How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)？
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, my guest, Prof. Jeffrey Hall, talks about the dynamics of friendship that are hard to quantify, but which socologists have long understood. In this episode, we discuss the three levels of friendships that make up the sort of friendship hierarchy, and why it's hard to accumulate these friendships as an adult.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast how long does
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it take to make friends for someone you meet who's a potential friend to turn into an actual
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friend if you're out of college and not a young adult anymore you know that it sure feels like
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it's a process that takes an awfully long time well my guest has actually crunched the numbers
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on this question has the numerical figures to answer it as well as a whole lot of insight into
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the dynamics of friendship that are harder to quantify his name is jeffrey hall he's a professor
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of communication studies who counts friendship among the topics of his research today on the show
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jeff explains the three levels of friends that make up the sort of friendship hierarchy how many hours
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it takes for someone to move from one level to the next and why it's hard to accumulate these needed
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hours as an adult we also talk about how sheer time isn't the only factor that's needed transforming
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acquaintance to a closer best friend and the other factors that need to be in play as well we then
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shift in discussing another element that influences the friendship making process the expectations each
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friend has for friendship we discuss how expectations for friendship differ according to sex and
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personality and what happens when two people have differing expectations for what it means to be
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friends after show's over check out our show notes at aom.is friendship time
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jeffrey hall welcome to the show it's good to be here thank you so you are a professor of
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communication studies who has spent a lot of your career researching and writing about friendship
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how did you end up on that track yeah i actually kind of remember where i started long time ago when
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i was an undergraduate student i realized that one of the things that was really motivating for me as i
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was trying to understand big questions like a lot of undergraduate students do like what's the best
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juicy for your time you know how do you really want to spend your time on this life and i remember
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at that time having some really really excellent friends you know people who i wanted to spend time
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doing road trips with or exploring los angeles with or you know just spending hours just talking
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and i said to a friend of mine at that time something to the effect of you know i think that
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the feeling of really having a wonderful conversation with somebody and spending time with them that way
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is almost as good as sex and they looked at me like this look on their face like no way that's not
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even possibly true but at that point in my life this feeling of what it meant to really connect with
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people and feeling like people understood you became a motivator that's been with me my whole life
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and so from there on you just decided i'm going to study friendship well that was actually a little
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bit took a little more time to get there my very first project that i did in graduate school that
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was about friendship was actually specifically on men's friendship i was in a fraternity and i was
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actually fraternity president when i was an undergraduate student and one of the things that i experienced
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there was that men had these really deep friendships they spent unbelievable amount of time together
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doing all manner of different things and one of the things that was really odd though is that they were
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also very concerned with what other men thought that they were gay they were very cautious about
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that and they also used a lot of kind of you know slang at that time to kind of derogate you know
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feminine behaviors and so my very first project i did on in graduate school about men's friendship
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started looking at this idea of men using those kind of that kind of language to defend themselves
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against intimacy so as they felt greater intimacy with other men they also use that to kind of as a
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shield to say look at least you know i'm not attracted to you i just really really like you
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as a person and that kind of tension for masculinity with men and how all that came about was really
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kind of the origin point of my academic work on friendship gotcha all right so you've written some
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papers recently where you've studied the amount of time and bandwidth investment it takes to make and
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maintain friendships but before we get to that i think it'd be useful to break down the types of
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friends that we all have and i think all of us intuitively understand that you know all not all
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friends are equal you know some some friends are closer than others so how do sociologists break
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down the hierarchy of friendship that's right so they actually look at kind of three different
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categories of friendship that they have pretty well secured and say these are definitely ones that
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we would call friendship one is that you might reserve for a best friend close friends or best friends
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as categories that people use often interchangeably really kind of referring to people who you're very
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close to emotionally and also find like your preference over all the people that you know
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the second kind of category is ones that would be broadly just seen as friends right so these are
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people who you would definitely call a friend if you were asked they may be old friends that were
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once very close to you but aren't as close to you now and then the third category would be casual
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friends and casual friends are kind of a curious category and one that i think that people kind of know
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in the sense that they're not quite acquaintances right because you kind of know them and you would
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say that they're a friend but they're not necessarily people who you would really kind of be as part of
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your choice of who you might hang out with if you had a lot of time to spend with people so these would
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be people who would be part of larger organizations you're at so teammates or workmates these would
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also be people who long ago were closer to you but not as much anymore kind of ceremonial friends is what
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they're called and they're all this kind of collection of people who you come out in different sort of places in
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your life and are your friends but you wouldn't really spend time with them exclusively necessarily
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yeah so like i think of a casual friend like the guy you see at the gym all the time
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and you might exactly talk about stuff but you're not really friend i mean you're friends but you're
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not that's right and i would say one thing to kind of differentiate the guy you talk to the gym
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and all the other people at the gym is all the other people you wouldn't even call a friend and you
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wouldn't even bother talking to them similar with people at work right there are people who are my work
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friends and then there are people who i work with and they're not necessarily the same group of people
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gotcha okay so in the depth of friendship you know whether it's a casual friend a friend
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close friend it depends on the time you spend with that person we'll talk about that here in a bit
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but sheer time isn't the only factor i mean if it was then like you said like all your co-workers
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who you see pretty much you probably spend more time with your co-workers than your family
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they would be friends but like you just said some of them are friends but most of them aren't
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so like what is there a certain type of interaction that needs to happen between people so that you
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know you move from acquaintance to casual friend and then casual friend to friend it's very interesting
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is that people tend to judge others really fast before i did research on friendships kind of at the
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same time i was doing research on what's called person perception and it's the ability that people have
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to judge a person's personality or make estimations about characteristics about them with just a small
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bit of information just a single conversation and recent research that i was really impressed by
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argued that this kind of ability of person perception also guides our friendship choice
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in a way that we almost immediately have a sense of whether or not this person has potential
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so in the same way that when you're interested in someone romantically you have a pretty quick
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estimation of whether or not you're interested in them pretty quickly with friends it's very similar
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in the sense that we know how similar they are to us we know what kind of personality they have we
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know whether they respond well to what we have to say and this is something that happens swiftly and
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then something clicks the click that happens is not only the funny thing is the click is actually even
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something people have used to describe the process academically but it's basically a process of two
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people mutually recognizing liking right two people at the same time or roughly the same time realize i like
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this person and the other person likes them in return and we see that verbally and non-verbally
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in conversation we see that when people make jokes and we other people get our jokes we see that when
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a person says something that's kind of sly or cynical or even you know something kind of quirky and you
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totally get it you know where they're coming from and all of those little clues we suss up very swiftly
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and then we say this person has friend potential so what's interesting is is that it seems that our ability
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to judge whether or not we want to be friends with people happens fast but the process of developing
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that relationship takes a lot more time okay and so okay you have that first recognition so let's say
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you're talking to some guy at work and he throws out a joke that's kind of quirky and you got it you're
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like wow this is potential friend here what sort of thing like how do you what do you have to do to
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besides time what do you have to do to move that from acquaintance to casual friend
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so a lot of people what they do is they change kind of their routines at work so if you were
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somebody at work you might stop by their office more often you might you know see if they want
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to have lunch together during work hours you see whether or not they're going to the same kind of
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training or otherwise you sit by them during a meeting what's interesting is we do a lot of
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behaviors that similar to what you might do like a middle school to show these are the kind of people
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who I want to spend time with so that kind of workplace is the first kind of place in which the people
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develop that friendship usually doesn't happen that people meet at work and then immediately say
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hey do you want to come to my house or do you want to have a drink after work or do you want to join my
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softball team that's that's a little unusual and part of it is is that we are not normatively
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accustomed to the idea that friendships should be something that develop through a process of
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invitation although I would argue that that invitation act is critical in moving a friendship forward
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another project I did at the University of Kansas with a graduate student focused on this idea of
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turning points and we need this moment in our friendship to signal that you're open to having
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kind of a deeper relationship with another person so although immediately after clicking with somebody
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you start kind of redirecting your behavior to spend more time with them at work at some point
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if you want that friendship to develop into something more significant you have to actually take some
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risks and those risks require spending time outside of work right so inviting them to go get
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drinks go to go to a ball game or something like that whatever yeah exactly so I've made friends
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through people who were part of a softball team when I first got to the University of Kansas
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I've made friends with people who you know we had a similar interest in things that were going on
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around town or wanted to go to a basketball game together and so there are a lot of possibilities
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of what you might invite people to but there are a lot there's a lot of social awkwardness
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that comes along with that invitation as well which is I think why people are so reticent to try
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well let's say you've you've made that move there's that turning point you've you've turned
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an acquaintance to a casual friend you spend time and you get closer like what has to happen what
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sort of interaction has to happen to move from say friend to best friend or good friend yeah so
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what's interesting here is my study that I did on friendship hours basically took three processes
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into account one of them is just time and time alone so this study got really popular because that
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it provides some sort of estimates that people can think about in terms of what it requires to get
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there and I think that those estimates are important because what they seem to suggest is if you have
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less than that amount of time then you probably haven't spent enough time with that person to call them
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this type of relationship so it's kind of more of the idea of this is kind of the range of where
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things start to change the second thing we looked at is how do you spend your time together
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and what my study found was the more time you spend hanging out with somebody the greater chance
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that's going to develop into a more intimate friendship but the more time you spend just at
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work or school it decreases the likelihood of that developing into a more intimate friendship
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and the third is how you talk to someone so there's a long long history of doing research
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on relationship development focused on something that's called self-disclosure and self-disclosure is
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kind of a huge body of literature that says that if I talk about myself or reveal more intimate
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details of myself that this develops liking well I broaden that description quite a bit in my study
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to say that it doesn't require self-disclosure necessarily but it does require doing things
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like joking around having catch-up conversations being like so what have you been up to or how did
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that thing go that you went to or you know what's been going on in your life and then also meaningful
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talk and meaningful talk doesn't have to necessarily be like your personal trials and tribulations although
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it could meaningful talk could also be talking about things that you really care about you know
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things that you're concerned about in politics or things that you're concerned about at work that really
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matter to you personally and having the other person listen so the idea that I'm working with
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is that there's kind of like three separate factors that are all going on in that relationship
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development in order to develop a really a best or a very close friend you kind of have to have all
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three okay so let's do a quick recap here so the time you spend together counts but it can't just be
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time you see someone at school or work because I mean you see people every day at school and work and
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you don't become friends with those people it also matters how you spend your time together and how
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you talk with someone and there are three types of interactions that increase your intimacy and can
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increase your chances of becoming friends with someone the first one is self-disclosure then there's
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having meaningful conversations and then there's just catching up on the everyday stuff as well like
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what's going on with work kids etc and if you want to move from friend to best friend or close friend
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you want to have all three of those conversations okay so even though time isn't the only factor
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I want to focus that on that a little bit because you've done some research as to how long it takes
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to move up the friendship hierarchy so let's talk about that for a bit let's say you you meet some guy
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you hit it off you have a lot in common you get along great how long is it going to take to move
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from acquaintance to a casual friend yeah so according to my study that range happens somewhere between
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40 and 60 hours of time together so the study that I did actually had two parts to it one was focused
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on adults that had geographically relocated and they typically relocated for work or for family
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and then the other one was on college freshmen and I caught them three weeks right after they had
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arrived at the University of Kansas and looked at who they had been spending time with in those three
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weeks before the start of the semester and in combination the kind of that first estimate of
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casual friend from acquaintance came from the idea that probably for adults it took according to my
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study it took longer for adults to develop friends but what's tricky about that is because it was a
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retroactive study it could be that they had already developed a casual friendship and were just spending
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more and more time afterwards because the one done on students was done prospectively meaning we
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caught them so early on we were actually able to see changes of different time windows so that estimate
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is really the 40 to 60 hours is meant to accommodate the idea that it depends kind of on whether or not
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more and more hours are accumulating with this person and you can imagine how that would do that in a
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school setting or in a work setting the next kind of level of change happens between 80 and 100 hours
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of time and between 80 and 100 hours of time you kind of go from the casual friend to the friend
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category and this happens really sort of in a development of greater amount of time spending time away from the
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place that you met spending time hanging out spending time playing you know whether you play video games
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or watching tv or going to events together so it kind of diversifies the kind of ways in which you're
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experiencing the other person and the third level is over 200 hours it takes to make a close or a best
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friend and i actually think that might be a conservative estimate meaning i think it might actually take
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longer than that and part of the reason that it takes so long to develop that level of intimacy with
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another person is you have to get to the point where your guard is dropped you have to get to the point where
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you're feeling comfortable being yourself around this other person and i think for a lot of people
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they don't get to that level of of comfort with another person to allow for a best friendship to
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develop okay so it takes about 200 hours or more to make a closer best friend so to clarify do these
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hours include both time spent at school or work and outside of it or is that just time spent together
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outside of school or work no both so that estimate came from time spent in both places okay and the
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there's is there a certain time frame that you need to accumulate these hours within so i mean like in
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high school or college i mean you're seeing your friends every day all day and then you might be
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spending every weekend together so you might accumulate those 200 hours within a matter of months
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i mean that's why when you're young it feels like you can meet someone one day and then like in a few
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months later you guys are best friends but when you're an adult and you got a job and you got a
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family you might see a friend just like a few hours every month so it could take possibly several years
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to accumulate 200 hours so do you need to accumulate all those hours within a certain window of time or
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can it be spread out over several years yeah i think they absolutely can and one thing you're pointing
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out that i think is very important is that when you have the luxury of time and you're open to
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developing relationships such as when you're in school or a young adult studies actually suggest
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that people build really strong friendships usually within the next you know about three or four months
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and the reason that it's such a short interval of time is people kind of make a choice because they
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have so much luxury of time and different people to make friends with that by the time that four
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months elapse you're kind of where you're going to be with that person i think that you're right that
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for adults there is some evidence to think that this is not only a more gradual process
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but remember when we're talking about 200 hours we're talking about someone who becomes your best
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friend and i think that that standard is actually quite high to develop a brand new best friend is
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quite a hefty endeavor it's not something that you can do simply or it's not something you can do
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through the process of just really liking someone or spending a little bit of time together
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so i think that you're correct that as an adult to develop a best friend probably takes many many more
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months and maybe even years in the process of slowly slowly gradually accumulating kind of that level of
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closeness and intimacy which can be done in a lot of different ways as you kind of progress through
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that process okay so like the lesson there is that adults need to be patient when with making friends
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i mean if you're expecting to make like a new best friend or a good friend in a matter of months
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like you did in high school or college you're probably going to be disappointed absolutely i actually
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would find it hard to believe that there'd be a context in which that you would be able to do so
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as an adult unless you found someone who is just an exact same stage where you're at where you're
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really open to meeting someone new yeah that's another interesting hard thing about adult
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friendships is that you're in different stages with different people so like you know you might
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be newly married no kids you have a lot of time and then you meet some guy who's married and has
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three kids and is you know coaching football or whatever you guys probably you might have a lot
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in common but it might not turn into friendship because you're you're out of sync that's exactly
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right being ready to actually invest time in friendship is i think that's something that people imagine
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that's only on them and sometimes they find it really frustrating because they can't
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make the other person be available in the way they might like but it's probably more common
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than not that two people are on different pages and that's why i think also circumstantially when
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you are a young adult it's so much easier is that many many people are open to the process of
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developing friendships and having a longer time to spend together with their friends okay so one of
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the obstacles to making friends as an adult is that not everyone's at the same stage in life or
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some people just aren't open to friendship at the same time besides that are there any other
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obstacles to making friends as an adult and accumulating those hours and hours it requires
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to make a friend there are i think three kind of key parts to this one is that we really value work
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in the united states we work more than any industrialized country in the world we work longer
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hours and what's weird is is that in other countries as people get you know more education or they have
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more access to resources they actually work less but the united states if you make more money you
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just keep working harder and a lot of that is due to kind of a broader kind of cultural value that we
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put on that the second i think factor which i think is really difficult is geographic kind of mobility
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we move from place to place to place so we actually lose out on all of that basis of friendship that
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we've built with another person we pick up and go to another place now you don't lose all of your
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friends when you move but study after study has confirmed that moving is a huge threat to being
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able to maintain friendship over time and i think the third probably has less to do with just united
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states but if you ask both men and women people throughout the world having kids and getting
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married are huge killers to friendship and both of them is because that they're a huge amount of
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emotional time and also physical time with people basically all of that time is being invested in your
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most important relationships and so you don't make time with friends what's interesting is in the
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past there's good reason to believe that due partly to gender segregation where men and women had
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different activities due in part to also kind of a more open culture in the sense that people were
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more likely to do things like join bowling leagues and be part of the elks club and you know all that
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kind of thing they spent a lot more time out of their house with people who were not their family and so
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there was more of an understanding that if you left your home during the week to go do things
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it wasn't an insult to the people in your home it was just kind of how you were in the society that
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you lived in but i find that in our culture those forces of work the forces of geographic mobility
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and the forces that have really said people and men particularly should be spending more time with
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their kids and with their loved ones at home means that that time that they would spend outside of
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their home developing friendships has really been very much curtailed and in some ways minimized as
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a value so it sounds like if you want to make make friends you have to make it a priority like you have
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to put it on your schedule or it's not going to happen bingo yeah yeah i feel strongly about that
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you know i'll just tell you know anyone out there who's interested i actually have it on my list of
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things to do sometimes and i'm not even kidding like if i want to keep in touch with my friends i put it
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on my you know make us an appointment i have a standing conversation with my best man for my
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wedding who lives in los angeles and i live in kansas and we talk once a month and we don't
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sometimes we only get to talk for 15 minutes sometimes we talk for longer but we make it a
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priority and so it's odd is that even someone like myself who you'd think you know i've cared
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about friendship a long time i study it it would just come naturally you really have to make it a
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priority in life otherwise it won't happen no i think that's a good point i think a lot of people
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don't do that because they think well it's friendship you're not supposed to make it like this sort of
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it's not a to-do but you you kind of have to make it that way or it's not going to happen
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i think so and you know what's funny about things about the to-do concept is that a lot of people
00:21:45.400
actually think that the process of having to organize something makes it less pleasurable
00:21:49.320
but in a lot of research suggests also that when you have something to look forward to it's actually
00:21:53.520
really nice like being able to anticipate the lunch that you're going to have with a friend or
00:21:57.420
being able to anticipate hanging out with the guys or anticipate that phone call with a long a friend
00:22:02.300
from long ago also has its own rewards and so people have this kind of interesting characteristic
00:22:07.840
where they call it negative forecasting bias where they imagine something is in the future
00:22:12.400
they don't want to put on their calendar because like oh god making friendship into a chore that's
00:22:16.760
like the worst thing ever but oddly by rendering it into something to look forward to and that's
00:22:21.700
something that you can actually plan for it actually makes the experience of having it that much more
00:22:26.200
fun we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
00:22:33.320
all right so we've talked about you know how much time you have to spend with someone so they become
00:22:37.380
a friend do we have any research on how long it takes for a friend to descend down the hierarchy
00:22:41.720
of friendship all right so for example if you don't invest regularly in your best friendship
00:22:45.380
how long does it take for that best friend to become you know casual friend and just sort of
00:22:49.840
an acquaintance what's very funny about that is that there are kind of two thoughts schools of thought
00:22:54.840
about this there is pretty consistent information and evidence that says that people in the casual
00:22:59.520
friend realm are turning in and out of that all of the time you know different stages of your life
00:23:05.740
from middle school to high school to college to young adulthood to the time with your family
00:23:10.920
places in your you know you change to go to different places in the country of the world to live
00:23:15.640
that these people who are your casual friends there will go away and some of them will maintain
00:23:20.960
through things like you know social media or facebook or otherwise but many of them are just
00:23:25.560
people who will disappear and interestingly there's good evidence to say that those people's the loss of
00:23:30.000
those people isn't necessarily a bad thing you know people don't feel particularly sad about having lost
00:23:34.420
their casual friends but the what i would say is that having that kind of group of casual friends
00:23:39.840
to reconnect with is a useful thing to have if you move back to the place where you met them
00:23:44.200
so if i move back to los angeles for example i would have a whole set of casual friends i've kept in touch
00:23:48.700
with a little bit that i might reenact a friendship with if i live there however when it comes to best
00:23:54.100
friendship that's where the school of thought kind of differs what's interesting is is there are these
00:23:58.400
several studies one that was done in the in the early 90s that i really like it was called just
00:24:02.900
friends and this researcher sociologist interviewed men and women about their best friendships and then
00:24:09.580
they would interview the best friend about their friendship as well and what they found was that
00:24:13.480
there were people who basically said this person is my best friend the researcher research to the best
00:24:18.020
friend the best friend would be like i'm their best friend i had no idea that's fantastic like i
00:24:23.040
haven't seen them in years so you can keep this best friend in your life in your emotional kind of
00:24:29.200
sense of who i am and even in a relational sense even if you don't communicate with them very often
00:24:35.040
and i think what's interesting about that to me is that we do have the value of feeling like we're
00:24:40.880
connected with someone but if we don't enact that then we don't all get the benefits of it
00:24:46.420
so what i'm getting at is that there seems to be two different processes going on and my own
00:24:51.280
research looks a lot at this one is the relational process are there people in my life and the second
00:24:56.160
is the communication process which is how often do i talk to them and both contribute to your
00:25:00.900
well-being so if you want to have the best possible best friendship experiment experience you
00:25:06.040
actually have to do both the communication part and the having part and so yeah this means you could
00:25:11.080
still maintain a best friendship even if that person moves you just had like like you you make it a
00:25:15.080
priority to talk to your best man at your wedding at least once a week once a month yeah craig and i
00:25:20.200
talk once a month and i love it like it's it's i look forward to that conversation we just dive right
00:25:25.420
in and even if we only got 20 minutes he'll be like okay i got 20 minutes i'm like okay let's work
00:25:29.380
let's take it and you got to make it a priority absolutely and i think it's interesting too if you
00:25:34.340
ask a lot of people like oh who's your best friend they'll often mention like someone from high
00:25:38.300
school or from college even though they haven't seen them in you know decades and i've noticed that like
00:25:43.700
who's your best friend like i'll include in that list my best friend from high school and we haven't
00:25:48.420
talked in a while but if we got together i feel like we would pick up right where we left off yeah
00:25:53.820
that's a definitional characteristic of a best friend right the thing that makes best friends
00:25:58.120
or close friends close friends is that they are people who we can stop having the relationship with
00:26:03.160
and then when we see them again we still get to have that sense of closeness and that sense of
00:26:07.640
camaraderie i too had an experience like that or a close friend of mine from college
00:26:11.940
i saw in new york a couple of years ago because i was going out there for work and we just spent you
00:26:17.000
know a long afternoon evening together and had just a fantastic time of catching back up again
00:26:21.680
but neither one of us do a very good job of keeping in touch in the meantime so i think what's lovely
00:26:27.440
about these things is that the kind of concern or the worry well if i reconnect with my old friends
00:26:31.800
or otherwise they you know it may not be as much fun typically speaking you know if you're as close
00:26:37.040
to that person as you were then chances are it will be a very good experience
00:26:40.840
another component that influences making and maintaining friendships that you've researched
00:26:46.580
are the expectation each person the friendship has for the friendship so what are the factors that
00:26:53.000
you found that shape a person's expectations for friendship yeah when i did that expectations
00:26:57.540
project and that was where my interest began to go away from just looking at men's friendships
00:27:01.820
and look at kind of differences between men and women's friendships people have a set of
00:27:05.920
expectations for what it means to be a friend like what does it require minimally for someone to become
00:27:11.020
a friend or to be a friend and those projects really focused on the ideas how does our you know our
00:27:16.220
concept of what friendship is differ between men and women and otherwise one of the things that about
00:27:22.720
that friendship expectations project that i looked at and i find really fascinating still is that i argued
00:27:28.140
something that i call cultivated complexity which is essentially the idea that you cultivate a level of
00:27:33.280
expectations and complexity of those expectations with another person so that for some friends you can
00:27:38.580
have very simple expectations of what it means for you and them to be together as friends for other
00:27:43.840
people the friendship list of things you expect from them may be very very big what's fascinating is that
00:27:49.500
if you expect too much of your friends you're often disappointed but if you expect nothing from your
00:27:54.840
friends a lot of times they don't even meet that minimum standard so there's this kind of this
00:27:58.560
middle ground which seems to be the people who are functioning the best in friendship is they're able
00:28:03.340
to expect enough from their friends to be able to get kind of those relationship factors out but
00:28:08.340
they're not expecting so much to be you know disappointed when their friends aren't there for them
00:28:12.200
every single time and in every single circumstance and not so like expecting nothing is that basically that
00:28:19.860
relationship goes nowhere so those kind of expectations really play a role in being able to kind of
00:28:24.700
set the stage for what you want that friendship to look like and so what are some things when we're
00:28:29.060
looking at okay what kind of expectations we have for the friendship like what are we looking for is
00:28:32.860
it just a matter of like how much you're going to invest interest like what what is what are the
00:28:36.560
factors we look at yeah so the main factor the one that's actually the most important in in many ways
00:28:41.900
is the one that what is kind of a trust a sense that that person is going to be there for you when you
00:28:47.400
need them a sense in which that they value you as a person the idea that their concern for you is genuine
00:28:54.000
so these kind of four issues that you can trust them that they'll be for you that they truly like you for
00:28:59.720
who you are and that you can count on them or they genuinely believe the things that they are right
00:29:04.900
they're not fake or they're not just kind of fair weather friends that's kind of the core expectation
00:29:09.400
of friendship and the most important one then other ones we've kind of talked about already one is things
00:29:14.180
like having somebody who's similar to you as a set of friendship expectations similar values similar hobbies
00:29:19.140
one of them is things around self-disclosure so self-disclosure expectations one of them is about
00:29:24.140
having fun with another person spending time together the expectation that they're going to include you
00:29:28.480
in things and invite you to do things and then there's a kind of a final set of expectations which
00:29:33.100
are pretty small the big picture but also things like i you know it's nice to have friends who know
00:29:38.800
people are nice to have friends who are well connected in business or it's nice to have friends who are
00:29:42.640
athletic or it's nice to have friends who are are you know kind of socially popular or otherwise
00:29:47.300
and so these are also things we like to have on our friends but are kind of ancillary to friendship
00:29:52.540
but my project on expectations was saying these are the kind of six sets of expectations we can have
00:29:58.120
for our friends so it sounds like you can have different levels of friendships and listening to you
00:30:03.880
it sounds like it tracks really nicely with aristotle's idea of having three different levels of friendship
00:30:08.860
the first level of friendship it's instrumental or utilitarian friendship and this is where
00:30:12.720
it's a friendship where you just get some kind of use out of the guy like maybe they can help you
00:30:16.920
with your network help you with your business maybe the second level of friendship is a friendship of
00:30:22.080
enjoyment so this is where you know you you just have a good time with this guy but you wouldn't
00:30:26.720
expect him to visit you in the hospital if you were there and then the third level of friendship
00:30:31.080
is a friendship of virtue and this is where you help each other become better people and where you're
00:30:37.220
just friends for the sake of friendship and so as a consequence you'd expect more from this
00:30:41.620
type of friendship you got it so how do we develop these these expectations we have towards friendships
00:30:47.540
so this actually something that starts very early the research on child development says that kind of
00:30:53.020
the process of being able to develop an understanding of what other people can do for us and who they
00:30:57.120
are to us is something that kind of maps on to a developmental process in children that starts
00:31:01.960
kind of early on and this is like in our kindergarten age where kids begin to prefer certain playmates
00:31:07.180
people that they like to spend time with over others and a lot of time it's because they can
00:31:11.700
jointly play together they can actually do things at the same time and they share nice with each other
00:31:16.740
so they begin to look at their friends as somebody who is sharing their blocks or their cars or whatever
00:31:21.160
rather than somebody who's being selfish those developed expectations get to a little bit farther when
00:31:26.460
their play gets more complicated and kind of get even more complex when the social issues become more
00:31:31.840
complicated so think like middle school where it becomes super important that you have a friend who's
00:31:36.600
genuine super important you have a friend that you can trust to kind of defend your character
00:31:40.940
if another person is being harsh on you a lot of this comes from the idea that adolescents actually
00:31:46.260
go through a period of time where they're really sensitive to both inclusion signals like do people
00:31:50.940
like me and want me to be here but are also very you know very concerned with exclusion signals so
00:31:56.260
the feeling that if anyone slights them or looks down on them they get really aroused and upset by that
00:32:01.820
kind of thing so as a consequence your friendship expectations come from that developmental
00:32:06.120
process what i think is really interesting is that the developmental process maps onto the three
00:32:11.020
level of friendship we talked about earlier so as you said right at that lowest level of oh i like
00:32:15.800
this guy he's a good guy shares nice he shares his toys right that's a casual friend or an aristotelian
00:32:22.420
model of a you know instrumental friend or utilitarian one and then as you move up from friend to close
00:32:28.660
friend or best friend at the very top of our best friend that's also the most emotionally developed
00:32:33.820
relationship and friendship the one that we would only be able to have when we developed a more
00:32:37.940
secure sense of self and other and that only happens after you know 15 16 17 years old so what
00:32:44.060
i find really fascinating is this is this process that your emotional development as a person maps onto
00:32:49.280
your strength of relationship in these three different categories of friendship how do friendship
00:32:54.040
expectations differ by gender do men and women generally have different expectations for their friends
00:32:59.120
men and women do have different expectations based on gender in the case of women as you might
00:33:04.920
suppose and guess that women tend to have a higher expectation of kind of emotional intimacy
00:33:09.860
self-disclosure kind of talk that's really based upon a high level of sort of emotional talk and also
00:33:16.040
sharing men and women both share two similar expectations for different categories they both want their
00:33:22.660
friends to be someone who they can hang out with and share a laugh and enjoy themselves the other
00:33:27.460
quality that men and women are quite similar on is this idea of kind of genuineness like this person
00:33:33.500
really likes me for who i am and men and women are quite similar on their expectations that their
00:33:38.680
friends should be trustworthy and genuine in that regard although women do tend to have slightly higher
00:33:43.500
expectations for that than do men but the last category where men actually have higher expectations
00:33:48.560
than do women is this category that's kind of curious it can has all of the different characteristics of
00:33:54.140
what we might want in a friend that's not about the relationship so for example this category included
00:33:59.460
friends who were intelligent and athletic and successful and had good business connections and
00:34:04.160
were attractive and were people who had you know access to high paying jobs and the idea was is that
00:34:09.820
men more so than women and even young boys and young men all evaluated friends who had those
00:34:15.860
characteristics as being more valuable friends than did women that so status is an important part and
00:34:22.560
exactly and you can kind of see how that changes right and so for boys for example status might be
00:34:27.740
somebody who's popular and athletic as a young adult it might be somebody who has access to jobs or
00:34:32.480
has comes from a family with you know income as your young adult you also might find someone who's
00:34:36.900
well connected so the idea of these status indicators actually are motivations for men to maintain
00:34:42.640
same-sex friendships in a way that they're not for women does personality play a role in our expectations
00:34:47.600
absolutely so probably the one that makes the biggest difference of all personality characteristics
00:34:52.700
has to do with this issue of attachment right so people who have very secure attachment have an
00:34:58.100
easier time being able to evaluate others as being a safe place to develop closeness with
00:35:02.780
they get less anxious if there are these signals of exclusion or otherwise however there are other
00:35:07.620
the one that people talk about the most and i get this question the most often is well what about
00:35:11.460
introversion and extroversion and what i find fascinating is that there is good reason to think that
00:35:16.400
introverts and extroverts are different on two key phenomena one is extroverts are comfortable talking
00:35:21.140
to a whole heck of a lot more people and count a lot more people as friends than introverts do but
00:35:26.460
the other one is is that introverts also tend to find friends and really dedicate themselves so they
00:35:32.340
have fewer friends but really work on developing friends but introversion and extroversion both value
00:35:37.680
friends in a very similar way they just define what it means to be a friend a little bit differently
00:35:42.160
so if you have like an extrovert and introvert being friends like the extrovert might have like
00:35:47.200
you know hey you know my expectation for you is that you know you're just around whenever if you
00:35:51.880
can't make it no big deal the introvert be like hey where were you you were supposed to be here
00:35:56.200
yeah those kind of miscommunications could come up one thing that i'm actually kind of thinking in my
00:36:01.240
own experience too is that i'm probably a little more extroverted in terms of comfortable certainly
00:36:05.540
talking to different people and making different types of relationships and one of my friends that
00:36:10.280
from college that is much more introverted one of the things about having a relationship with her is
00:36:14.920
that she's really like these are my people so what's neat is is that when we're you know able
00:36:20.180
to hang out which doesn't happen nearly as often as it did when we were in college we were actually
00:36:24.020
going to more depth of conversation and all the things that a more introverted friendship looks
00:36:28.620
like so i was able to enact those in my relationship with her and i went in a way i wasn't really
00:36:33.880
necessarily able to do with a lot of my more casual friendships so i think it's important to keep in
00:36:38.540
mind here is that yeah there can be conflict between different kind of personality styles or
00:36:43.420
attachment styles when it comes to to friendship but part of the beauty of friendship is you can
00:36:47.660
have friends for different reasons right you can have a friend that you talk to about really
00:36:51.100
important stuff but you can also have friends that you're always having a great time because
00:36:54.280
everyone's laughing about everything you can have a friend who's fantastic for being on a
00:36:58.440
you know softball team together or someone that you like to go out and have a drink and
00:37:01.400
shoot pool with but can have another friend who is somebody who would be more likely to invite
00:37:06.380
to like a social gathering or someone who you might like to work with so what's neat about
00:37:11.500
friendships is that because they're not exclusive we can find different parts of ourselves being
00:37:16.140
developed through these relationships we cultivate with others but what happens when there's two friends
00:37:21.920
their expectations of the friendship differ what typically happens yeah what's most likely to happen is
00:37:29.280
friends very rarely actually have conflict that leads them to go down different paths and you might
00:37:36.040
be able to guess what are the types of conflict that really break friends up and this is things like
00:37:41.160
you cheated on me with you know my my partner you really let me down right i expected you to be
00:37:47.300
there and you totally blew it or you were just downright mean right what's weird is is that
00:37:52.720
friendships can even recover if people like you know fight or scream at each other or come to blows even
00:37:57.820
and some research actually suggests that you know that can actually even be bonding because you care
00:38:02.520
enough about that other person to argue with them so what's weird is is when people have different
00:38:07.500
expectations they're much more likely to just sort of back off they spend less time with the person
00:38:12.880
they don't say anything you know they ignore their texts they don't respond they prioritize other people
00:38:18.660
and all of these ways of disentangling oneself from that friendship usually happens as a matter of course
00:38:24.900
rather than a matter of intent so people aren't going i need to break up with this person instead
00:38:29.660
they're like meh i'm just not feeling it or you know what they're always expecting me to do this
00:38:33.980
and i don't really want to or they're just not meeting the other person's expectations for the
00:38:38.420
frequency of communication or type of communication so the other person stops inviting them and i think
00:38:43.260
that that's one of the things about that kind of tension that plays out is we are generally speaking
00:38:49.180
not going to talk to our friends about the process of relationship disengagement in the way that we would
00:38:54.180
in a romantic partnership where there's a clear expectation that if things are falling apart
00:38:58.320
you try to talk it through so when friends have different expectations for a friendship
00:39:03.060
they typically don't discuss it and then they just disengage and the friendship dissolves
00:39:07.240
but even if it's not common to talk about the relationship the friendship is it possible to have a
00:39:12.380
successful or fruitful discussion about different expectations for the friendship yeah that is a very
00:39:17.720
very hard thing to do you know i think that friends are actually poorly equipped to figure out even how to
00:39:22.840
broach the topic usually what happens is if there is some sort of disconnect the disconnect
00:39:27.480
happens more because of a sense of reciprocity right i'm providing a lot more to you than you're providing
00:39:33.420
to me i'm having to be the one who reaches out more and i'm having to be the one who carries the work
00:39:38.480
and scheduling time together and i think those kind of things on a more sort of fundamental level
00:39:42.720
can be managed quite well right in the sense that you can actually kind of say you know when person
00:39:49.180
if you're the person on the receiving end of those invitations but not are not great at initiating you know
00:39:53.460
be thankful and grateful for what the person offers and make sure the other person knows you know i
00:39:57.140
really appreciate you keeping in touch even though i'm not great at it or even be self-deprecating
00:40:00.960
about it you know i'm terrible at this but you're so great and i really appreciate it so i think there
00:40:05.240
are ways to kind of smooth those edges over but research on kind of fundamental disagreements of
00:40:10.660
expectations you know around trust violations of trust or violations of intimacy or violations of
00:40:16.300
sense that the other person just isn't there for you those are very hard to repair and generally
00:40:21.220
speaking we do not have a good kind of cultural dialogue or any kind of sense of how to approach
00:40:25.640
when someone actually does something that's pretty off all right so people are going to have a hard
00:40:30.120
time discussing you know deeper expectations in in friendships or for friendships but it is possible
00:40:36.580
to communicate about you know the more you know concrete ways there may be some miss signals going
00:40:42.320
on like you know for example i know my experience is that most people are either initiators
00:40:47.400
inviters by nature and some people aren't and i think it's just a personality thing so the people
00:40:52.480
who are natural initiators they often just need some reassurance from their friend you know saying
00:40:57.040
hey you know what just because i don't reach out as much uh doesn't mean i don't like you i'm just not
00:41:02.780
very good at it's not my inclination i think that we can misinterpret a lack of equity and friendship
00:41:08.660
as a lack of desire to be in the relationship and i have had that happen personally so many times
00:41:14.500
where you know just recently i'm back in touch with a friend of mine from undergraduate at least
00:41:20.400
back in more routine touch with a friend of mine and i had thought all the times that he didn't like
00:41:25.260
return my text or otherwise was just that you know he had other priorities and now that we're kind of
00:41:30.160
back in touch again he says yeah i really appreciate all that time that you spent trying to get me to
00:41:35.840
respond i just did not have my together i did not have my life organized in a way where i could
00:41:40.720
respond and i'm sorry i wasn't a good friend but i'm really glad we're back in touch now and that
00:41:45.220
is so deeply reassuring to me because i did have some anxieties like why why isn't he returning my
00:41:50.680
stuff like i don't get it yeah like some people just are bad texters like they just don't they don't
00:41:55.280
do that but they probably appreciate it i think so yeah so what do you think the the big takeaways
00:42:01.580
about friendship and adulthood that you think people should take away from or that they can get from
00:42:06.240
your research absolutely i would say the number one is do not be a flake do not be a flake if people
00:42:12.660
invite you to do stuff show up you know if you say hey we should hang out together hang out like
00:42:17.780
follow through is key and follow through doesn't have to mean like tomorrow it doesn't have to even
00:42:22.640
mean next week it means that you make it something that you if someone makes a promise or invitation to
00:42:28.500
you to do things you help make it happen and one of the things that i think that in our contemporary
00:42:33.180
culture you hear a lot is that men will or and women for that matter will say you know they met
00:42:39.040
somebody really interesting they'd like to be friends like hey we should hang out and do that
00:42:42.060
thing together sometime and then nothing nothing happens that is to me the biggest key indicator of
00:42:48.380
something that has potential if another person says i want to spend time with you take them up on
00:42:54.040
it and spend time with them the second big takeaway that i would say is something we've already talked
00:42:58.340
about is be intentional be intentional about you know spending time with your friends keeping in
00:43:03.040
touch with your friends and then the third thing that i would take away is support your partner in
00:43:07.120
doing the same you know if you're in a romantic relationship recognize that you will be happier
00:43:11.780
if your partner also has better relationships with other people and that goes both ways for both
00:43:16.980
men and women in a heterosexual relationship and so i think that the takeaways here is that
00:43:22.900
in order to enjoy the great parts about being friends with people you actually have to enact it
00:43:28.420
and so i want to encourage people as much as i possibly can to take those steps to do so
00:43:32.480
well jeff this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your work
00:43:36.340
yeah so at the university of kansas we have the relationships and technology lab i invite everybody
00:43:41.000
to check it out and learn a little more about my work you know i do stuff that has to do with
00:43:45.160
you know social media and how that affects our lives we do work on friendship and we do work on
00:43:49.780
you know kind of all those issues of this intersection between relationships and technology
00:43:54.260
i mean friendship is one part of that so i welcome everybody to kind of learn more about it well jeff
00:43:58.980
hall thanks for your time it's been a pleasure it has been my my pleasure thank you my guest there
00:44:04.680
is jeffrey hall he's a professor of communication studies who specializes in friendship make sure to
00:44:08.560
check out our show notes at aom.is friendship time where you find links to resources where you delve
00:44:19.780
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:44:24.600
art of manless.com where you find our podcast archives well as thousands of articles run over
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the years about pretty much anything you think of and if you'd like to enjoy ad free episodes of the
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member who you think you get something out of it as always thank you for the continued support
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until next time's brett mckay remind you not to list the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action