That gradual accumulation of shared moments added up to an important friendship during the early days of the pandemic, when they were trapped inside. They’ve checked in on each other when they were sick, and split a subscription to People magazine. Sometimes that time builds up slowly, as it did for two neighbors who have lived across the hall from each other for 20 years. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people spend a lot of their time anyway: work, school, church, extracurricular activities. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that.
The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. Though every bond evolves in its own way, I have come to believe that there are six forces that help form friendships and maintain them through the years: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace. I could continue this for the rest of my life and only scratch the surface of the infinite ways friendship shapes our lives, but I’ve done my best to pull out the recurring themes I’ve observed from these 100 conversations. When this project launched, I wrote, “People are at their most generous, their funniest, and their most fascinating when talking with and about their friends.” The interviews that followed only reinforced that belief. Being trusted with your stories has been one of the greatest honors of my life. I’m so grateful to the hundreds of people who have welcomed me into their relationships. I never did a single interview that I didn’t publish every friendship has a story. In them, I’ve not only heard about friendships, but witnessed them in real time-how the friends talk and joke together, how they remind each other of their shared history.
These conversations have felt different from any other interviews I’ve done. Saying goodbye to this series is bittersweet.
The 100th-which features a French woman and an American woman whose families were connected by an act of courage during World War II-published today. Read: How friendships change in adulthood It was intended as a onetime article, but the conversation was so fun, genuine, and sometimes vulnerable that I wanted to do it again. Did it work? Did it feel like dating? What do you do on a friend date anyway? So I interviewed two young women who became best friends after using the app. Having written a lot about both friendship and dating apps, I was curious about Bumble BFF. “ The Friendship Files,” my series of interviews with friends about their friendships, began with an idle thought. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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