Three Keys For Building Healthy Friendships

By: Hannah Fillinger

Friendships can bring some of the deepest connection, support, and joy in our lives — but they don’t happen by accident, and how easily they come can change depending on where you are in life. As therapists, we talk about this with people across every age: a child hoping to navigate the playground, a teen at a new school, an adult starting over in a new city. Why does making close friends sometimes feel effortless, and other times feel like it takes forever?

Research backs up that it really does take time. A University of Kansas study found that it takes roughly 50 hours together to become casual friends, about 90 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. Schools, sports, cafeteria tables, and college dorms naturally create repeated opportunities to spend meaningful time together. Outside of those settings — whether you’re an adult building a life in a new place, or a teen whose friend group just changed — that structure doesn’t show up on its own, so building it has to be more intentional.

That’s part of why it’s worth paying attention to which friendships are actually worth investing those hours into. Some relationships leave us feeling valued and understood, while others leave us feeling drained, criticized, or unsure of ourselves. Learning to recognize the difference can help you protect the friendships that support your well-being, and reconsider the ones that don’t.

Recognizing Healthy Friendships

• Respect: A friend takes your “no” at face value instead of pushing back on it, and doesn’t roll their eyes at opinions or choices that differ from their own.
• Support: They show up for the good news, not just the hard stuff — genuinely excited about your wins, not competing with them, and there for you when things go wrong.
• Open communication: You can tell them when something they did upset you without rehearsing it in your head for three days first, and you trust they’ll hear it without punishing you for saying it.
• Fairness: The effort goes both ways over time. You’re not always the one reaching out first, remembering the details, or making the plans.

Identifying Harmful Friendships

• Hurtful comments: Jokes at your expense that sting a little too much, or comments about your choices, body, or relationships disguised as “just being honest.” Over time, this kind of feedback loop can quietly erode your self-esteem.
• Lack of mutual support: No friend is available every time — that’s normal. But if you’re consistently the one showing up and they’re consistently unavailable when the roles reverse, it’s worth asking whether your needs are actually part of the friendship.
• Controlling behavior: Guilt trips for spending time with other people, pressure to make choices to keep the peace, or subtle jabs designed to make you doubt other relationships in your life.
• Manipulation: Conversations that leave you apologizing for things that weren’t your fault, or a friend who always seems to come out ahead after a disagreement, no matter what actually happened.

Fostering Healthy Friendships

• Be a genuinely engaged listener. Ask a follow-up question instead of waiting for your turn to talk. People remember who actually listened.
• Spend real time together, not just proximity. Since it’s the hours of hanging out — not just being near each other — that build closeness, look for ways to create the structured time that school, sports, or a shared activity used to hand you automatically: a standing weekly hangout, a recurring practice or club, a group chat that turns into an actual plan.
• Set boundaries you can actually hold. Decide what you need around your time, communication style, and emotional energy before you’re already resentful — boundaries are much easier to set early than to retrofit after burnout.

Friendships shape more of your day-to-day mental health than we tend to give them credit for. If a friendship (or the lack of one) is something you’re struggling to navigate, individual counseling for children and teens or individual counseling for adults can be a place to practice these skills and untangle patterns that keep showing up. The 200 hours are worth spending — just make sure you’re spending them on the friendships that spend them back.