Some bad news: Friendship is incredibly vulnerable to decay. If you’re not actively investing in your friendships, you may end up without any.
Why? Life happens. Our adult lives can become a monsoon of obligations, from children, to partners, to ailing parents, to work hours that trespass on our free time. A study of young adults’ social networks by researchers at the University of Oxford found that those in a romantic relationship had, on average, two fewer close social ties, including friends. Those with kids had lost out even more. Friendships crumble, not because of any deliberate decision to let them go, but because we have other priorities, ones that aren’t quite as voluntary.
The pace and busyness of many people’s adult lives means that they can lose contact with their friends at a rapid rate. For instance, a study by the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst found that, over a period of seven years, people had lost touch with half of their closest friends, on average. If we’re not careful, we risk living out our adulthoods friendless. This is a situation that’s worth avoiding. Friends are not only a great source of fun and meaning in life, but studies suggest that, without them, we’re also at greater risk of feeling more depressed.
With the natural decay that happens in friendship, we’ll have to make new ones throughout our lives. Here are some tips.
Make a deliberate effort to meet new people
Two types of avoidance inhibit your ability to make friends. First, you might practise ‘overt avoidance’ by not putting yourself in situations where it’s possible to meet new people. Instead of going to your friend’s movie night, with the chance to meet others, you end up staying at home. Second, you might find yourself engaging in ‘covert avoidance’, which means that you show up but don’t engage with people when you arrive. You go to the movie night, but while everyone else is analyzing the film after it’s over, you stay silent in the corner, petting someone’s pet corgi and scrolling through Instagram.
To make friends, you don’t just have to show up (overcoming overt avoidance). You have to say hi when you get there (overcoming covert avoidance).
Initiate
To embrace the importance of initiating, you must let go of the myth that friendship happens organically. You have to take responsibility rather than waiting passively. Science backs this up. Consider a study of older adults in the Canadian province of Manitoba. The participants who thought friendship was something that just happened based on luck tended to be less socially active and to feel lonelier when the researchers caught up with them five years later. By contrast, those who thought friendship took effort actually made more effort – for example, by showing up at church or at community groups – and this paid dividends in that they felt less lonely at the five-year follow-up.
Although we might fear that other people will turn us down if we initiate with them, the research finds that this is a lot less likely than we might think. When the American psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked research participants to open up conversations with their fellow train commuters, can you guess how many of them were shot down? None! Epley and Schroder concluded that: ‘Commuters appeared to think that talking to a stranger posed a meaningful risk of social rejection. As far as we can tell, it posed no risk at all.’
First, show up. Then, talk to people. And then, invite them to hang out. In sum, the secret to making friends as an adult is that you have to try.
I’ll share much more on the secrets to making friends in my How to Make Friends virtual workshop on April 30th (a recording will be available if you purchase a ticket).
All proceeds from the workshop are being donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Tickets are available here.
