Friendship builds in hours, not meetups
You can say hello to someone at the gym for 6 months and get nowhere. Or you can take one 4-day trip together and keep texting for years afterward. What matters isn't how often you cross paths, but how many uninterrupted hours you spend together without a shared task.
Psychologist Jeffrey Hall surveyed 2 groups: adults who had recently moved to a new city and first-year college students. He asked how much time each person had spent with a specific new acquaintance and what that person eventually became to them. Their answers revealed approximate thresholds. These are self-reported estimates, not a law of nature: some people reach them faster, while for others friendship doesn't happen even with much more time.
Why the coworker you see every day never became a friend
In this data, hours were broken down by what people were doing. Time spent on a shared task - work, classes, a shift - barely moved relationships forward. What did was something else: chatting on the way somewhere, watching a show together, asking, "So, how are you really doing?" A year in the same office is more than a thousand hours side by side, and it may lead to nothing.
The logic is simple: when you're focused on a shared task, you're both looking at the task, not at each other. The person across from you remains a collection of work-related lines that reveal almost nothing. Polite small talk, according to the author's other research, also does little: what brings people closer is a conversation where someone shares a little more about herself than the situation requires.
If you spend a lot of time with someone, friendship will happen on its own.
What mostly counts are hours free from a shared task. At work, you're engaging with the work, while engaging with each other only tangentially, so a thousand work hours may not produce even one heart-to-heart conversation.
That leads to a conclusion many people find annoying: hours don't add up automatically. Lunch at the same table while everyone scrolls on their phone counts for almost nothing. But 3 hours stuck in traffic together give you more than a month of sitting near each other in an open-plan office.
A coworker you've sat in the same office with for a year usually gets stuck at the second mark: the time was shared, but not free.
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Sources
- Jeffrey A. Hall, "How many hours does it take to make a friend?", Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019 (online - 2018): 2 surveys - adults after moving and first-year college students
- thresholds were estimated from self-reports and are not exact figures