How to Make Friends as an Adult?
126. How to Make Friends as an Adult?
I wanted to do this episode on friendship for 2 reasons:
- because many of the people I coach (and I coached more than 600 persons) prefer to meet their partner in real life rather than on apps, and it’s true that a good way to do that is to widen your circle of friends (about 30% of partner encounters happen through friends, according to the latest statistics I’ve read).
- I also found it important to address the process of making friends because, ultimately, building a relationship with your partner also relies on having a good foundation of friendship, in addition to attraction.
You've Forgotten the Investment You Once Needed to Make Your First Friends
When you’re a child, you spend 5 days a week at school or university, roughly 30 hours a week, with people your own age, where you have tons of opportunities to have fun and naturally create connections, some of which turn into real friendships and others stay acquaintances. As an adult, if you want to make friends, the time and effort investment needed to make friends doesn’t decrease, it’s your expectation that thinks it should be different, that you do two or three drinks and boom, you have plenty of friends. Often the opposite happens, because first you’re also clearer on who you are, your values, who you click with and who you don’t, and also you have less time than before. To give you my own example, when I moved from Geneva to Zurich, I had to invest time to make friends outside of work, my German classes, and outside my relationship with my husband, and it took me a year of one or two meetups a week to meet new people and finally make friends. So the idea isn’t to discourage you before you even try, but to be realistic about how long it will take, because you can’t shorten it.
❤️ Check out my webinar on how to finally be happy in Love!
The Friendship Expectations That Keep You From Making Friends
Just as in love we often talk about expectations — whether they’re realistic, whether we’re allowed to voice them or not — in friendship it’s a bit more elusive.
Are you allowed to have expectations in friendship? Do you need to communicate them?
To help you find your answer, I’m going to give you three aspects to consider when you want to make friends:
- Does the other person need friends? You might meet someone really nice at work or at the gym, but if that person doesn’t need new friends because they already don’t have enough time to see their existing friends, investing time to get to know them and try to become friends will inevitably disappoint you sooner or later, when you see that the level of friendship you want isn’t reciprocated.
- Your life stage and the life stage of your potential friend. It might sound silly, but if the person you meet is married and has children while you’re single, you won’t have the same constraints, the same desires, the same struggles, the same topics of conversation. In episode 127 I’ll talk about this because it’s often a source of friendship clashes, meaning friends who used to be very close can suddenly shift friendship levels precisely because of a change in life stage. So if you’re looking for a deep, inner-circle friendship, make sure you have compatible life stages.
- Circles or degrees of friendship. Not everyone is your best friend. When you want to make new friends, sometimes it’s a mismatch in the degree of friendship that’s the problem, because you’d want more from this person in friendship terms and the other person just sees you as an acquaintance or someone nice to grab a coffee with at work. This has 2 consequences: first, being aware of your degree of friendship with this person, and accepting that you won’t immediately be part of the other person’s inner circle will give you better odds in terms of friendship.
My invitation here is to ask yourself what you’re looking for in friendship (is it more acquaintances to meet people and go out, or are you looking for a more intimate friendship) and to observe whether the person in front of you is looking for the same thing.
Test It and Accept Being Disappointed Along the Way
In episode 125 I give you the list of concrete things you can do to meet friends and, why not, your partner in real life: doing activities you’re passionate about, going to Meetups, being a regular at your favorite café or restaurant, volunteering, activating your professional network, getting into the habit of talking to strangers.
Naturally, by doing this, you don’t know in advance whether, at the events you choose, you’ll meet people you have things in common with, people who share the same values, the same humor, with whom it flows easily.
Think of it like a job hunt: when you apply for a job you don’t immediately find the job you love, you have to search with no guarantee of finding it, and when you do find it, you’ve taken a lot of “no”s along the way — but does that stop you from job hunting?
No, because you know that in the long run, giving yourself the means to find a job you love is going to have an impact on your life.
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It's the Same for Friendship, Except We Take Friendship Too Much for Granted
So there will be outings where you meet interesting people, but sometimes you realize they don’t have the same expectations as you in terms of friendship — disappointment is part of the process.
The way to counter this is to manage to detach the outcome from your own self-worth, to not take it personally when these disappointments happen. You can get there by reminding yourself of the friends you already have, by asking yourself what you’d say to someone who was in exactly the same situation as you, by working on your emotional independence (more in episode 12).
This also means that you can be the leader of what you want in friendship. For example, if it’s your dream to have a group of friends and not just see friends one-on-one, take the initiative to make it happen yourself. If you want to take trips with your friends, suggest it and organize it.
Friendships Are the Consequence of an Existing Connection
Friendships are like romantic encounters, you need to meet the person regularly for the connection to happen naturally.
There’s no shortcut to building a connection, you have to start from zero with every person you meet:
- Getting to know the person
- Discovering what you have in common
- Sharing enjoyable experiences together
Without necessarily having a precise friendship goal or controlling the outcome, but more to make you want more of this person.
The only difference with romantic encounters is that in a romantic encounter, you need to clarify upfront the type of relationship the other person is looking for. I talk about it in my episode 6 on the 6 stages of a romantic relationship.
You Can't Be Friends With Everyone
You can’t force someone to be friends with you.
The first criterion of a friendship is reciprocity.
So take the time to check for reciprocity, the other person’s interest, by looking at the facts — that is, whether the other person reaches out to see you, whether they suggest activities, whether they show interest in you, in your world.
Focus on what you have in common
As you get older, you may feel that you’re compatible with only a few people, even when it comes to friendship: because your values are more clearly defined, your tastes are more clearly defined, and you have a better sense of what you want and what you don’t want.
This wasn’t necessarily the case when you were younger, when you were more open-minded in your choice of friends because the connection was more important than compatibility.
So how do you find the right balance?
To achieve this, I see two main approaches:
- Focus on what you have in common—it could be interests, it could be your stage of life, or it could be values.
- Set aside your judgment and appreciate the enrichment that the other person’s differences can bring you.
Going Further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
And if you need help learning all this, you can join my program Opening up to love, the fruit of my 8 years of practice. You can choose the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: body-based work to deprogram your nervous system’s automatic patterns and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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