checkWhat "how long have you known each other" actually says about a friendship
It's a throwaway question at parties, but the actual number — and how fuzzy or exact it is — quietly tells you something about the shape of the friendship itself.
A question everyone gets asked and nobody thinks about
"How do you two know each other?" always gets a real answer. "How long have you known each other?" usually gets a shrug and a guess. That gap is telling — the how tends to be vivid and specific, while the how long blurs almost immediately, even for friendships that matter a lot.
Precision says something on its own
Some friendships come with an exact date — the semester you were assigned as roommates, the day you started the same job. Others only get a fuzzy "sometime in college, I think." Neither is better, but the difference usually tracks something real: a sharp, bounded start (a class, a team, a shared event) versus a friendship that drifted into existing gradually, with no clear beginning to point to.
Duration isn't the same as depth
A twelve-year friendship that only sees you twice a year and a six-month friendship you talk to daily can both be genuinely close — length of time and closeness are related but not the same axis, and it's easy to accidentally rank friendships by years-known instead of by what's actually happening in them right now.
Why CheckVibe asks
When you add a friend on CheckVibe, it asks how you know each other and — with year required, month and day optional — roughly when it started. Not to rank friendships by tenure, but because that context, next to how you've each tagged the relationship, is part of what makes a friendship a specific thing instead of an entry in a contacts list.
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