How to Make Friends, According to Science

As Weiner points out, “Friendships almost always happen extremely gradually as a result of shared time and continued effort.” Take things slow and take a genuine interest in people to develop real friendships that can last beyond a few casual lunch dates. It’s normal if you’re feeling a little rusty. “It’s okay for things to be a bit uncomfortable

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well:

And you would devote 130 minutes (a bit more than two hours, or a whole evening every other month) to each of the ten additional sympathy-group members.

On average, we devote seventeen and a half minutes each day to each of the five people in the support clique, and about four and a half minutes a day to each of the ten people that make up the rest of the sympathy-group layer.

ALWAYS FOLLOW UP We all meet people but we rarely take the time to follow up and actually begin a friendship. Analyzing eight million phone calls between two million people, researchers at Notre Dame found that what makes close friendships endure is simply staying in touch every two weeks.

My take on this is that the process of making a new friend follows a fairly set pattern.