Why is it so hard to make friends in adulthood?
The good news: This is fixable. The bad news: It takes work.
Q:
It seems like everyone has this question, but I feel like I never get an answer that truly satisfies me. I’m in my thirties. I want community. I know that only community will save us in this hellhole that we’re living in. But I have no idea how to build community. Making friends in adulthood seems really, really hard, and I don’t know why. Help?
A:
If I had a nickel for every time someone asks a question along these lines, I would have… nowhere near a significant amount of money, due to late-capitalist-driven inflation, but I would have a shit-ton of nickels.
Here’s what I love about this line of inquiry: People are waking up to the necessity of building powerful friendships, engaging in community care, and incorporating relationship anarchist principles.
And I have good news: It’s not that these are impossible things to do in adulthood. It’s that the amount of energy – emotional and practical – that it takes to sustain these kinds of relationships is a lot more than most of us have.
So what do we do?
First thing’s first, if you’re looking for a place to process these feelings, make real movement in your sociopolitical values alignment, and have accountability toward your goals, I got you:
I imagine that if you’ve been following my work, you already know the answer to the why. Why is it hard to make and keep strong friendships in adulthood? Well, because it’s designed that way.
In 2020, I wrote an essay for Human Parts, titled Friendship in the Age of Isolation, where I unpack some of this:
In adulthood, our friendships start to fall to the wayside, that intimacy replaced by romantic partners and newly forming family units – the apex of relational achievement. This divide mostly goes unquestioned. Until one day, we find ourselves lamenting how hard it is to make friends as adults, asking for an explanation – rhetorically, usually. Because it’s too disturbing to explore how the system limits our access to community on purpose. But the way we’re socialized to care about other people is hierarchical. And non-partners, non-family members fall to the bottom.
What happens when we get older? What, internally, allows us to eschew the beauty of friendship in pursuit of a domesticated, one-and-only kind of love? Why is monogamy, even, sometimes threatened by the sheer power of close friendship? Why do we let it be?
Let me count the ways: We have a hard time with friendships in adulthood because our socialized focus is set on other things.
It’s monogamy. It’s marriage. It’s the nuclear family.
Friendships play a very specific role in our lives under these norms, and it’s to socialize us as children and adolescents. This is part of what makes school such a pivotal place. In the United States, we have K-12 education, which roughly lasts from ages five through eighteen. Within that system, we are with our same-aged peers all day, every day. Similarly, in college, which is becoming more and more of an expectation for high school graduates, we are given ample opportunity to meet people through sharing majors, extracurricular activities, and, of course, dorms.
It’s much easier to form all kinds of connections that way: friendship, acquaintanceship, partnership. We’re constantly meeting people in our age group who share our interests.
In early adulthood, which is roughly defined as starting in our mid-twenties and moving us into midlife, we’re taught to reconsider our focus: to “settle down,” so to speak.
The amount of energy that it takes for us to find life partners is immense. We’re swiping on dating apps, attending speed dating and mixer events, going on first, second, and third dates. And often, when we find someone, we cocoon into that relationship, eschewing the connections we’ve made along the way to singularly focus on the budding “rest of our lives.”
Too many of us (myself included! I’m guilty of this, too!) will focus so obsessively on our partnerships that we don’t have the time or space for other kinds of intimate connection.
Whether it’s us doing it, or our friends doing it (or, hell, both!), we tend to grow further and further apart – until we depend on Facebook updates to know what’s happening in the life of who was once our closest confidante.
Think about it: How normalized is it to move cities and states for the purpose of family-building? And how common is it to do that for our friends?
Thus, as the relationships we’ve built fall apart, we tend to find ourselves in a precarious position: having to form brand-new friendships in a context that isn’t exactly habitable for it.
Our priorities have shifted.
And as we get older and our energy starts to wane and our responsibilities pile up, we no longer have the deep spaciousness that we once did for our friendships.
It isn’t until we notice the deep well of loneliness in our hearts that we realize maybe we got it all wrong. Maybe we need those connections to keep us happy.
Here’s the good news: This is fixable.
But here’s the bad news: It takes work.
Like, a lot of work.
Like, a similar amount of work as it takes to find and maintain a romantic partnership.
It takes putting effort into meeting people; we trade dating apps and mixers for resources like Bumble BFF and meetups. It takes work to build those connections: phone calls, hangouts, responding to text messages. It takes vulnerability to open up and form closeness.
And the truth is, I don’t think that most people want to put in that level of effort.
So maybe we need to change the question. It isn’t so much “Why is it so hard to make friends in adulthood?” It’s “What work am I putting in to create and maintain platonic connections – and is it enough?”
If you’re ready to do that level of self-reflection, I have two book recommendations for you: Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends by Dr. Marisa G. Franco and The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People by Rachel Wilkerson Miller.
And if you want to talk about this more, I’m here for you! Schedule a 20-minute discovery call here, and we can chat about your friendship goals and how I might be able to help.
Love,
Melissa