It can be incredibly difficult to make friends as an adult.
This challenge has been highlighted for me every time I’ve made a major move.
My first transplant as an adult took me to Tennessee for graduate school. I moved with a good friend and had some family friends in the area. I had school and a job waiting for me, which gave me a ready-made cohort. Finding my place in the community was challenging, but never too painful, thanks to the support system I already had in place.
The second move was five years later, when I finished grad school and my husband and I moved to Vermont. I didn’t have a job lined up when we moved, and I had no idea where I would find community or connection. I was newly pregnant and felt extremely isolated. There was a deep desperation to the loneliness I felt in that season.
The third move was about three years ago, when my husband, three children, and I moved back to the area where I grew up. I hadn’t lived here since I was 18. I had the friendship and support of my parents and siblings, I knew a lot of people on a surface, social-media-friend level, and I had a few friends I had stayed in touch with over the years. The demands of working and parenting have made the process of finding and building community feel very slow and complicated. Though truthfully, the process of finding and building community may always be slow and complicated.
Making friends as an adult is hard. Really hard.
It is remarkable how many adults tell me that they are deeply lonely. It certainly isn’t just people who move and are new to an area. In the busyness of life, friendships often seem the least critical of all the demands we face. Family and work come first and there is very little left over to invest in friendships.
And yet, we need friends. We need people to laugh with us, cry with us, and bring us coffee when we are having a bad day. We need people to act as witnesses to our highs and lows, our struggles and victories. And we need to give that same gift to others. We need relationships and community; we suffer when we live in isolation.
But how do we make friends?
Friendship takes time; sometimes friendships form instantly, but more often than not, they grow out of extended time and contact. We need to create time and space for our friendships, even when we are tired, even when it’s not convenient. Find ways that you can connect regularly with the people you know that you want to deepen your relationships with; text, call, meet for coffee or dinner, plan a playdate, go on a walk. I have found it very helpful to have standing dates with friends; I have a friend whom I try to meet every other Wednesday at 7:30. Having that on the calendar keeps the weeks from slipping by without us getting together.
Friendship takes persistence. It’s easy to get discouraged when someone doesn’t respond immediately and enthusiastically to our first attempt to get together. It is very easy to perceive this as a rejection and move away from the relationship entirely. We forget that other people are busy, easily distracted, and dealing with the complexities of their own lives. They may want and need your friendship but have simply dropped the ball or missed the opportunity. We need to pursue friendships in the same way we want to be pursued.
Friendships require initiation. We all want to be pursued and invited. We want people to think of us and include us. This is a normal, healthy desire. It’s easy to forget that everybody else wants this too. The other day I was telling my sister that I felt sad that I wasn’t invited to participate in a group outing and she asked me if I had ever invited the group to do something with me. Nope. Point taken. We need to be includers, people who reach out and pursue others.
For a lot of us, our childhood friendships formed effortlessly and naturally. You can see this with preschoolers at the park playground. Kids will introduce themselves to each other and just start playing. Things get so much more complicated as we grow up.
Friendships take time, persistence, and initiation. It’s a lot of work. But, when we put the effort it, when we invest in the friendships we have and seek out new friendships, we can experience the joy and beauty that true community brings.