Friendshipping

Friendship is an ancient survival skill. Millenia ago, Paleolithic humans worked together to find resources, protect one another, and gather food. Scientists think it’s possible they formed groups to better hunt woolly mammoths because the animals were ten feet tall and required several arrows and spears to take down. Today, you don’t need friends to help you hunt a bison (though maybe some of them would help, if asked), but they do make surviving a whole lot easier.

Biology agrees: Companionship boosts important feel-good chemicals in your brain. You’d think something so essential would be easier to attain in this modern age, especially because there are now about eight billion people on Earth. But while the numbers may be in our favor when it comes to meeting new people, it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. Making friends and keeping them as an adult is really, really hard.

Why Making Friends Can Feel So Difficult

To start, there’s no script for you to follow. TV and movies offer us cliché romantic milestones (exchanging phone numbers, asking someone out, the first date, the first smooch), but there’s not really an equivalent for friendship. How many times must you hang out together before you can decide you are pals? What’s the precise number of text messages that need to be sent before you reach capital-F Friendship? Is there a “third base” for best buds?

Logistics also play a part here. Maybe you live in an isolated area, and transit is an issue. Even if you live in a well-populated place with public transportation, there’s probably not a communal place where friends can drop in every day. No dorm room, no Central Perk, no Cheers bar. It’s tough to even find your people—the people whose values, schedules, and lifestyles gel with yours—let alone see them with any regularity. It was different when you were a kid. If you had a conventional childhood, you were surrounded by peers basically all the time. Most of your waking hours were probably spent at school, where you had recess, you were paired up in gym class, and you were forced into group projects. Socializing was built into your education; it was a structured part of your development. As a grown-up, you have to go out of your way to create the circumstances that give you access to new people.

And let’s be real: There is a monetary cost to having a social life, and most people don’t have those extra funds to spare. Adults often center their lives around making enough money to survive. You can’t just pick up a hobby to meet new people, as all traditional advice says, because most hobbies cost money. And while you don’t need extra money to make new friends, it would certainly make the task easier. If we could wave a magic wand and give you an extra $200 to burn at an arcade or your neighborhood bar, we would in a heartbeat.

But you’re too damn busy for that anyway. Imagine that every single responsibility you hold—your job, your health, someone else’s heath, your inbox, your pets, your overdue homework, paying rent on time—is represented by a bowling ball. Some are light. Some are heavy. But that’s gotta be dozens and dozens of bowling balls, right? (A public school teacher once told us that every one of her students = another bowling ball. EESH.) If you suddenly add “make new friends” to your list of obligations, that’s like carrying the bowling balls up a set of stairs or a hill. If you are part of a marginalized group of people, you have an even heavier load, more stairs, and steeper hills. Parents are also especially challenged to carve out time for themselves, yet they’re taught to feel guilty when they do it. Carrying too much at once can make you collapse, even if you have huge muscles, like us. Also, the polar ice caps are melting at disastrous rates, and why can’t any gun control laws pass in the United States? (We hope that sentence will be outdated by the time this book is in print, but probably not.)

With all this in mind, you can see that it isn’t fair to blame yourself for not being able to make new friends. (Unless you’re a jerk with no redeeming qualities. But you probably aren’t. Everyone acts like a jerk sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you are one.) There are legitimate obstacles in your way, and you’re working with limited time and resources. We’re rarely afforded the circumstances that make it easy to establish new friendships. But here’s the good news: Making friends does not require you to employ sweeping life changes. It requires effort, sure, but you don’t have to throw yourself into a uplifting movie montage where you call up long-lost friends from childhood, jump in the car for a road trip, fill your calendar with extracurriculars, scrub your apartment top to bottom, take out a dozen bags of trash, and get that perfect shiny new haircut. In fact, we don’t recommend making many dramatic changes all at once, because that level of commitment is just not sustainable. It’s simply time to tweak your habits and behaviors to make your life easier for friend-making.

Before You Begin

First things first: Before you get to know new people, why not get to know yourself? Understanding yourself is a powerful tool. We encourage you to assess your goals, intentions, good moods, bad moods, and habits, so you can learn how to best set yourself up for success in making friends. Here’s a starting point: Have you ever played one of those painful icebreaker games, like Two Truths and a Lie or Never Have I Ever? If you’ve suffered through a college orientation, this is probably bringing up some awkward memories. But luckily you don’t have to do this exercise with anyone else. Start by reflecting on what you would change about your social life and friendships. You can also write it down (and then probably hide it somewhere, or eat the evidence). Be very specific. It’s important that you imagine changes that are, in fact, attainable. These are not attainable:

But here are some changes that are achievable. Maybe you’d like to:

You’re focusing on the changes you can actually control, one at a time. When you restore an antique house—not that we ever have, but stay with us—you don’t overhaul everything at once. You repaint one windowsill. Then you replace the broken banister, or fix the lightbulbs. Then you make a decision about the flooring, and perhaps you discover something surprising, like there’s incredible antique hardwood underneath the linoleum and you want to keep it; you don’t want to change what’s already there. You upgrade what you want little by little, piece by piece.

To help you along, we’d like you to adopt the habit of “meta-thinking.” (Or “metacognition,” if you’re an actual psychologist, which we are not.) Metathinking means thinking about the way you think. It’s a mental tool often used to make students notice their strengths and weaknesses and determine the best way they learn. Here, metathinking means noticing what thoughts enter your mind and examining why they’re there, where they came from, and if they are actually true. Your thoughts dictate your mood and self-worth, so it’s important to be mindful of that voice in your head, especially when it’s cruel to you. This is particularly useful for anxious people who do a lot of negative self-talk. It is really, really hard to find new pals and try new things when you feel like garbage on the inside. You are not garbage, so do the work you need to do to feel less like garbage.

Here’s an example of metathinking in action: Say you’re at a hip coffee shop crowded with hotties in cool glasses, and you accidentally spill your iced latte all over a stranger. You apologize, but you spend the rest of the day reliving the moment, feeling embarrassed, and mentally berating yourself. You might think: I am always so awkward and clumsy and gross. Ughhh! But the voice inside your head is often an unreliable narrator. Hit your internal pause button. Ask yourself: Hang on. Is that really true? Do I deserve the way I’m treating myself over a mistake? Zoom out and look at the thought again. You may start realizing:

The goal of metathinking is to practice compassion for other people and for yourself. You do not have to believe all your negative thoughts. And look, we know this feels cheesy, but these mental games are worth the effort. We wish we could all go back in time and get the emotional training we deserved as children. Very few of us received profound childhood education on empathy, consent, self-esteem, and the personhood of others. So we’re talking to you, but also to that seven-year-old version of you who deserved better. Do the exercises for younger you. Because when you believe that you are someone who is good enough for human companionship, you will have an easier time making friends. And you deserve friends! You deserve to be cared for and understood. This doesn’t mean you get to point to a specific person and say, “I deserve your time and attention. Be my friend now.” But you can certainly develop companionship that is fulfilling and reciprocated and widespread. Humans need other humans.

Where to Start: Defining Friendship

There’s no universally accepted definition of what makes a friend. Even if you feel like there is, we wouldn’t want you to devote yourself to one narrow interpretation of what friendship can look like. Otherwise, you will pursue only one type of friendship, or you’ll compare your friendships to relationships that aren’t feasible or don’t make sense for you.

Here’s what we do know: In the most basic terms, a friend is someone you actively and joyfully welcome into your life. You’ve given them some kind of access to you, and they’ve reciprocated. Maybe you’ve exchanged social media handles, email addresses, or phone numbers. Friends ask, “How are you?” because they are genuinely curious about the answer. In conversations, they take turns asking questions and show interest in each other’s hobbies (or show interest in the fact that you’re interested). Friends do not need to participate in all the same things, but they participate in some of the same things. They remember facts about each other, like your beloved sports team, or that you dislike horror movies, or at the very least, that you are mortally allergic to pine nuts.

A friend is someone who respects you—your identity, your decisions, your sexuality, how you see the world, and how you choose to spend your time. They accept your personal boundaries and want you to feel comfortable and valued. A friend helps carry your baggage instead of adding to it.

Friends want you to have fun at an event even if they aren’t there with you; they want you to have other friends who love you; they do not hold claims to your time or attention. No is an acceptable answer between true friends. Friends are not manipulative, controlling, or abusive, and fights occur rarely.

Friends usually like each other about the same amount, but of course, it is impossible to have perfectly balanced relationships across the board. Sometimes you will feel extremely close to a dear friend, but that dear friend happens to have a best friend who predates you by a few decades. It’s not an affront to you that your friend has other people they are close (or closer) to, or have simply known longer.

Just like there isn’t a single definition for what makes a friend, there are many examples of what a best friend can look like. If you committed a grisly crime (and please do not—our lawyers would like us to say that we are not encouraging this), your closest friends would perhaps top the list of potential accomplices and confidants. A best friend can be your spouse, a sibling, or your group of college friends whom you love equally. Or you might not have a best friend at all. Movies and TV have taught us that everyone has a single best BEST friend, a better half, a top cheerleader, and if you don’t, something is probably wrong with you. But you don’t have to categorize your friends into gold, silver, and bronze, like the Friend Olympics. You don’t require a single “best” friend. You don’t need the Abbi to your Ilana, the JD to your Turk, the Molly to your Issa. It’s unfair to compare yourself to fictional characters.

A friendship can be low-maintenance, long-distance, temporary, or entirely online. Whether you communicate once a month at bar trivia or every morning over coffee in the break room, that’s a friendship. Friendships do not have to be acted upon every single day. Friends don’t need to follow each other on social media. You can even have friends you never make formal plans with, but run into at your neighborhood park, for example. Or maybe there are people you see just once a year in Tulsa at the Yarn-A-Thon Knitting Convention. Are these folks going to remember the names of your parents or deliver a heartfelt toast at your next birthday party? Probably not. Are they going to make your list of emergency contacts? Nah. But so what? A friendship can be specific to a setting or context and still be a meaningful connection.

Consider the Friends You May Already Have

As you begin your search for new friends, take stock of your flock. What mighty ducks are currently in your flying V? Is there anyone in your life you’d consider an almost-friend? Whom do you want to get to know better? (The answer to these questions might be “literally no one,” and that’s OK, too; you can start from anywhere.) We’ve listed some common and recognizable dynamics below that might help you understand yourself and your relationships, both new and old. Do any of these look familiar?

The Fairy Squad Mother/Brother/Other

This person is the group planner—great at organizing activities, hosting, and nurturing. They can act like a parent or guardian: always taking on the burdens of others. That’s so kind to do. Unfortunately, people like this often try to take on all the burdens. This kind of friend is prone to burning out, overstepping boundaries, and/or not taking time for themselves.

The Party pal

This is the type of friend that you meet for drinks or go out to clubs or concerts with. Perfectly nice, enjoyable company, but they’re probably not the person you call when you need serious advice or an important favor. Nothing wrong with that. It’s great to enjoy a mutually surface-level relationship with someone who knows how to have fun.

The Fandom Friend

This friend is fanatical about the same TV show / comics / book series / film franchise / podcast as you. The fandom, whatever it may be, acts as the friendship glue and the source of much mutual excitement. You might only interact with them through one medium, like Twitter, conventions, or a book club. You may not share much in common outside of this niche interest, but that’s OK! It feels pretty amazing to know people who love the same thing you do, and just as much as you do.

The Ensemble Cast

In a group, these are the friends you aren’t incredibly close with, but you are still so glad they’re around. Their company is joyous. You share meals, hobbies, interests, inside jokes, but you also don’t hang out with them one-on-one or exchange deep secrets. And that’s not a strike against anybody. Friendships do not have to be revealing or intimate to be important.

The Unpaid Intern

Friends help each other. Friends lend their time. But if one friend is always helping / giving their time / doing favors / running errands for the other, that’s a power imbalance. Wallace from Veronica Mars comes to mind. He did so much work for Veronica in the beginning of the series that he should have been on the Mars Investigations payroll. This is a common pattern to fall into, and it’s important to be aware of whether or not you are forcing any of your friends to be your personal assistant. Do you give help freely and gladly? If you don’t, consider what it might mean to recover some of your time and energy.

Younger Sibling and Older Sibling

Some people want siblings (or additional siblings, or better siblings than the ones they have). Or they want to care for and mentor someone, or be taken care of and mentored themselves. Whatever the reason, lots of people have friendships with a siblinglike dynamic, particularly those with an age differential. Intergenerational friendships can be amazing. But the “older sibling” in this relationship needs to be wary of the power imbalances and cautious about babying or talking down to their friend. Adults should be treated as adults.

This isn’t an all-inclusive list, but giving thought to the dynamics of your current friendships can be a meaningful exercise. You might sense real potential and start to build a bridge to someone—a stronger connection. Or you could decide to strike out and meet entirely new people. No matter what your circumstances are, we want you to have realistic yet high standards for friends. In fact, we demand it. You’ve got exactly one life ahead of you—as far as we know, anyway—and you deserve people who are kind and caring to you almost all of the time. (No one is kind all of the time.) As you begin this friendshipping journey, we give you complete permission to leave behind anyone who makes you feel anything but worthwhile.

Where to Meet New Friends

You might never feel totally prepared to meet new people. You probably won’t leap out of bed one morning and yell: “Hello, world! I’m ready for you!” Unfortunately, you may have to force yourself to start before you feel ready. Because unless you’re making friends on the internet (which is totally legitimate—more on this later), you’ll have to leave your home to make friends. You’ll have to go to new places, often by yourself, and talk to people. We’re very sorry about this. But we’re here to help! And, before you get started, know that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to meeting new people. Making friends as an adult is really challenging, and it’s a challenge you can take on from many different angles.

Start Close to Home

Perhaps you already have a built-in resource, but you don’t know it yet. We’re talking about the friends and acquaintances you currently have in your life. These folks will naturally be invited to events that you aren’t, and sometimes you can tag along. Tell your pal you are ready to meet new people and ask if they have any group hangouts on the horizon. Be clear about what you are looking for. Here are some scripts to get you thinking, but feel free to use your own words: