As kids, many of us learned this little ditty:
Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. It's a paraphrase of a 19th century quotation by Welsh composer and musician Joseph Parry.
You might think it is natural to grow apart from people you knew in the past, and while it is common, it isn't required.
The fact is that making friends takes a lot of time. According to studies published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, it takes about 50 hours of socializing for an acquaintance to become a casual friend, and 200 hours to become close friends.
In short, we invest a lot of time to make close friends, and that investment really should not be wasted.
Yet people are often unwilling to reach out to old friends. According to social psychologists Lara B. Aknin and Gillian M. Sandstrom in an article published in the journal Communications Psychology, more than 90 percent of test subjects said they lost touch with an old friend, and the majority felt neutral or even negative about getting back in contact. Researchers concluded that, with the passage of time, people come to think of old friends as strangers.
