You're not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard (2021)
wbur.org
wbur.org
If you go to lunch with a friend, ask "would you like to do this regularly?"
lunch/walk/hike/movie/dinner/gaming/sewing/driving/<your-idea-here>
weekly/every two weeks/every first saturday of the month
don't worry about flakiness
I've done this with a few people and my life has gotten better.
at first it was a little awkward, but people RESPONDED to it. Others need this too!
Throughout school, my mates would meet up at a lookout on Wednesday @ 3-5ish PM, go grab dinner and just hang out.
Been doing this for 7 years straight. There is enough of us that someone being sick or away doesn't impact anything.
Another is regular coffee + sports with a friend. We are slowly meeting and playing with the other regulars there and entering small tournaments.
Still, it does require worrying about flakiness. It’s hard to get something off the ground if you can’t get enough commitment to book a table or even put it in your calendar . At some point if people want to make friends they should act like they care.
It’s really frustrating that the person already making the effort to organise things should take on the emotional toll of making everyone else’s life as noncommittal as possible.
And yes, the findings in TFA are true. The main catalyzer is something you do regularly with another person. That's it. It could be just sitting next to each other, but weekly. The best thing for this is joining a club, clubs happen around a common interest but also a club could just be something like "we sit on this bench every week".
I got busy with work and other stuff and have not put in the care this project needs to get it off the ground, but if you're interested in helping out, feel free to reach out.
Two takeaways (not mentioned in TFA):
* Being intentional means knowing thyself and deciding what you want in your life with as much detail as you can. "I want to meet new people" is not as good as "I want to meet people who like baking muffins AND are actively engaged with it AND also want to meet other people that are heavily into muffins". Sure, the audience is greatly reduced the more specific you go, but the value of that group when you find it is 100x more rewarding. You don't need 100 friends, you only need 2 or 3 genuinely good friends :).
* A lot of people are on the same boat as you, way more than you imagine. Something like 6-7 out of 10. So, grab your hometown population, multiply it by 0.7, that's how many people are willing to make new friends TODAY. The problem is that we have been trained to suck at meeting new people, the processes by which we discover each other and learn about each other has been labeled as "exposing yourself" by nu-psychologists (of which the vast majority should be imprisoned imo, but that's a different topic).
The reason why this (fear) has been ingrained into the population is to have a mass of people who age/die faster because they are lonely and (induced to be) stupid; but again, that's a different topic, lol. I just want to give you the overall context.
A club is the perfect excuse to let those guards down, after all, you and others think "I'm not a creep[2], I'm here because I genuinely like <collecting Pokemon cards or whatever>" and those connections start to flourish naturally (because they're natural, we are primed to meet people, we are primed to make connections). So, go ahead and just join one local club that caters to your interest; if it doesn't exist, create it, it will be a very rewarding experience.
1: Everyone told me to do D&D. I don't like D&D and trying to force yourself into something you don't really like just to meet people has low ROI (I've tried it for years, I stopped doing it).
2: Thinking you are one is part of the psychological abuse that was put in there on purpose and by design. I cannot stress this enough, one must understand the causes to tackle the disease properly.
On advice like yours, I started a niche club and ran it for 3 years. When people join your club, they're not there to meet you! They're joining to participate in the club. Now you're in the awkward position of responsibility as the club's host/organizer, with the additional distance between you and the other participants.
>The main catalyzer is something you do regularly with another person.
The easiest thing to do that in an intentional way is to find regular activities and do them with other people. The activity is the excuse to be together for x amount of time every week, be it whatever. If you choose something you genuinely like, not only will your intent be more sincere but even if you didn't meet anyone, at least you did something you enjoyed.
This is advice for people who have zero or one friends. If you already friends, then, by definition, you don't have this problem. Also, a bit controversial but useful, people who don't have this problem usually give very poor advice to people who have it. "Just make more friends, bro".
I'm curious to hear if you can think of a better way to make friends irl with a decent chance of success.
>I started a niche club and ran it for 3 years.
Did you not make one single lasting connection (friendship) from that?
Any environment where you can meaningfully help each other: a group for new parents, a study group at school, joining a non-profit advisor board.
> Did you not make one single lasting connection (friendship) from that?
I made a lot of activity partners: people I could talk to about that topic, and maybe some adjacent topics, but who didn't have a lot of interest in making me a part of their life outside that general topic. They wouldn't join invitations for dinner, they wouldn't hang out outside the club's context, and they would eventually flake out.
You start with setting specific relationships. Your gym buddies, your work buddies, that guy who's always at the bar you go to. For most people, their longest lived friendships started as school friends, or their parents' friends' kids. IMO, most people are able to figure this type of socializing out.
The next step up in familiarity involves building a relationship that is not fixed to a particular setting. You take a setting-specific friend, and invite them to something else. The easy way is the sort of thing where the place/timing is adjacent. You go, "Hey, gym-buddy, want to grab dinner after our workout? I've heard about this new Ethopian-Italian fusion place and I've been meaning to go". Once you reach that level of repoire, you start inviting them to things that are not immediately adjacent, like "yo, ACDC is going to be in town on the 20th, want to see 'em?". IMO, this is the step people fail at. They never make the step of inviting people to shit, and then end up with a bunch of work friends that they never see again after job hopping.
Then you make sure to see them in social settings at least every other month or so, and bam, friends. Then you start introducing your friends to each other, so that you end up nucleating a friend group. That makes it much easier to plan things, because you don't need to say "when is everyone free", you just make plans and some subset of people show up. Ideally you keep this up by establishing some sort of regular gathering, where inviting your other friends is encouraged. This lets you meet your friends' friends, which will expand your social life further. Sometimes multiple friend groups will merge, which again adds a bunch of people to your 1 degree and 2 degrees of removal set.
Beyond that basic process, the only key tips are 1) alcohol helps, there's a reason it's been the social lubricant of choice since the foundation of civilization. 2) It's okay that not everybody you ever interact with ends up a close friend. Knowing people helps you get to know more people. 3) Relationships are built on mutual utility. Most friendships exist because the people involved find spending time with the others more enjoyable than spending time alone. You can tip the scales in your favor on that by being enjoyable to spend time with. You tip the scales even further by being likely to say "yes" when invited to stuff. People don't like the feeling of being rejected, so someone who will routinely be down to hang when invited will get invited to hang a lot more than someone who is more picky. Don't agree to stuff where you'll be miserable, but if the options are a quiet night at home and a mediocre night of bowling with your friends, go with the bowling.
- Places you visit often might be fundamentally antisocial: e.g., a gym where everyone wears headphones.
- Tickets to popular events (AC/DC) are astronomically expensive and sell out long in advance.
- Inviting people who you don't know well to smaller, local, less spectacular events tends to bore people.
- If someone is your first local prospective friend, inviting them and only them out constantly can stress an already tenuous relationship.
- Introducing people to each other may reveal that they don't enjoy each other's company, so now they're both less interested in hanging out with your group.
- Your prospective friends might have no local friends of their own, so they depend on you disproportionately for all of their socializing.
- Your prospective friends might not drink alcohol or enjoy hanging out in bars, so hanging out at a bar no longer feels very inclusive.
- Some people have a tight budget and don't deal well with the perceived obligation to spend money when out with friends.
In my experience, this does tend to happen in smaller communities - a small town where everyone knows each other, and already has picked out all the people they're likely to be friends with.
> Being intentional is essential, she says.
> According to Franco, the key to building a community of friends is setting up planned interactions, like regular group events or rotating potlucks.
For me, this is D&D.
It can be hard on you sometimes when you are trying your best.
Personally, I've struggled with rejection sensitivity. It's been a whole other journey to recognize this, and make progress despite the uncertainty of outcomes. It's one thing to know intellectually that failure has nothing to do with me. It's another to grapple with the social pain that arrives regardless of what I know.
Also, it takes time. I've learned that faith comes from trust, which comes from time, and experience. The more I am around others, gaining experience with our personalities, we come to trust one another, and build faith in friendship.
One of my old best friends from my 20's/30's only leaves the house to go to work, sits alone on social media circle jerk politics, never returns texts, the few times I've seen him he just complained about not having friends and it being everyone else's fault.
If you want to make more friends, leave your house, go out and volunteer somewhere. Return calls/emails/texts with the people you meet. Do the work, get more friends.
What do you think would work well? What do you think the pitfalls might be?
The bars in my city don't have public APIs. If you start small and local, you could maybe get buy in from some places, "Send this address an email with event details and I will help you get butts in the door!"
Also if you build any app that lets you meet new people, especially new people with compatible interests, Match Group will buy you out and turn whatever you built into another tinder.
Not cynically. Just, is this a hobby for someone? If so, awesome. In my town we have a WhatsApp org for local musicians that helps with gear exchange, gig promotion, collaboration, etc.
Restaurants and bars and event spaces use a myriad of promotion vehicles. Other local businesses. The paper. Official announcements from the town. Other events. Etc. Same with the groups playing.
The ways to find this stuff aren’t amazing but not so bad that I’m searching for another app on my phone.
My point was that even as an avid music fan, I don’t hear a lot of folks looking for another app for this but maybe I am way underestimating what’s possible.
Do men (here) experience this often? Not often? I’ve not stumbled into this problem in many years. Perhaps this is an exaggerated issue.
And I’m still making male friends - not every day, but not none!
It is really not that hard coming up with something.