I don’t think that’s the case at all. In fact, I think for a lot of us, making friends as an adult can feel hard.
So in today’s post, I want to share with you why I think this is, maybe help you feel a bit less lonely with this particular struggle, and offer up some practical, actionable guidance and therapeutic inquiries if making friends as an adult is something you’re personally struggling with.
Obviously, having friends is a good thing.
I doubt that I need to tell you that having friends is a good thing.
It’s what half the sitcoms and movies of the world center on and, as Cicero anciently opined, “Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.”
But did you also know that friendship may make us live longer?
Or that, according to a study published in the Journal for Developmental Psychology, best friends buffer the physiological stress effects in our bodies and the psychological impact on our “global self-worth.”
And, as the mother of all longitudinal happiness studies – Harvard’s Grant Study – as analyzed by The Atlantic pointed out, “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points … to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’”
And, in my professional opinion, for those of us who identify as un- or under-parented, or who live far away from families of origin and aren’t super connected to a local community, friends become your veritable family. Your urban family. Your family of choice. Sometimes the person or people you need or want to list as your emergency contact. Your go-to. Your person.
For these and so many thousands of other reasons, friendship is obviously critical to overall life fulfillment.
But what’s also true is that, for many of us as we age up through our late twenties and thirties, it can often feel harder to maintain old friendships and more challenging still to form new friendships at quite the same intensity and depth as our prior ones.
So why is this?
Why is hard to make friends as an adult?
While there’s no one single reason as to why it may feel harder to form friendships as an adult (we all have our unique situations that contribute to this), generally speaking, there are, I think, three primary reasons why it might feel harder:
- Reduction of built-in cohorts.
- Reduction of intensity of shared experiences.
- Schedule overwhelm.
Reduction of built-in cohorts.What do I mean by reduction of built in cohorts?
Think about it: From roughly ages 5-22 we journey with a built-in cohort of companions from kindergarten to college that basically bakes in daily socializing to our lives.
