How to Make Friends as an Adult

Nobody warns you that friendship stops being free. For the first twenty-five years of a life it arrives as a by-product of institutions: school, university, a first job with a shared canteen, a shared house with terrible heating. You do not make those friends. You are simply placed in a room with the same people repeatedly, at an age when you have nowhere else to be, and after a few hundred hours something forms without anybody deciding on it. Then the institutions stop, and you discover that the mechanism you had relied on your entire life was never a skill you possessed.

The research on this is unusually blunt about what the mechanism was. Friendship, in the studies that have tried to quantify it, is largely a function of unplanned, repeated proximity — many hours, without an agenda, in a shared setting. Roughly two hundred hours is the figure most often cited for a close friendship, and the important word in that sentence is unplanned. The adult version, in which two busy people schedule dinner six weeks out and spend the evening exchanging status updates, is far less effective per hour, because a scheduled occasion pressures both parties to perform a summary of their life rather than simply be present in it.

Which points at the actual method, and it is deeply unfashionable because it is not spontaneous. Adults make friends by joining something that meets regularly and then continuing to attend it after the initial enthusiasm has worn off. Not an event; a recurrence. A choir, a five-a-side team, a class, a volunteer shift, a run club. The activity is almost irrelevant. What matters is that it repeats without either party having to issue an invitation, because the invitation is the friction point where adult friendship nearly always dies. Two people can enjoy each other enormously and still never meet again if someone has to be brave enough to ask.

The second requirement is a willingness to be the one who does the small, slightly undignified work. Somebody has to suggest a coffee afterwards. Somebody has to send the message that goes unanswered for three days and not read anything into it. Adults are extraordinarily reluctant to do this, partly out of pride and partly out of a belief that friendship should be effortless because it used to be. It used to be effortless because a timetable was doing the effort. The timetable is gone; the effort did not disappear, it was simply transferred to you.

There is also a quiet arithmetic problem that people rarely say out loud. If your existing friendships are all maintained at low intensity — a text at birthdays, a drink once a year — you can hold a great many of them, and you will feel lonely anyway. Depth is a function of hours, and hours are finite. Most people over thirty who describe themselves as lonely do not need more contacts. They need to take three of the ones they have and see them ten times as often, which requires letting some of the others fade. That feels like a failure and is closer to a decision.

The last thing worth knowing is that it takes longer than you expect and less time than you fear. Almost everyone reports the same shape: months of feeling like the new person, a stretch of wondering whether this is working, and then a point, usually somewhere past the half-year mark, when you realise you are no longer attending an activity. You are seeing your friends, and the activity is just where it happens to occur.