I just left my church and previous circle of ‘friends’ because it was a toxic environment. I won’t get into any more details there, but now I’m in a space where a lot of the people I’ve invested time into over the years I’m not able to spend as much time with going forward.
So, I’m on a journey to create new friends. I’m finding that it is a lot more challenging now than it was when I was in college and interacted with more people regularly (I work remotely now).
I recently started running with this guy because we were talking at a mutual friend’s house and we found out that we’re both training for a marathon. I like him, and we’re having some good conversations as we run, but I can tell we’re still feeling each other out a bit.
I was doing some research into making new friends and came across this article ([https://news.ku.edu/news/article/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend](https://news.ku.edu/news/article/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend)) that states it takes about 50 hours to become a casual friend, 90 hours to become a “friend”, and over 200 hours to create a close friendship. This seems like a lot to me, but I’ve been out of the making new friends game for a while, so I’m not sure if this is true or not.
I’ve probably spent 30-40 hours with this guy at this point. I’d love to invite his wife and kids over for dinner (he has kids about my kids age), but I don’t want to rush things and make it feel weird. I’m not sure if I should take the risk and just do it, or give it more time and see how things develop naturally.
Does anybody have good advice or experience with this?