How To Make Friends As An Adult

How to make friends as an adult: everything you need to know.

Have you ever wondered how to make friends as an adult? The simple truth is that making friends as an adult is not always easy!

But it used to be easy. Remember at school when we were kids and there were tens if not hundreds of kids that you could pick from to be friends with. If you didn’t really get along with one person, there was always someone else to get to know, or another group that was maybe more your style. Sure, there were fights and hurt feelings, sometimes you might have wanted to be friends with someone who didn’t want to be friends with you, but more often than not, there were still other options or choices. There truly were more fish in the sea, and once you found your fish, becoming friends was pretty quick and easy.

Unfortunately, life as an adult is just not that easy.

You see, what many of us don’t realise until it’s too late is that school is set up in a way to make it easy to get to know people well, to make friends quickly. But once we leave school, it’s nowhere near as easy to make friends quickly or to find friends with similar interests, and it can leave many of us wondering how to make friends as an adult.

This can be exacerbated if you’re particularly shy, or if you move interstate or overseas for work, or if you work for a company or small business with only a handful of people to interact with every day – leaving quite a few people in their 20s and 30s all of a sudden feeling a lonely. In fact, young adulthood in particular can be a lonely time, with more than 1 in 3 young adults aged 18-25 reporting problematic levels of loneliness according to a report last year from Swinburn University and VicHealth.

Even then, if none of those situations apply to you, you still need to watch out if you’re particularly independent or even just really busy, as it can be easy to accidentally neglect the relationships around you. Or through no fault of your own, your friends move away, one by one, to travel or pursue jobs opportunities or romantic interests, and before you know it, you might not have that many people you can call a ‘good’ friend.

Once we leave school, the number of opportunities diminish to interact deeply on a daily basis with a variety of people . This means that the choices are more limited, but also that we have to put in time and effort to maintain the relationships we have.

Why Having Good Friends Is Important

Connecting with others is proven to build emotional resiliency and make your life happier. Friends bring us laughter and good times and help us get through the bad times. They make us feel connected and help us build self-esteem. They can make us feel loved.

On the flip side, the Swinburn and VicHealth study found that higher levels of loneliness increased a person’s risk of developing depression by 12 per cent and social anxiety by 10 per cent.

It’s also shown that people with close social relationships fair better in old age. According to a recent study, “Social engagement and connectedness may simply be the single most powerful factors for cognitive performance in old age.” In short, staying involved in the community and having close social relationships is also critical to a longer life.

But when we’re not in a school environment, finding that time together becomes harder, so it takes longer and requires a lot more work. So, look after your old friendships, or develop new friends—but be prepared for it to take dedicated time and effort. Either way, having good friends will serve you in the long run.

Making friends as an adult isn’t always easy. Here are some tips on how to make friends as an adult and add some extra happiness to your life.

So, if you find yourself in a new town, or you have moved on from old friendship groups, you can sometimes be left wondering how to make friends as an adult…

To start with, it’s important to note that it takes a significant amount of time to make good friends. In a study by University of Kansas professor Jeffrey Hall, he found that it takes about 50 hours to go from an acquaintance to casual friend. It takes another 90 hours or so to move to friend status and then an additional 200 hours to become close friends.

So, if you’re willing to put in the work, here are some ideas to get you started on building new friendships.

Starting out on making friends

So, how do you make friends as an adult? To start out, look for an activity that brings together a variety of people and encourages regular social interaction. It’s about doing activities together that gives you something to do while you slowly getting to know others. This helps with the awkwardness of just meeting people in a bar or approaching strangers at a party. You could try:

1. Joining a class – ever wanted to learn to paint or do pottery? Classes give you a reason for seeing people every week. Once you suss out the people in the class whom you might want to be friends with, sit closer to them and have a bit of a chat on the way out of class. After a few classes, you can offer to carpool or grab a drink afterward for additional bonding.
2. Volunteering – contributing to your community not only makes you feel good, but it can also be a great way to meet like-minded people. If you like animals, try volunteering at your local pound or pet rescue centre. If you want to help the environment, find a group of people who plant trees or clean up beaches or organise in other ways to make a difference.
3. Join a sports team – this is an easy way to meet a variety of new people and often involves training and playing multiple times per week, upping the interactions and often speeding up bonding – particularly if you can play at a higher level.

Deepening the bonds of friendship

Once you have found someone you think you might want to be friends with and you’re into the ‘acquaintances’ stage, look for opportunities to do some deeper one-on-one activities.

1. Go for a hike – This type of activity is quite forgiving of long periods of silence, in case you’re both still getting to know each other and the conversation isn’t quite flowing yet. You can focus on walking or you can chat as you go, either way you’ll be getting to know each other better as you go.
2. Plan a short holiday together – divide the planning and work on it together, this is just as important as the trip away itself. The planning together is half the fun. So, take a trip to a local winery, or to the coast for the weekend, or somewhere you both decide would be fun, and fill your days exploring a new location.
3. Invite a small group over for dinner – this can be a really easy way to bring different but new people together. Again, the focus can be on the food, and it’s a short, defined time if things aren’t going too well! After dinner, you could try some conversation starters (see below) if you’re a bit nervous about keeping the conversation going!

Keeping the friendship alive

I know, life gets busy, but keeping relationships takes work. Here are some tips to keep the relationship strong.

1. Make an effort to see your friends at least once per month. During that time, make sure you’re spending quality time together – making time to talk to each other one on one. So if you go to the movies, or theatre or a show, make sure you also grab a drink afterward, or dinner beforehand.
2. Don’t forget to pick up the phone and just have a chat every now and then.
3. Use social media to share smaller moments you can bond over. See something that reminds you of something you shared? Send it to your friend with a short message.
4. Remember birthdays and Christmas – even if it’s just by sending a card.
5. Need some inspiration for things to do? Try some of these ideas to bring inspiration into your life.

BONUS: Fun Conversation Starters For Dinner Parties

1. If someone was going to make a movie of your life, what actor would you choose to play you?
2. What is the most boring sport ever?
3. When making a cup of tea, do you put the milk in first or last? Why?
4. If you could be invisible for one day, what would you do?
5. Which two historical figures would produce the most amazing children?
6. Who would you choose to rule the world and why?
7. If you were forced to change your nationality, what nationality would you choose?

Related content: Read Moving On article How to make cooking fun again

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