I'm actually not sure this is true. And I say that because I'm actually not sure this is true:
> It. Takes. Time.
And I say that because of things like [0], which seems to say that connection is more about vulnerability and depth of understanding than anything else, and achieving that depth can be accelerated.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729723400...
Outside of the lab being vulnerable carries significant risk. For one, you risk being taken advantage of. This happens all the time, people are manipulated for sex, financial gain, and sometimes just for social status gains (clique shunning etc.).
It's pretty common for vulnerable bonding to be misused by one or both parties. This can be in the form of using inside knowledge for blackmail or negative gossip/social shaming of some form.
People can be horrible. Finding good friends takes time because you have to learn to trust each other. Fast friends in my experience do not last.
Some people decide to get married after knowing each other for a few weeks. Some of those marriages even end up healthy and lasting long term. If anything I think it’s maintaining a real relationship that takes time not forming it.
This is a high risk scenario. Being vulnerable early demonstrably can accelerate a relationship, but as I mentioned this is a high risk approach that most people would not recommend as the norm.
The question is: how quickly and how can you tell if a relationship will be lasting?
What are the signs?
What if its just a numbers game? Meet enough people. Some of them will last.
That said I'm "too trusting." I get burned all the time. Taken advantage of. I have a scarcity of natural love in my life and thus an abundance to give. Makes me a target for the narcissists.
Those who do love me think I'm brave for loving so freely -- everyone. Even those who hurt me. They know it's driven by a deeply personal isolation within my soul that waters my eyes in this moment. But they can never empathize and am happy for that.
Survival bias.
Most of those "relationships" don't even get past the first date.
I also don't think it would feel very fun, and is probably not good for you.
Forming relationships is a pain in the ass no matter how you slice it.
I'm sorry if you've had a bad experience, but for the most part, I've enjoyed making friends.
Friend dates. My gf and I have started double dating those we like. You can listen while the other two talk. Being quiet with someone can be very comfortable or unnerving.
So there's clearly multiple paths.
It's actually pretty fast actually. 200 hours is nothing.
What really happens is that grown up don't invest the required hours because their days are already filled to the brink.
200 hours would be 1 hour drink 4 time a week during a whole year. Once you word it that way, for sure, you got a friendship running !
Or as someone said below being in deep shit. First, while in deep shit, you spend many consecutive hours with your partner(s) adding toward the 200 hours theoretical threshold. Second, helping each others is a very fundamental dynamic in friendship, I suspect it's happening at reverse here : rather than becoming friends, thus helping each other, people who starts by helping each other then are friends (monkey brain power).
So maybe you should advice people wanting to make friends to join charities and other helping works : several time a week, selfless environment.
Yeah. There's ways to force or speed up the process. I think a lot of corporate team-building activities are basically this; "let's go do something miserable to simulate closeness."
There is - being in deep shit together for a brief time. The deeper the shit the shorter the time needed for a true friendship.
You pay me $1000, and I will put you, alongside two other people, through a miserable grind of an experience. One of you will not survive; the other two will form a long-lasting bond.
(minus the death part)
In a way — strange though it seems — one of the things I miss most about school is just being in a group of people forced to do things that we really don't want to do and that give us no pleasure, because one of the magnificent side effects of this rather masochistic endeavor is that it forms bonds with your peers.
Usually I take that as "you annoy me" and just refocus on other relationships. Then he comes out of nowhere and invites me to a BBQ six months down the line, or to hang out with him at his place.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think one of the things about modern life, especially urban life, that makes things most complicated is that it is increasingly harder to mix friends so instead of some stable group you hang out with when you're feeling like it, you end up having to juggle multiple individual friendships and your own personal time.
The obvious unsympathetic suggestion "go do some social stuff" ignores that lonely people often experience a non-negligible inertia that keeps them from doing exactly that. Sometimes it's better to say "now what" than "stop doing that".
I don't dismiss the possibility of a technological solution to the problem. Even if you don't get a real friendship out of some platform, maybe you get something that's good for you anyway. I personally like the idea of "cold call" one-on-one talks.
> The idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting. In playing around with the app, I had conversations with people about how to make friends in NYC and why it sometimes feel like others don’t care about us as much as we care about them.
I'm a moderator for a city-specific subreddit, and we get _a lot_ of posts by people bemoaning the lack of personal connections, and seeking _deep friendships_. And I always tell them the same thing: It. Takes. Time.
That's it. There's no shortcut. There is no short conversation you can have that'll turn a stranger into the kind of friend they're seeking. You can pay your five dollars a week to bare your soul to anonymous or pseudonymous users, but you need repeated human contact to form the basis for a friendship.
I'm glad they're trying to solve a real problem, but I don't think that "penpals - but with money" is it.