One of the most frequent questions you see over on asktrp is "How do I make friends/build a social group?" And just as awkward and confusing is the romantic process for most men, so is the process of making platonic male friends.

Usually the top comment has advice from How to Make Friends and Influence People, which is a great book and I do recommend it, but I'd like to bring up another book that I've found even more useful.

The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over by Dr. Jack Schafer. I recommend reading the entire book for a full grasp of the topics covered, but most of it can be summarized into what he calls the Friendship Formula.


Friendship = Frequency + Duration + Intensity + Proximity

Frequency - How often you see someone

Duration - How long you're together

Intensity - How meaningful the shared experience is

Proximity - Physical closeness during the encounter


The great thing is a lack of one can be substituted with one of the others.

Think of all the friends you've ever had. Odds are they fit into this formula in one way or another. The more of each facet, the stronger the bond.

The scenario that most new guys describe is the difficulty of making new friends after graduating. And the question you have to ask is, Why was it so easy to make friends in school in the first place?

Because of an abundance of all four facets of friendship.

You see each other almost every day (frequency) for hours at a time (duration) facing the same challenges (intensity) sitting next to each other (proximity)

Take work friends for example. You have frequency, duration, and proximity working for you. Perhaps not intensity if all your conversations are work related, but even with a lack of intensity simply being next to each other every day builds a bond.

Just as sometimes you share an intense experience with someone you just met which quickly builds a friendship despite barely knowing each other.

I met one of my close friends at the gym. We happened to work out on the same schedule. Other than shooting the shit for a few minutes every night we barely talked, but simply being in the same room with another person (proximity) a few times a week (frequency) for an hour (duration) allowed us to establish a baseline friendship which eventually led to us hanging out outside the gym.


One last thing from the book. Other than the formula, he recommends having some kind of "curiosity hook". Anything at all that makes the other person have some kind of interest in you. I'll post excerpts from the book in the comments with examples. But just as women need plausible deniability, people in general need some kind of excuse for starting a conversation.