In our case, it helped that we are both what we like to call “social initiators”: the ones who host the chaotic clothing swaps (“Friends of all body types welcome!”), the ones who will immediately send a calendar invite after someone says, “I’ve always wanted to go to that museum too.” Our shared love language is making and keeping plans. We have both had our moments of feeling sad while sitting alone at home, but we also know how to channel that energy into reaching out to a friend. We are nothing if not proactive women.
As a consequence, we both get frustrated at social moochers. These are the people who are always complaining that no one wants to hang out with them yet never buy an extra movie ticket and invite someone to join, or send an email to suggest dates for a long-promised hang. Moochers passively rely on other people to fill their social calendar for them. But for us, it was easy to feel like our advances were quickly reciprocated in the early days of our friendship. Neither sat back and waited for the other to reach out first.
Being an initiator is not for extroverts only. Aminatou, an introvert, is not always energized by being around people. She learned early on that in order to have a social life she would need a plan. Setting up regularly scheduled one-on-one activities is one of the ways she gets to see her friends while also having a great deal of control over the social settings she finds herself in.
Structure helps many people with this phase of making friends: signing up for a class together, joining a league, or always seeing a movie on Friday night. (Some researchers will tell you that men are socialized to be more interested in forming friendships around doing activities together, while for many women activities are less important. Nonsense! We know women who love activities and men who love deep conversation too.) Whatever you pick can become your thing until the friendship is strong enough to survive without the external motivation to see each other. You’ll know that’s happened when you find it easy to propose other contexts to hang out in, and when your friendship expands to other settings.
If we hadn’t followed up in a deliberate way, we would have ended up as people who only pop up in each other’s social-media feed because of a life event, prompting questions like, “Wait, who is this person flashing their engagement ring? Did we meet at a potluck once?” Almost immediately, though, we were making plans—and, even more important, we were actually following through. We resisted the cheap thrill of canceling last minute because we’d rather spend the night alone in our underwear eating snacks.
Eventually, we got close enough to spend time in our underwear together eating snacks.
* * *
Gotta put in the face time” would become a refrain of Aminatou’s in a later phase of our friendship, when we lived far apart from each other. But that maxim applies to the early days too. All significant friendships are founded on some serious time together.
You have probably heard about the 10,000-hour rule. According to the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, it’s the number of hours required to master a skill. The number is based on research done by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University who has said—twist!—that Gladwell misinterpreted his work. But the 10,000-hour idea became popular anyway, because we all want to know how to distill ambitious, difficult things down to their component inputs. “In cognitively demanding fields,” Gladwell wrote, “there are no naturals.”
In friendship, our cognitively demanding field, there are magic numbers too: 30 hours, 50 hours, 140 hours, and 300 hours. Jeffrey A. Hall, a researcher at the University of Kansas who has avoided being summarized by Gladwell, actually timed the early stages of friendships. Hall found that after 30 hours spent together, people said they considered each other “casual friends.” After 50 hours, they would start referring to the other person as a “friend” with no qualifiers.
But it wasn’t until 140 hours that people considered it a “good friendship.” And “best friend” was a label people started using only after 300 hours together. That might seem like a lot of time, but it’s actually only 12.5 days, just a little longer than a typical honeymoon trip. That’s also basically enough time to watch a full season of a TV show together. In our case, it was approximately a dozen movies of questionable quality—some of which we endured only because of Aminatou’s habit of bringing a Nalgene full of wine into the theater with her. It was many episodes of NYC Prep and Entourage and RuPaul’s Drag Race. It was more than a few house parties and bar nights.
Our overlapping social circles made it easy to spend so much time together. The low-grade anxiety of “Have I forgotten to invite someone?” was a dominant feeling of our years in DC. Like a lot of postcollege 20-somethings in cities where there are job opportunities aplenty, we had a sprawling, interconnected social world. The group dynamic could be a blast. After Ann organized a holiday dinner for “some quality ladytime” at an over-the-top mansion that doubled as a restaurant, we spent hours taking photos of each other in dramatic poses around the venue. Later we found ourselves in a nearby Japanese spot doing karaoke to T.I. and Rihanna’s “Live Your Life.” We rolled deep to parties too, and no matter where we went, a good time was guaranteed because there were a lot of us. When you’re still finding your place in the world or blowing off steam about the fact that you haven’t figured it out yet, there’s social safety in numbers.
Mostly, though, we could be found sitting in one of our apartments, doing next to nothing for hours. And it was definitely more than 300.
In the first year of our friendship, couch time was essential. After a quick exchange of “hey, what are you up to?” texts, Aminatou showed up at Ann’s door. As soon as she stepped inside, she pulled off her bra through the sleeve of her shirt—obviously Ann was already free-boobing and in a pair of sweats. A DVD of questionable quality was queued up. Ann emerged from her tiny kitchen with snacks. She was into making pizza from scratch and adapting the many cheese-based appetizers of her Midwest upbringing to suit her adult vegetarian tastes. (Take it from Aminatou: if you don’t have a Midwest diva in your life, you are really missing out on creamy, tangy, and super-spreadable dips.) We opened a bottle of wine or poured two glasses of whiskey, then sank into the luxurious feeling of the no-judgment zone. On other nights, it was Ann who turned up on Aminatou’s doorstep, kicking off her shoes and curling up on one end of the couch. Aminatou had her own cheesy-dip repertoire. She had honed her queso-making skills in the heart of Texas and knew every store in town where you could get Ro-Tel, the key ingredient. Her margaritas were legendary, and even when there were snow drifts outside, they made Ann feel like she was on vacation in a warmer place.
There was something so satisfying about caring for each other in these little ways. For two women who had been raised by mothers who did all the cooking and took charge of entertaining, it felt transgressive to prepare dishes and select movies with only each other in mind—no husband or children in the equation. This simple ritual, usually just the two of us or a few other close friends, became a foundation of our friendship. Our private homes provided space away from the men who dominated our professional worlds. In our offices and at networking happy hours, they were dictating what was important, what was smart, what was funny, what was useful. There was something freeing about spending time alone with other women and allowing our own standards and definitions to flourish. Why would we go out at all when the people we were most excited to talk to were willing to walk to our house in a pair of leggings and stop by a corner store for a bottle of $6.99 Syrah and a bag of Tostitos along the way?