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> There is no short conversation you can have that'll turn a stranger into the kind of friend they're seeking.

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...

Real world relationships, those that are truly meaningful, take a lot of investment from both sides.

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.

I am not sure where you can draw a clear line on what is a meaningful relationship.

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.

> Some people decide to get married after knowing each other for a few weeks.

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.

It's a definitional problem. Building lasting relationships takes time because it's only after a long time that it will be considered "lasting."

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.

> Some of those marriages even end up healthy and lasting long term.

Survival bias.

Most of those "relationships" don't even get past the first date.

I will say that it's probably possible to min-max or speedrun a relationship, but I don't think it's easy, and I don't think we're at the stage where a phone app can do it for you.

I also don't think it would feel very fun, and is probably not good for you.

As though the normal means of forming relationships is fun or good for you? How many people commit suicide over failed relationships? How many people are committed to bad relationships due to sunk cost fallacy?

Forming relationships is a pain in the ass no matter how you slice it.

> As though the normal means of forming relationships is fun or good for you?

I'm sorry if you've had a bad experience, but for the most part, I've enjoyed making friends.

Find things in common so you can stay busy together without talking constantly. It gives your mind time to consider what and how to say things without being too vulnerable too fast. Ponder what was said. Go slower. Silence is OK.

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.

I have friends I've made through the conscious repetition of time spent together. But I've also made friends another way: we went to a festival together one weekend on Molly and LSD. Afterwards, I ended up hanging out with them practically every week and I really value that friendship too.

So there's clearly multiple paths.

"Time" : https://www.futurity.org/friends-time-1718952-2/

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.

> Or as someone said below being in deep shit.

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."

A funny outcome, possibly intentional, is a cheesy activity may force the common bond just because they are all going thru the miserable activity.

Unfortunately if you're in deep shit you'll (or at least I did) discover most of your friends give you a whole lot of "space". I get it. My kid almost died, it was a major bummer. She's doing okay now, can we hang out again?

> It. Takes. Time. That's it. There's no shortcut

There is - being in deep shit together for a brief time. The deeper the shit the shorter the time needed for a true friendship.

Announcing my new app: Shittr.

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.

One step further – all that miserable work can be productive! Match prospective couples/friends with someone who has a grueling job they need completed (e.g. help me move this refrigerator). It's like Tinder x TaskRabbit – couples fulfilling your Instacart order as a first date.

People pay a lot less for that, see https://www.goruck.com/find-an-event/

(minus the death part)

Regardless, that's inherently also going to involve a good deal of investment. Maybe not an investment of time, but emotions or some other factor.

Absolutely agree. This is why my closest friends today are those I met in primary and secondary school: we were all there, though we didn't always want to be; we all had homework that we didn't want to do; we all had teachers we didn't like; and we were forced to a full 5 days per week together.

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.

yeah but it also takes someone willing to make time for it. It's difficult to find. I had a reasonably close acquaintance tell me "between work and family I'm booked until the end of the year" which sounds like bullshit to me (I also have a job and family).

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'm one of these people that is bad at hanging out with others. I want to hang out with people, but life can be exhausting and sometimes you just want to cancel (or not even make plans) so you can just stay home and rest.

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.

This might not be about establishing "real" friendships. What is it that we lack when we're lonely? What helps? These aren't easy questions to answer, in my opinion.

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.

To me it seems the better ones are the ones where there isn’t a symbiosis (that’s kinda transactional but with friendship), I think the better ones are the ones without expectations other than having a disinterested bond.