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.
These people don’t have much skin in the game because they’ve got their established friendships to fall back on. Allowing for some degree of attrition, they’ve managed to accumulate friends along the way.
They’re the folks who fit the round holes: whose lives have followed a conventional pathway. They tick the boxes of social norms in terms of sexuality, gender, neurotype, world views, lifestyle. The world is set up for them.
For those of us who pass each weekend staring into the void, our problem is not lack of time but the absence of a ready network of friends to call on and the means of acquiring one.
Looking into that void, I compare my life with other people’s lives of cosy social abundance as I imagine them to be. There is deep shame in falling short of what you believe to be an adequate compliment of friends. And there is deep frustration in not being able to find the connection you crave.
As a queer woman who hasn’t managed to build a ‘chosen family’ — the queer community’s consolation for being on the outer in our families of origin — the failure to build a strong friendship network feels even more intense.
While I’m generally content in my own company and don’t need a lot of social interaction, boundless solitude is not good for anyone. Research shows how crucial social connection is for mental and physical health.
In mid-life, the friendship stakes are higher. Fractures in this area of life are magnified as you get older and you look to friends not just as a means of social diversion but as a support network.
For those of us who are single and with limited family, it’s vital. I mean, who do you put down as your emergency contact or arrange to pick you up from day surgery? These moments are an acute reminder of how alone I am and how vulnerable that leaves me as I get older.
Friendships at this stage of life are about quality not quantity and they take time to develop. And the time you need them most is the time they are hardest to find.
Comparing my life to those whose trajectories have been so vastly different to my own is pointless. I need to meet myself where I am and figure out the steps I take from here.
But what do you do when you realise your friendship circle needs a serious revamp but you’re at a loss as to how?
There are plenty of articles lamenting the challenges of making friends as an adult and offering well-meaning advice. Most of it’s very surface-level and dances around the core reasons of why making friends as an adult is so mind-blowingly hard.
I’m well past expecting a social life to materialise without leaving my living room. But what if you’re doing all the things and still never seem to get anywhere?
‘It’s a numbers game’, my psychologist told me after another of my ‘I don’t want to die alone’ emotional purges that I can only justify inflicting on someone I’m paying $250/hour. ‘But burning through all those numbers is so tiring’, I protested.
For a while I was trying to use dating apps to make friends but they’re so skewed towards dating and hookups. When ‘just friends’ is defined by what it’s not, there’s not much to anchor it.
I really did give the Meetups a red-hot go and I had hopes for the queer women’s ones. But far from being targeted, the selection of people was as random as walking into a bar — which is pretty much what they were anyway.
Throwing a bunch of people together under the banner of sexual orientation isn’t enough to facilitate friendships. I had so little in common with most of them I couldn’t be myself.
And I figured that if I’m not feeling comfortable here, the kind of people I’m drawn to are probably not going to be flocking here either.
But where are they and how do I find them?
Marisa Franco’s book Platonic is all about making friends as an adult. It’s been a gamechanger for me.
Franco cites research showing that people’s social networks have been decreasing for the last 35 years. Most of us are now moving in a social landscape that works against connection. Increased mobility has broken down community bonds as we change jobs, neighbourhoods and friendship groups more frequently.
The people who were able to build and maintain friendships earlier in life have a distinct advantage. They’re not just drawing on their existing friendship circles but on the social capital to build on them. It’s a case of the rich getting richer. As Franco says, it’s harder for those of us who feel that we’ve missed the window of making friends earlier.
Us square pegs never experienced friendship as an incidental part of life that just unfolded without much effort. We were less likely to find common interests to bond over and we tend to be driven by a need to share deeper truths than garden-variety chit-chat. For us, friendship has always been a niche market.
It’s no wonder we feel as though we’re going against the grain. It’s easy to internalise the failure as you keep wondering what you’re doing wrong. The reality is that we’re all ‘swimming against the tide of disconnection’ and many of us need purpose-made tools to build friendships.
One of the extremely valuable things Franco does is to challenge the myth that friendships just happen by magic. Taking friendships for granted has meant that we lack knowledge of how to cultivate them.
When you reach the tipping point where the pain of loneliness eclipses the fear of doing something about it, it’s time for a radical shift. Being passive just won’t cut it.
Franco says that making friends as an adult requires you to be intentional and proactive. It calls for initiative.
Initiative in making friends is about being alert for opportunities and taking advantage of them. For example, Franco suggests asking an acquaintance for coffee, following up and checking in. Small acts can lead to bigger things — you don’t know where that initial hello to someone in your building will take you. These things are ‘promising seeds of connection’ and when we feel a ‘spark’ in them we should seize them.
If I’m honest, I’ve overlooked friendship opportunities or been too reluctant to take initiative. I wasn’t properly open to connection because that requires rewiring neural pathways primed for rejection and building new patterns of behaviour.
Initiative isn’t just about showing up but engaging and persisting. According to Franco, ‘covert avoidance is when you show up physically but check out mentally’.
It makes sense. I saw turning up to Meetups and other events as a tick the box exercise, that if I went to enough of them, at some point I should be rewarded for my efforts. I was still caught in the trap of waiting for things to happen. In addition, I’d burned through so much mental and emotional energy by the time I go there that I’d zone out and appear aloof and uninterested. And probably uninteresting.
I was still in self-protection mode, pre-empting rejection on the assumption people wouldn’t like me. I’m still working on reversing this assumption.
M y psychologist’s ‘numbers game’ theory is about half right. You need to be strategic about how you put yourself out there. Otherwise it’s like throwing handfuls of slime at a wall and hoping some of it will stick.
You need to persist to a point, but you also need to understand your needs and what environments where you’re comfortable enough to be yourself.
The spaces we find ourselves in shape the friendships we develop. There are certain types of environments that are more conducive to making friends. Franco says that the ingredients sociologists consider essential for connection are continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.
Repetition is a key ingredient in making friends because for many of us, it takes time and exposure to build the necessary underpinning of trust. Propinquity is the idea that you are likely to build relationships with people to whom you are consistently close. Accordingly, continuous social events like book clubs are better than one-off events.
I wonder how often we’re setting ourselves up for failure by putting our square shaped selves into social environments that don’t fit because we’re led to believe this is what we should want. But if you’re not comfortable in the environment, you can’t be authentic and you can’t make genuine connections.
The types of social environments in which I’ve felt most comfortable involve low demand and focus on a common interest or goal — volunteering, writing, even hiking. Shared activities anchor the interaction and generate more opportunities for spontaneous communication.
Where I can engage in something rather than standing around looking awkward and thinking of small talk, I feel like I have agency and the potential to shape the interaction.
Social environments are sustainable if they’re accessible. And if they involve an activity that you enjoy for its own sake, you’re more likely to keep doing it.
I think I may have found the optimum combination in a book club that is 15 minutes down the road. I’ve been twice and looking forward to the third one. It’s a relaxed, low pressure vibe and the conversation flows.
It feels like laying a foundation for connections to grow over time. Instead of a hitting a wall, there is possibility.
We’re stuck with an imperfect social landscape that we have to navigate but it’s empowering to know that there are tools to help us get there.
The reality is that building friendships involves consistent work with inconsistent results. Progress doesn’t often present in a steady, linear fashion because that’s not how life works.
The difference now is that when something doesn’t work out as I’d hoped, I neither internalise the failing as my own nor blame or project it onto others. I figure out what I need and take responsibility for it. And maybe sometimes folks are just busy.
Franco suggests rewarding yourself for the process and the skills you’re building along the way rather than focusing on an abstract future outcome.
For me, the crucial thing is that I’m putting myself in a position to make connections and that in itself gives me hope.
