Why making friends as an adult is harder

I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person.

Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work.

Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play sports. It doesn't matter if you're athletic or talented.

You just gotta show up and see the same people every week over and over. If you're a reasonably well adjusted person (and even that sometimes doesn't matter) you will make friends.

Again, making connections and friends is easy. Being around the same people regularly is difficult. Solve that problem and the friendships will come with little effort.

I have found that people generally understand the value of friendship and are welcoming to newcomers. It's been a very refreshing surprise as I've gotten older.

Get out there!

Most of the things mentioned in the article result in making friends as an adult being different than making friends as a child, but not necessarily harder. I'm in my late 50s and continue to make new friends.

I think the larger problem is that many approach friendship with the wrong expectations. As Zig Ziglar said.

"If you going out trying to find a friend, friends are scarce. If you go out trying to be a friend, friends are everywhere."

I really committed myself to solving this for myself a few years back. It does take commitment.

A few things I’ve done that work:

1. Start a “Dad’s night” with people in my neighborhood. We picked Wednesday night from 9 - 10pm. Started out just as BYOB in my back yard. Eventually we periodically went to a local pub that was near the neighborhood.

When you have kids of a certain age, it’s inconsiderate to bail on your wife while the kids are still awake. The hard time limit keeps it easy for anybody during the work week. Doing it mid week keeps weekend plans from getting in the way.

Lots of dads were thrilled to have this. The trick is consistent scheduling even if you have some weeks with no shows. That’s why starting it in my back yard was easiest until we regularly had about 8 people showing up. Doesn’t put you out if nobody can make it. Don’t get your feelings hurt because things like this start slow.

Covid killed it, but most of those guys became a Friday lunch group instead.

2. If you can, a cheap poker night. Like $10 buy in so the point is more to hang out than to loot your neighbors coffers and it keeps it accessible for people who have never played. This probably works for most games, but poker is such a broadly played game that it’s not that intimidating. Works in all weather conditions and works well with a sporting event on TV in the background.

Again, the key is consistent scheduling.

For either of these options, make sure people know they can bring a friend if they think they’ll get along with the group.

3. Take up golf. I haven’t done this but I know enough people who have. It works. Join a country club and play regularly. They’ll pair you up with people and groups. It’s not for everybody, but works well for lots of people.

4. Join a church with adult Sunday school. Free and easy way to meet people in your community. Usually comes with family friendly activities around community service too.

5. Get involved with local tech communities and meetup groups.

I made my first new friend in years simply by… asking. Struck up a conversation with a guy in line for coffee, on my way out of the cafe went up, gave him my number, said I was looking to make new friends.

The world is more like the playground than you might think. Just ask if someone wants to be friends. They probably do.

TBH, I thought this was a pretty empty article. It seemed to rehash things that I believe most people are aware of regarding the difficulty of making friends once you hit adulthood. Thus, I'll add one piece of advice that I didn't see mentioned in the article or the comments.

Beyond just having unstructured time together, I think I made some of my best friends when I was in a group that had a common goal, and we had to work together to achieve that goal. While the common goal actually isn't the most important factor in making friends, I think it provides the framework that makes the "unstructured" time so much more natural, easy, and regular. E.g. joining a sports team provides the framework of regular practice, but then you can make great friends getting something to eat after. Or in a community theater group, the rehearsals provides the structure, but it's all the downtime where you really get to build friendships.

I mention this because I so often here the advice of "join a group of other people with shared interests", and while that's true, I've found that is it's too "laissez faire", then the normal pressures of adult life can often get in the way, and it's harder to connect. E.g. a book club is nice, but when you get really busy it's easy to just bail and not feel as connected to the folks in the club.

I confess I largely stopped paying attention after the "as a kid, it was easy" comment.

As a kid, having playmates was easyish but having friends was tricky. As an ND intellectual multilingual round peg in a town of unilingual anti-everything square holes, I had acquaintances but no good friends until high school, one or two then, none in uni, though there were sufficient like-minded people that it mattered less, and, from then until 10 years ago, at most one or two.

In late 2014 I bought a Jeep and joined a hardcore offroad group (rocks, not mud). They are the most diverse group I've ever hung with, and I have half a dozen people I would consider close friends and rather more who would drop everything and drive 50km in a snow storm if I needed help.

I lucked out. But to say it was ever easy is misaligned with my experience.

I made lots of friends (and eventually my wife and best man at my wedding) in my early 30s by first joining a meetup group and eventually becoming the organizer for it. It was disbanded a few years ago (before Covid), but I still hang out with the 13 or so people I met in the group. The group lasted almost 8 years.

I had work friends in my 20s, but it was always difficult for me to make new friends after college. Joining a common-interest meetup group made it so much easier. I find the key is to meet weekly and in-person. If you don't do this, you just won't be able to put the time in to actually have a real friend.

It would be nice if it was as easy for adults as it is for kids. My daughter will go up to another kid and say "Do you want to be my friend?" and they will play all day together.

Children have it easy because they are made to go to school. It's simple forced proximity. Adults often had it easier in the past because people needed each other more, and that placed them together.

But advancing technology takes that away. People need each other less and less with each passing day because we are too self-sufficient with technology. AI is the final step that will make friendships very hard to form indeed.

It's not!

You just need a shared interest or objective in as close to 'real life' as you can get it, and you need to dedicate time to it that you would otherwise give to TV and doom-scrolling.

Gamers make real friends. Open source enthusiasts can make real friends. Music fans can make real friends (though your local scene is considerably better for this).

It does take management and maintenance, and if you're a single person then covid lockdowns will have broken many ties; I am definitely a more insular person than I was before.

But stop wasting your time watching TV, make a plan to make your social media more focussed on local activities and less focussed on personal drama, and try to be part of something a bit bigger than yourself. Get a dog, maybe.

For me it went something like: I'm lonely > try to make friends > it's hard, but wait I already have friends > try to reconnect with old friends > for various reasons old friends don't want to/can't be friends > try to make new friends > wait I want my old friends > not going to happen > volunteering

It feels like there's nothing of substance in this article.

My own addition to this beyond the "we need third spaces", etc. that gets repeated is that I believe where you live has a huge influence that maybe scales in a way that is not tangible to a person who hasn't experienced it. My life in NYC is wildly different than what it was back on the west coast. I struggled to make friends in Portland, Seattle, and SF. I found that those cities were not just lacking friendliness but somewhat actively hostile towards building friendships. Seattle having the "Seattle Freeze", SF being full of introverted fobs who had a disdain for anything that wasn't their own culture, and Portland being against anything that wasn't anticomformist.

By no means is NYC perfect, it is far from it, but it has allowed me to meet a lot of people who are completely open to meeting new people and making new friends. Will these be friends I have for the rest of my life? Probably not but they sure do make the time pass more easily. I do find it has a "quality" issue when it comes to friendships but I think that is somewhat also due to the sheer volume of people I am thrown. What is alarming to me about NYC is how many people who are native to this region are willing to make new friends. It almost felt that with any place that I lived on the west coast, it was almost a given that you'd never make friends with locals because once they found their little insular group then they'd never branch out of it and never make new friends. It created an overall unwelcoming environment because everyone didn't want to ever try anything new.

Anyway, just my two cents. Different cities even within the same country can yield wildly different results. I will miss the accessibility of friendship when I do inevitably move back to the bay area to start a family - but I am hoping I will be so focused on my immediate family that I will not be too bothered by the loneliness of not having as many easily accessible friendships.

Just suggesting because I don't see it here: foreign language group classes. I would say groups are pretty good for beginner level. But you are trading a bit of learning efficiency for the social aspect, arguably

I came to California, in part, because my family in the Midwest is a bunch of Jesus freaks - not the "love thy neighbor" kind, more like the "God hates fags" kind. So when a girlfriend (in California) invited me to her church for some volunteer work, I went prepared to hate on everyone. However, I was blown away, as they were the nicest people I'd ever met in my life. They all went out of their way to help one another, just to be helpful, not to destroy the "gay agenda" or "save the unborn" or whatever. No one preached to me, no warnings about burning in hell.

My point is that, love it or hate it, church can be a great way to meet good people. I'm still anti-religion, anti-church, although a bit less. But I can't deny the social support church can provide.

Friends and people to have fun with are not the same thing.

The older you get, the less you trust people because you know what you and those you grew up with have become.

You got deep insights into decades of politics, dark patterns in engineering, and fraud and lies everywhere. All that is done by people, who are either like you or not. In any case, it's hard to trust any of them, especially if you have kids and you understand how all these people turned into what they are now. That's up to 13% of the population, I estimate, who, if you are more honest than corrupting (in the worse sense), can simply be dropped after one or two conversations and evenings. Move on as quickly as possible, don't let them occupy any space whatsoever in your mind.

Radical honesty, trusting your gut and acting on it when it comes to people and most other things goes a long way and saves you decades of time, brain power, nerves and rewards you with so much peace of mind. If it's not an honest match, fuck it. There's a million other people.

But that must not necessarily matter when it's about just having fun. Just a getting a few good licks out of an evening and being human works with anyone. It's in everyone's interest to let shitty people pay for their sexual gratification, though. Their 'bad boy' or 'bad girl'-vibes are just a facade, a charade, a bad act and any intimate time with them is worth much less than the average sex toy.

I have a few board game groups I belong to. We occasionally also do things outside of board games. So, for me it was finding a common interest.

Another factor, for me, is being married. My wife has a lot of friends. They go on walks together, have regular Ladies Lunches were they try different restaurants in the area. I've become friends with some of the other husbands when we do things together as couples. Everything from movies, to holiday parties, to escape rooms, to board game nights (party games), to murder mystery dinners, etc.

I barely have any friends. Being a single father is incredibly isolating.

Doing group activities is the key, but finding a group that can include me and my son is very rare. Also, our neighbors are incredibly impolite. We're hoping to move homes soon, and I am hoping the change in perspective will have a good impact. So I would add neighborhood community also has an impact on socializing.

For me a huge challenge is that I grew older (college years) in an environment where people were strongly convinced that opinions and tastes can only be right or wrong. If someone liked something else than the group, they just didn't see the truth. It was exhausting and also meant that "finding friends" basically meant trying to find someone who likes and values exactly the same things as you.

I learned pretty late that you can get along very well with people who have vastly different taste and as long as your ideals are not directly contradicting, it still works.

So I guess my suggestion is: don't artificially limit your pool of potential friends by looking for the perfect match. No need to find your soul-copy. Someone with whom concersation flows is just fine.

If you make a little effort it gets easier once you hit 50s or 60s. People in their 30s and 40s are very busy with family and work. This changes once kids are gone and people near or have reached retirement.

As a kid, maybe your parent/guardian did the legwork to get you into the playgroup/neighbourhood/school/sport/etc. where you made friends.

As an adult, you have to do that bit yourself. (Thanks mom!)

Get a dog, show up regularly to the local dog park. You will quickly meet people.

Begging the author to volunteer in their community at the very least

I've slowly become more reclusive, and have been working from home since COVID. I think it's killing me.

This is my speculation through observation, but imho friendship in its pure form is a genetic program. If you're "no longer twenty these days" (semi-quote from Bernie Taupin), you may not remember how it was but just look at any teen company in public transport or elsewhere, it just feels like a single organism. And at that age it doesn't mean whether your views (if there are any) are similar, you're just attracted. Another speculation that this mutation could be tossed several times with different outcomes, like different spans of this attraction. And keeping the strong bonds later in life from the evolution standpoint it wasn't worth it really so the best fit was to narrow it to some period best for survival of both participant (or group)

It is hard, for those that treat life as 'working and slacking'.

Join a group - any group. Attend meetings. Contribute. Make friends.

It's still that easy. But, you have to give up social media doomscrolling and movie binging. So there's that.

A better title might be - why it's hard now to get off your butt and do anything other than work and slacking. Because it is hard. But if you do it - all the same friendship avenues are still there.

The biggest issue I have in making & keeping friends is that I'm constantly haunted by my backlog and the fact that I'm time-poor due to having a wife, three children, and a home to maintain.

Do I take three hours today to talk to some strangers or do I spend that time fixing my staircase or remediating the mold issue in my upstairs bathroom or do I finally build that STEM kit my 10 year old has been asking me to do with him for the past few weeks?

I honestly think the majority of the difficulty is that we live so far from one another.

In school, or college, it was easier to be in proximity to other people which is just not possible as an adult.

I notice that as we grow older patience in growing a friendship is less, usually at at adult change we look for a perfect person or someone with way less difference in tastes.

I made good friends when I was teenager, but once I started working I made a bunch more. Then once I had kids, I made a bunch more, but I share a lot more with the ones from work/school, however the new ones I do share kids, which is an enormous part of my life. The connection with work/school friends is a lot stronger though.

I don't find making friends that hard, surprisingly, given I'm an introvert.

Never made friends easier than in my 40s. I am late 40s now and made a really good friend only last year. I guess the 'secret' is just to talk to anyone at any time: I strike up conversations in the supermarket, when having a coffee etc; I always did. Often ends up having lunch or dinner and goes from there, or not.

It is even harder among expat communities, as those hard won friends keep going away, searching for other adventures.

maybe this is a projection, but it always seems like the people struggling to make new friends also tend to never put themselves in the bare minimum situation to be able to make said friends. i personally rarely go outside outside of anything related to work. maybe for others it is the same?

Volunteer. Find an organization that has a good mix of cause you believe in and an activity you enjoy spending your time on. For me, I built emergency housing for people in extreme poverty, I met other amazing volunteers and we'd hang out often outside the social work.

Play sports, and it becomes much easier.

Community is showing up. Anywhere, weekly.

Only the most profound reason for doing so will create a multigenerational community. But there are smaller shorter lasting communities you can string together if you would like.

Must be something in the air: From yesterday, 275 comments.

"One way to fight loneliness: Germans call it a Stammtisch"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42488263

This is the first time I heard of Dupe photos: https://dupephotos.com/ , they look more amateur but feel more human.

I have an idea for an organization for getting building close connections among men:

The organization would connect men together and then those men with “chores” they could do within their neighborhood. Yeah, kind of like a free Task Rabbit.

But the idea is that the men go out on a mission together to help random people in their community, whether that’s helping someone move some furniture around, or hang some pictures, or maybe paint a bedroom, or pick up some food for someone that’s sick. The guys need an excuse to hang out together, but they’re helping people in the process. And maybe they can go grab a drink or lunch when they’re done. They get a sense of purpose and something to feel good about, as well as a companion for the day’s little journey.

I imagine people will read this and think this sounds idiotic, and that’s fine, but if you might want to explore this idea with me a little more, my email is in my profile.