“OnStaff at QDCT, why is it so difficult to make friends now adays? Do we not want to hang out anymore?” —Anonymous
After reflecting on this comment, I realized that I too seemed to share this sentiment. I have spent much of my adult life wondering why making friends seems so much harder than it was when I was younger.
As a teenager and college student, friendship seemed almost effortless. We had groups, we went everywhere together, we piled into the old beater of whichever friend had a car. I look at my old college photobooks, yes I kept all of mine, and see bright faces looking into the camera because we always ate lunch together, studied together, went to the movies, wandered around shopping malls and parks, and constantly texted one another about what we were doing.
If someone asked, “What are you doing tonight?” there was a good chance the answer was, “I don’t know. What are we doing tonight?”
But adulthood is different. At first, I assumed this was because adults simply become worse at making friends, because we got busy, we got married and have kids now and perhaps it’s because we become more guarded. Th old job, bills, new families and responsibilities just got in the way.
But recently I began to wonder if that explanation was backwards. Maybe the problem isn’t that we become worse at making friends, but maybe we simply grow out of the circumstances that taught us what friendship was in our formative years.
When we were young, we had very few resources and that limitation made us dependent on one another in ways we don’t necessarily recognize until those limitations disappear.
Maybe one person had a car, so everyone rode together. Someone else had enough money to buy dinner, so we all pooled or pennies to buy the family packs. Another person knew about a movie BOGO special or found something inexpensive to do and others had a dorm room or apartment where everyone could hang.
Our friendships weren’t just emotional relationships, they were practical networks of mutual dependence and we needed one another, and that need created opportunities to spend time together.
“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” —Parable
As adults, much of that has changed. Most of us can drive ourselves to places, we can buy or make our own meals and we can even go to the movies alone or make our own solo plans without needing a group to make any of it possible.
Independence is one of the great achievements of adulthood, but it has an unintended consequence: we lose many of the structures that used to bring us together.
A college friend might say, “I’m going to the movies. Who wants to come?”
An adult says, “I’m going to the movies.”
Neither is more mature or more meaningful, they simply reflect two very different stages of life. The same thing happens with nearly everything else. In school, we see the same people every day because we are required to be in the same places. In adulthood, we can go weeks, months or even years without seeing someone we genuinely like.
Nobody necessarily did anything wrong, the friendship simply lost its momentum. This may explain why adult friendship can feel so strangely elusive. We continue to expect friendship to happen the way it did when we were young, but the machinery that made those friendships possible has disappeared.
When we were younger, friendship was often accidental; you sat next to the same someone in class for months on end so you started talking, sharing lunch together or studying together, and eventually you met their friends and suddenly you were part of a group.
Adult friendship is rarely that automatic, instead, it requires intention.
You have to make plans and you have to follow up. ” You have to tolerate the awkwardness of initiating contact when you aren’t sure whether the other person feels the same way. And perhaps most importantly, you have to create the circumstances in which friendship can develop.
This is why I have started thinking that the answer to adult loneliness may not simply be “make more friends.”
Maybe it’s build more opportunities for friendship.
The easiest way would be to have somewhere to be with consistency and eventually, the activity itself becomes less important than the people who are there.
Perhaps we don’t actually miss being a “dark academic young adult.” We don’t miss having less money, less freedom or fewer responsibilities. We don’t even necessarily miss the particular friendships we had back then.
What I miss is having a life that naturally overlapped with other people’s lives. As adults, our lives are separate by design and the separation is both liberating, and lonely.
Maybe, then, adult friendship isn’t about recreating the friendships of childhood. It is about learning a new version of friendship—one based less on needing one another to accomplish ordinary things and more on deliberately choosing to share our lives with one another.
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