You can’t fast-forward a friendship. The history is the foundation, and it only gets poured one memory at a time.

Closeness is made of accumulated time and there is no shortcut through it. You can meet somebody and click instantly, and that is real, but it is not yet the thing you have with a person who was there for three specific bad months. What makes an old friendship hold is a shared record: the in-jokes, the thing that happened in the car, the version of you they remember. None of that arrives faster than it happens.

Be patient with new friendships rather than judging them against old ones. Keep laying down memories with the people you want around in five years. Do things worth remembering later.