How to Make Friends and Keep Them Close
On Making New Friends:
After moving across state lines six times in my adult life, I’ve learned how to make sure my most cherished friendships survive across time, space, geography, and life stages. I have also learned how to establish community through building new relationships wherever I live. I’ve learned a lot along the way, especially after mourning friendships that were painful to release, and have tried to use that knowledge to practice being in better, stronger, healthier relationships.
Here are my top tips for making new friends as an adult:
Deepen your existing long-distance friendships. What makes starting over in a new city bearable is the knowledge that I am never, ever starting from scratch. My friends in other places are still my friends! They are always just a phone call or FaceTime or plane ride away. They are the baseline from which I assess every new friendship so that I approach relationship building from a place of abundance and clarity, knowing exactly what “my people” look and feel like and so that I don’t settle for anything less.
Having a Friendship Abundance Mindset has kept me from feeling lonely or desperate for connection, and has prevented me from haphazardly attaching myself to people that aren’t a good match for me. As you get older and various responsibilities place higher demands on your time, who you give your limited time to matters even more. I try not to waste too much of it on relationships that regularly leave me drained or frustrated. Quality will win out over quantity time and time again, so resist the urge to constantly surround yourself with lots of people to validate your self-worth.
Get outside. Your mind is a prison, love. Step outside of your own insecurities and actually be in the world. Do fun things that align with your interests. Sign up for the mailing lists of local establishments you like (coffee shops, museums, yoga studios, concert and event venues, nonprofits, bookstores, etc.). Go to events that those organizations host. By yourself. Or with that random girl you went to college with who you always thought was cool. Go to your coworker’s roommate’s boyfriend’s New Years Eve party. Volunteer for a cause you care about. Do a cohort-based local leadership development program. Take a personal interest class or join a sports league or invest in a hobby. When you’re out doing things, introduce yourself, strike up a conversation with people you don’t know, or add your thoughts to a conversation that the group is having. “Your people” are right underneath your nose, doing the same things you like to do.
Court your potential friends and make it known that you are doing so. I get it, we all hate being rejected or appearing to be thirsty for connection. But human connection is part of human nature. We are communal beings and there is nothing thirsty about wanting to be around other people. If there is someone you want to befriend, tell them you think they’re cool and ask if they want to link up sometime soon. I once asked my six year old nephew how he makes friends on the playground and he said “I ask them if they want to play or I just go up to them and start playing with them.” Genius - let’s all do that!
Tell them you want to be friends or you’d love to meet up sometime soon. Ask for their contact info. Interact with them on social media. Invite them to join you at one of those events that you’ve started going to in Step 2. You have to put in some effort to build good relationships, so put aside your tendency to flake and court your new friend like this could be your platonic soul mate.
Don’t drop the ball. Friendships are like playing tennis. One of you has to serve the “ball of effort” over to the other by extending an invitation or starting a text conversation or buying a birthday gift. Then it is the other person’s responsibility to hit the ball back to you by accepting your invitation, keeping the conversation going, or by inviting you somewhere next. Then it is your turn to hit it back, and so on, and so forth. When you are building a new relationship with someone, do not drop the ball when it is your turn to serve. You could have a great connection but be “bad at texting” and realize way too late that they reached out to hang weeks earlier and your negligence is why y’all aren’t already besties!
Now, sometimes you are serving ball after ball after ball and are getting nothing in return. There is no exact science to knowing when to give up. My general rule is that if I have extended three specific invitations to a potential friend to hang out (with like an actual date and venue and activity, not just a generic “we should meet up soon!”) and they have turned me down three times in a row and/or have not initiated contact or a hang after I have done so, they are probably trying to figure out a polite way to get rid of me. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes people have a lot going on in their lives and me, random new person trying to hang out, is not a priority. Hopefully they can say that, but if they don’t, I try not to force it, don’t take offense, and give them space. If it’s not a match, move on.
Give what you would want to receive. People are super shy in new friendships because everyone wants to appear to be cool and unattached and to not have a deep fear of rejection. But you’ve got to take some risks in order to reap the rewards of a deepened connection. Brené Brown famously defined vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure” and trying to befriend someone is one of the most vulnerable things you can do.
Even though you have no guarantee that they will pick up what you’re putting down, just be the type of friend that you would want someone to be to you. Their pet died? Send condolences. You had fun hanging out? Tell them. I like to think of generosity as giving with no expectation of receiving anything in return. We are often so focused on what *we* deserve in our relationships that we don’t take the time to think about what we’re bringing to the table.
After following these steps slowly, over time, you will start to build a small roster of people that you can reach out to when you want a buddy to join you for a walk or brunch or at a party. And if you’re lucky, over time that roster will blossom into something resembling a community.
On Keeping Old Friends Close:
Even the best friendships require maintenance, and one of the biggest mistakes people make is taking their strong friendships for granted and not putting in the work required to sustain them.
The best book I have read on this topic was Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s Big Friendship. In it, they combine research, interviews, and a deep analysis of the peaks and valleys of their own real life friendship to offer us some real talk and much-needed education on how to be in big, whole, thriving, healthy, adult friendships and why it matters. I was obsessed with this book for months after reading it, not-so-subtly asking all of my friends to pick it up in a desperate attempt to engage in our own analyses of how our relationships had evolved over time, whether we were satisfied with the current state, and what we could do to strengthen our connections.
Among the many gifts this book offers to the reader, it concludes with three great suggestions for how to keep your friends close:
Ritual: Create commemorative occasions that celebrate the relationship. This could be an annual trip, holiday and birthday gift exchanges, a recurring phone date, or any other private routine that is exclusive to the friendship. These rituals can change over time and they don’t need to happen every day, but they require a consistent commitment to building new points of connection and memories together, and not simply relying on what once was to sustain the relationship.
Assurances: Find verbal and non-verbal ways to assure each other that you value each other and plan to be in each other’s lives in the future. From saying “I love you” and “thank you for being here, I couldn’t imagine going through this without you,” to listing each other as emergency contacts, there are many ways to do this. Don’t assume they know how you feel or what you want or what their place in your life is. As the circumstances of our lives change and we experience different life stages at different points in time, friends can often feel left behind unless we are intentional about assuring them about where they stand.
Openness: Establish a culture of talking about the hard stuff in your friendships. Be transparent when you are feeling stretched or strained in the relationship. When one of you feels like you are giving more or receiving less. You have to overcome your fear of abandonment by being honest about how you are experiencing the friendship. That is the only way you and your friends will be able to make the adjustments needed to keep the relationship going. By avoiding these moments of release where you can openly share how you are feeling, you are setting yourself up to let things build up until the relationship is beyond repair.
Sow and Friedman caution that not doing these things can turn a friendship “stretch” (the give and take that’s necessary to maintain a friendship over time) into a friendship “strain” (one person in the friendship feeling consistently stretched, and adapting to the other person’s needs, more than the other).
In my experience, feeling strained and not talking about it is the number one reason why strong friendships fail. If you are not willing to evolve and adapt to the new circumstances of each life stage, your old friendships will fail. If you are so consumed by your own life, that you fail to look up and do the bare minimum to check in with those around you, your friendships will fail. So if you value your homies, do the work to keep the love alive, even when it feels scary.
I don’t actually believe that making and keeping friends throughout adulthood is that hard, but it is effortful. Nothing survives on vibes alone. Good friendships require a healthy mix of self-awareness, generosity, vulnerability, adaptability, and open lines of communication. Good friendships should also, at a bare minimum, feel good to be in most of the time. A great friendship can help you grow into the best version of yourself. Even a mid friendship that’s not based on anything that deep can be a consistent source of joy and companionship and fun. We are not meant to do this life thing alone. Go find your people and, when you do, hold on to them tight.