being before they cross over into the category of close friend. I am not a psychologist, and this is one researcher’s reading of his own data, not a la…