The importance of time for friendship

Continuing a series based on Dunbar’s book, “Friends”. You can find the basic thesis here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/09/18/introduction-to-friends-by-robin-dunbar/ 

Time is vital for friendships. It takes time to make friendships, and it needs regular time to maintain relationships.

“He found that it took about 45 hours spent in each other’s company after first meeting for someone to progress from being an acquaintance to becoming a casual friend. People who averaged only 30 hours together over 9 weeks (the equivalent of just 15 minutes a day) remained acquaintances. To move from being a casual friend to a meaningful friend called for another 50 hours spent together over the course of three months, while those who advanced to be best friends took another 100 hours to be spent together. In effect to make it into the most intimate category of friendship requires something close to two hours a day to be devoted to the friend day after day for some considerable time. Friendship does not come cheap.”

“If you don’t believe me when I say that time is the basis of friendship and the problem is that time is in very short supply, perhaps the fact that falling in love will cost you two friendships might convince you.”

The time it takes to make friends is important. It means that when you move to a new place, it is perfectly normal to take 3 months before feeling anyone is a friend and maybe a year before anyone feels like a good friend.

Your circumstances will also affect how quickly this process happens. Students leaving home and sharing a flat, or mums with newborns leaving the workforce and meeting for coffee 3 times a week will make friends faster than someone working a demanding job. But to get to friendships, you have to invest in spending time with people. As you do so, you both evaluate whether this relationship seems likely to work, and either keep putting to time in to build friendship, or allow the relationship to subside back to acquaintanceship.

(Incidentally, there are strong sex differences here. Women build and maintain friendships by talking. Men build and maintain friendships by doing together. “There was a surprising sex difference here. For the girls the activity that had the most effective preserving a friendship was talking together, whether in person or by phone. For the boys talking together had absolutely no effect at all—and I mean no effect at all – on how likely the friendship was to survive. What made the difference for the boys was making the effort to do stuff together more often when they had done before going to the pub playing 5A side football climbing mountains or whatever it was that they used to do.”)

Once friendships are built, with the exception of family, they need regular time to maintain the friendship or it fizzles out. “Friendships seem to flag surprisingly quickly [when people move away. One estimate is] that the quality of friendship declines by about one standard deviation for each year that the two former friends spend apart … in effect, 3 standard deviations change is equivalent to saying that a friendship of high strength will decline to no more than a mere acquaintanceship in just three years.”

“Friendships depend on you investing enough time and effort in each other to keep the relationship well-oiled and functional.”

That has big implications for church life, and especially for moving church. You cannot maintain all your church relationships when you move to a new church. There doesn’t need to be any falling out. But if you are now devoting time to a new church family, most of your old church family will drop off your friendship list.

One other implication of the importance of time for friendship is our time with God. Dunbar comments: “In fact, you can include anyone in your social network who is important to you—my favourite Saint, the Virgin Mary, God himself. You can even have your favourite soap opera character if you’re especially hooked on these.” For Dunbar, the point is not the reality of the person but how we treat them.

For Christians, we believe God is real (and think there are good reasons for believing God is real). And if we have trusted Jesus then God is our friend regardless of how much time we spend with him. But the benefits of the friendship and our feeling of friendship will depend on our time with him. We normally spend an average of 20 minutes a day communicating with each of our 5 best friends (though that may be concentrated into a day once a month, or a weekend a few times a year). So this suggests we need to spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day (average) consciously with God, listening to God (in the Bible) and talking to God (praying). If we don’t spend time with God, he will feel more distant- not because his love and friendship is less but because we feel less close.