50 first dates: How far 1 woman went to make new best friendships and what it says about Americans and loneliness

Aimun Amatul never thought she’d have trouble making friends. In college, a new buddy could be found on the dance floor, in class or even in the girls’ bathroom with a simple “omg, I love your outfit!” the 24-year-old tells Yahoo Life. And then, “adulting” hit — and hit hard. Her first job out of college was as a nursing assistant, working 12-hour shifts, which left little time for socializing. Even after switching to marketing, she was so drained after her 9-to-5 schedule. She didn't have the time or energy to respond to old friends’ texts and calls, let alone go out and meet new people.

But in a suddenly shrunken social sphere, Amatul turned to an unusual source to restore her connections: Bumble BFF, the friend-making arm of the popular dating app. Amatul just started matching and meeting up with other women, and before she knew it, she’d been on 50 friend-dates from the app. And she wound up with enduring friendships. “Over time, I’ve created extremely strong friendships, and I’ve come to realize that the friendships that last the longest are the ones where I feel totally and completely OK being myself,” she says. But Bumble BFF was a sort of hail mary for Amatul. Despite being extroverted, she felt pretty friendless and at a loss for how to change that before she started swiping on potential pals.

With a loneliness epidemic upon us, according to the former U.S. surgeon general, the state of friendship in America is much under the microscope. Amatul is far from alone in feeling that forming connections, especially close ones, has gotten harder over time. So is friendship in the U.S. really in a state of emergency? Here’s what Amatul, the data and friendship experts have to say.

When it comes to friends, quality matters over quantity

“There’s definitely evidence that people are experiencing high levels of loneliness,” Natalie Pennington, an assistant professor at Colorado State University who studies friendship, tells Yahoo Life. Her own research, published in the American Friendship Project, shows that young people in particular are struggling. Pennington suspects that, for teenagers and young adults, “people are around them all the time, but they aren’t engaging.” That may mean American friendships have a problem of quality rather than quantity.

Pennington’s research suggests that, on average, Americans might not have dramatically fewer friends than they did in the past, but counting them turns out to be harder than it might seem. One 2021 survey suggested that the share of both men and women who had no close friends increased by four-fold since 1990. A recent Pew survey made similar findings: 20% of men and 17% of women said they had no close friends. But when asked how many friends — not close friends — people have, Pennington’s study found that nearly half (44%) of Americans said they had between one and five friends. She and her colleagues concluded that only 2% to 3% of survey respondents had no friends. That, Pennington says, is similar to what was seen in past friend polling from the 1990s.

Perhaps more important, “people are pretty happy with the number of friends they have,” says Pennington. “They wish they had more time for their friends or were closer with their friends.” While more than 75% of respondents to the same survey said they were satisfied with the number of friends they have, only 57% said they were satisfied with the amount of time they get to spend with friends. And more than a third (37%) said maintaining close relationships had been difficult or frustrating for them over the past year.

Are we too busy for friendship?

A lack of free time may be why about 66% of adults surveyed by the American Friendship Project in 2023 said it was easier to make friends at a different time in their lives. However, it’s more difficult to pinpoint whether this reflects how relationships change over a person’s life or if there’s been a broader shift in recent decades.

In either case, all of the experts that Yahoo Life spoke to say that time is a key factor.

Amatul certainly has seen that firsthand. After college, “you realize how little time and energy you have” for a social life. Amatul, who was recently laid off from her job, says that when she was working, “I would come home at 6 p.m., have time to eat, do a quick workout, watch a show and then go to bed.” She simply didn’t have the hours in the day to spend with friends. Plus, “there are days that I choose to rot in bed and scroll and hang out on social media rather than with my real friends,” Amatul admits. “It takes a lot of energy for me to want to break out of that routine.”

Many people, including Amatul, find that making and keeping friends is harder in adulthood. But Andy Merolla, a professor of communication theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, suspects that many Americans are working more hours to handle rising costs for basic necessities like eggs and housing. That’s costing them time for friends. “You have to schedule time for friends as if you were scheduling a doctor’s visit,” Merolla tells Yahoo Life. “It’s not just that there’s fewer minutes in daily life for friendship, but that it takes more effort to make those kinds of quality interactions happen,” he says.

When you’re already tapped out by work, parenting and chores, it can be hard to muster the energy to reach out to friends. “The more that our work requires us to recharge, the more that we might feel driven to spend that time [alone] because spending it with other people might strike us as similar” to work, he explains. “The contradiction is that you might need that time with friends; that’s the paradox.” In other words, time spent with others may seem like it will further drain us when it’s actually one of the things that helps to refuel us, Merolla says.

Is it the internet’s fault?

In a word, no. “There’s not actually strong research evidence that social media is uniquely bad for us,” says Pennington. “It’s just more net-neutral.”

Whether social media and other forms of technology are beneficial or harmful depend — like any tool — on how they’re used, she says. Time spent passively scrolling through TikTok or reading news does little to connect us with others, Pennington says. But more active engagement, like messaging a friend, can have positive affects on our social connections and, thus, our overall well-being. For Amatul, technology made all the difference when it came to making friends: Her 50 first Bumble BFF dates resulted in many delightful dinners, hiking buddies and a group of six girls that get together regularly.

How much time does it really take to make a friend?

When it comes to making friends, researchers have actually figured out how long it takes. On average, people begin to consider someone a friend rather than an acquaintance after spending 50 hours together, according to a 2018 study involving adults. But it takes between 120 hours and 160 hours to become good friends and 300 hours — the equivalent of more than eight days — before someone qualifies for the title of a "best" friend.

How those hours together are spent seems to matter too. The researchers found that, in the early stages of a friendship, just hanging out together seems to help people become close. But later on in relationships, intimate conversations were more predictive of close friendships than shared activities.

Small talk, beyond when you first meet someone, predicts a decrease in closeness. But time spent on real talk — discussions about the past week, shared jokes, deep conversations — at the six- and nine-week marks was linked to closer friendships. These kinds of interactions often involve the key friendship ingredient of self-disclosure, Amanda Holmstrom, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University, tells Yahoo Life. “It doesn’t mean you should tell somebody everything about yourself right way, but, to some extent, intimacy is contingent on people sharing thoughts, feelings and beliefs." In other words, to be friends, you have to take the time to get to know one another and be a bit vulnerable.

As for keeping those friends? People may spend as much as 1,000 hours over the next month with each good or best friend to maintain their closeness, the study found. That’s a lot of time that we may not feel we have in the busy enviroment in which we live — especially in adulthood, when we’re spread thinner by long work hours, child care and other mundane but essential tasks.

How to make and strengthen friendships, online and off

There’s no getting around it: Friendships take effort. But some simple tools and tips can make that feel less daunting.

1. Start small. Holmstrom and her colleagues gave a group of college students an assignment: Each day, give one person a compliment, tell them they cared about them or share a joke over the phone or in person. “Students who did that just one time, at the end of the day, had a greater sense of well-being; they felt less lonely and more connected,” Holmstrom says. You can try that with any of your own friends or acquaintances. It’s a small lift with a big payoff, says Holmstrom.

2. Shoot your shot. Given her positive experience, Amatul has been an advocate for using technology like Bumble BFF to make friends. But she also knows that being willing to message others first improved her chances of a connection. And, Merolla notes, you can think of this as practice: Sometimes, the joke you make with the parent standing next to you at the soccer game will land, and sometimes it won’t. That’s OK.

3. Open up. Experts agree that self-disclosure is a key ingredient to meaningful friendship. But it’s definitely a two-way street. Try to plan time — whether it’s a call, a walk or even running errands together — when there is plenty of space to just talk with a friend. And remember that you can signal your openness to connection in subtle ways, like putting your phone away when you’re around others.