When the Search for Adult Friendship Hits a Wall
Establishing and keeping friendships has never come naturally to me and now that I’m firmly in mid-life, the difficulty is next-level.
I’m not alone in my aloneness. A sweeping glance over Facebook groups make it clear that loneliness and the struggle to find connection in adulthood is common. The same stories keep popping up, and for every telling, there’s plenty who concur.
The people who respond to these posts tend to fall into two groups. The first (which includes me) is frustrated by the lack of opportunity to make friends or the lack of progress when they try. Making friends has never been easy but it’s even harder now that we’re operating in a parched, inhospitable social landscape.
For me, the process of making friends has always been defined by a feeling of being on the outer and not fitting in. I was the classic square peg in a round hole, wearing myself down trying to be rounder. Learning much later that I had a neurodivergent brain explained a lot.
The other group breezily explains the problem away as just a matter of people being squeezed by the competing demands of their lives. The rest of us shouldn’t be offended if people are busy with more important things.
