CNN: How Many Hours it Takes to Turn an Acquaintance into a Friend
Friends Christina Weber and Rahul Sonnad
Here's an unfortunate little truism, taken from a recently published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships: "It is not possible to have friends without first making friends."
Look, I'm very much in favor of having friends. I even have some myself! It's just that the making friends part -- the ambiguous zone between meeting someone new and comfortably calling them a friend -- is, if we're all being honest, kind of awful: the small talk, the worrying about coming off as either too needy or too disinterested, the pretending not to size each other up while really sizing each other up.
There's a reason everyone likes to complain about how much dating sucks, and yet we rarely talk about how forging new friendships is just another variation of the same awkward dance.