Friendship used to arrive free with school, and for a while with work. Take the built-in repetition away and most adults are left with a wish and a full calendar.
The useful way to look at it is not as a personality problem. It is arithmetic, and once you see the numbers the method more or less falls out of them.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas put hours to it in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 to become a friend, and somewhere past 200 to become a close one. Students got there faster, near 120 hours, because a campus hands you dense unstructured time you did not have to arrange.
Now the supply side. The American Time Use Survey has the average American spending 60 minutes a day in person with friends in 2003 and 26 minutes a day in 2023. For fifteen to nineteen year olds it fell from 197 minutes to 57. Time spent alone went the other way, from 285 minutes a day to 333.
Put the two together. Twenty-six minutes a day is already spread across everyone you know. Give a new person an hour a fortnight and 200 hours is an eight-year project. That is the whole difficulty, and no amount of being more outgoing touches it.
The same research found the hours are not interchangeable. Time spent in shared leisure, small talk, joking and catching each other up moved friendships forward. Time spent working alongside somebody largely did not.
Which explains a common and slightly bleak experience: you can sit two metres from a person for three years and remain acquaintances, while somebody you see for three hours a fortnight in a pub or a workshop becomes a friend inside a year. The hours you already log at work are mostly not the currency.
It also explains why "we should get coffee sometime" never converts. One hour, once, with a three-month gap either side, is not enough time under any of these numbers to change anything.
This is the lever, and it is the only one with real force. Three hours a week with the same person is 156 hours a year, which crosses the friend threshold comfortably and gets within reach of close. A coffee every month is twelve hours a year, which crosses nothing.
So the practical move is a repeating slot rather than a series of meetings. Pick something you would be doing anyway, make it the same time each week, and let whoever turns up become a regular. Climbing on Wednesdays. Sunday morning chess in the same cafe. A run at six fifteen. The activity matters less than the recurrence, because the recurrence is what does the arithmetic for you while you are not thinking about it.
One person is fragile. Two or three overlapping regular things is what survives somebody moving, having a baby or getting busy in March.
"Meet people" cannot be answered. Nobody reads it and thinks that is me. "Somebody to climb with on Wednesday evenings, I lead about a 5.9" can be answered, and it will be answered by fewer people, which is the point.
On Notapub you write the specific version in plain words and it goes looking for the people whose own words line up with it. There is no profile to build, nothing to keep bumping and no feed to stay visible in. Your sentence keeps being matched after you close the app, so someone who joins next month with the same Wednesday problem is still brought to you.
The honest timing is hours to a couple of days, because the people on the other end have their own lives. If you want to talk to something sooner, there is a voice called Nora you can call now. She is not a person and she says so. She spends about fifteen minutes working out what you are actually after, and what you say becomes the sentences that go looking.
Around a shared activity that repeats. The repetition is doing most of the work, so the thing to look for is a standing slot rather than a promising person.
Research puts it near 90 hours together to become friends and past 200 to become close friends. At one coffee a month that is decades. At three hours a week it is under a year.
You say the specific thing you want to do or share, and the people whose own words fit it are brought to you, nearby or anywhere. Free on iPhone, Android and the web.