the friend crush is real and it takes 200 hours

I get nervous before I text certain people. Not people I want to date. People I want to be friends with.

There’s a specific feeling of meeting someone at a party or in a seminar or in a comment section and thinking I need this person in my life, and then going home and rehearsing the message. Rewriting it. Deleting the exclamation mark, adding it back. Waiting an appropriate amount of time so as not to seem strange about it.

That’s a crush. It’s just not a romantic one.

nobody warned you that friendship has butterflies

We have an enormous cultural apparatus for romantic pursuit. Every film. Every song. An entire genre of advice about how to signal interest, how to ask someone out, how to handle rejection.

For friendship we have nothing.

You are simply expected to acquire friends the way you acquire a cold, through proximity and time, without ever wanting it out loud. To pursue a friendship is faintly embarrassing. To admit you have a friend crush is to admit that you need something, and needing is not permitted unless it’s routed through romance, where need is not only permitted but required.

So we all walk around with these enormous unspoken longings toward people we admire, and we do nothing about them, because there’s no script.

There’s a word for this in ace communities, by the way. Squish

two hundred hours

Jeffrey Hall, at the University of Kansas, ran a study on this and published it in 2019. He wanted to know how long it actually takes to become someone’s friend.

He tracked 355 adults who had recently moved, and 112 first-year students, and what he found was roughly this. About 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend. About 90 hours to become an actual friend. And more than 200 hours before someone counts as a close friend.

Two hundred hours.

I want you to sit with that, because I think it reframes almost everything about adult loneliness.

The reason it’s hard to make friends after university is not that you’ve become worse at it. It’s that university was a machine that manufactured two hundred hours of unstructured proximity without you having to arrange any of it. You lived near them. You ate near them. You were bored near them.

Adult life does not do this. Adult life gives you two hours on a Thursday, cancelled twice. At that rate, two hundred hours is two years.

which is why the friend crush matters

If the science says it takes two hundred hours, then the friend crush is not an embarrassing surplus of feeling. It’s the fuel. It’s the thing that makes you keep showing up long enough for the hours to accumulate.

Romantic attraction gets a cultural licence to be inefficient and obsessive and to reorganise your calendar around a person. Platonic attraction gets no such licence, and so the hours never happen, and so the friendship never deepens, and then at 28 you sit in your flat and wonder why you have no close friends.

You had the feeling. You just weren’t allowed to act on it.

act on it

I’m going to be direct, because I think this is one of the few places where advice actually works.

Tell people you like them. Not romantically. Just tell them. I really like talking to you, we should do this more. It is so simple and it is so rarely said and I promise you the person on the other end has never once been offended by it.

Ask for the second hangout. The first one happens by accident. The second one requires somebody to want it out loud, and everyone is waiting for the other person to be that somebody.

Be inefficient. Two hundred hours is a lot of hours and none of them are going to be productive. Sit in a room and be bored together. That’s what the number is measuring.

And accept that you will sometimes be too much for someone, and they won’t want it back, and that’s the same rejection risk we accept constantly in romance without a second thought.

The friend crush is one of seven kinds of attraction, and it’s the one I think most people are underusing. Not because they don’t feel it. Because nobody ever told them they were allowed to do anything about it.

up next — sensual attraction, and why you want to be held by people you don’t want to sleep with