Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?

Making friends as an adult is harder than it was in childhood. The infrastructure has collapsed. Time is scarce. Trust is harder-won. Vulnerability feels riskier.

Remember when making friends was as simple as sharing your sandwich in the playground? When declaring someone your “best friend”, did it take all of five minutes and require nothing more than a mutual love of dinosaurs or Barbies? Those days feel like another lifetime. For most of us, adult friendship feels less like playground spontaneity and more like attempting origami whilst wearing boxing gloves.

I have 2,091 connections on LinkedIn, and another 2,617 followers. Do I know all these people? Well, quite a few, I generally only ‘connect’ with someone if I have met them in person. The followers just accumulate without any input from me. But until a few years ago, I failed the “pub test” spectacularly: having three friends you could ring on a Saturday and ask if they fancied a beer.

What changes between the ease of childhood friendships and the isolation of adult life?

As children, we had what sociologists call “continuous unplanned interaction“.

“People assume that friendships should happen “organically” and fall into their life like years past, but this is not true when we are adults. When we were younger, we used to find ourselves in contexts that had all the ingredients for nurturing friendships: continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. As adults, we no longer inhabit these contexts by default. Adults who embrace “aggressive friending” or radical responsibility for making friends are the ones who do.”

The school provided daily proximity to the same people for years. We didn’t need to schedule playdates or coordinate calendars. We simply existed in the same space, day after day, and friendships formed organically from that proximity.

As University of Maryland psychologist Marisa Franco explains, the ingredients for organic friendship formation are “continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability”:

“Sociologists have kind of identified the ingredients that need to be in place for us to make friends organically, and they are continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. As we become adults, we have less and less environments where those ingredients are at play.”

Think about it. When was the last time you spent consistent, unstructured time with the same group of people week after week without it being scheduled? For most of us, it doesn’t happen. We work, we go home, we manage our households, and we collapse into bed. The natural meeting places have disappeared.

Research confirms that proximity matters far more than we think. The Westgate studies by Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950) looked at student housing and found that:

1. Students who lived one door away from each other were most likely to become friends

2. Physical proximity was a striking factor in friendship formation - even more important than similar tastes or beliefs

3. “Functional distance” also mattered - for example, people living near stairways formed more friendships with upper-floor residents than their same-floor neighbours who lived farther from the stairs.

The study showed that in this relatively homogeneous group, proximity was the primary predictor of friendship formation, essentially proving that “people tend to befriend their neighbours.”

As adults, I reckon we’ve engineered proximity right out of our lives. How many of us know our neighbours? I know I don’t, other than the occasional nod hello.

Trust plays a big part. Recent research found that women, in particular, struggled to trust potential friends. This UTS article highlights:

“If we’ve had previous rejections as friends or suffered a breach of trust, we may find it harder to be trusting of others in the future. To trust a new friend means opening ourselves up and being vulnerable, just as we do in relationships.”

There’s that ‘vulnerability’ word again, which crops up constantly in my writing. We don’t always lead with vulnerability because vulnerability might have cost us before, or we are simply scared to open up. As research professor Brené Brown writes,

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome”.

I wrote last month about ghosting in friendships:

“So much communication today seems to fizzle out. You might have been chatting to a likely prospect on a dating app, or messaging someone you’ve known for years. Maybe it’s the easy convenience of modern messaging tools, instead of the deliberate and detailed written letter? All too often, closure seems elusive.”

These fadings of friendships can burn us. By the time we’re adults, we’ve accumulated a collection of friendship scars. We’ve been ghosted, let down, and disappointed. We’ve invested time and energy into relationships that evaporated without explanation.

So it requires us to summon up yet further courage to overcome this history and let our guards down.

Research by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found that it takes approximately 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend. To become a close friend? Over 200 hours.

For busy adults juggling careers, households, perhaps children, aging parents, and the endless demands of modern life, finding 200 hours feels impossible. Finding even 50 hours seems ambitious.

This time scarcity isn’t just about busy schedules. It’s about priorities. As Clark University psychology professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett notes, friendships reach their peak intensity during our years of “emerging adulthood” between 18 and 29. After that, life’s responsibilities multiply. We get serious about careers. We settle into relationships. We have children. We buy homes. All of those things demand time and energy, and friendship, being voluntary and flexible, often gets squeezed out.

Researcher Robert Putnam wrote in “Bowling Alone” that:

“For many people, the friendships formed in school, college, or early work life are the last new friendships they will ever make”.

For some people, including me, I did not even carry those friendships through to my later life. Instead, I saw myself as the ‘lone ranger’, handling everything myself, not asking for help. It’s not that I saw needing others as a weakness; instead, I don’t think I had developed the tools - the words, the vulnerability, the emotional maturity - to form new connections.

As I’ve written about the myth of self-sufficiency, this is particularly damaging for men. We are socialised from a young age to be strong, silent, and independent. Many of us find it nearly impossible to admit that we’re lonely or that we need friendship.

I know this pattern well. When I moved house last year, I pretty much did the whole thing myself, apart from hiring removalists for the large furniture. A few months later, a close friend took me to task, asking me why I hadn’t asked for help. I didn’t have an answer other than that I was just doing what I always do: sorting out my own problems. It was a new experience to be asked this and to question my answer.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development began following 724 college-age men 87 years ago as part of the longest-running study in history on human development:

“Close relationships…are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.”

I’m loving this article 36 Questions to Help You Live Longer by Kalina Silverman and Diana Rau. I think it’s worth reproducing their questions about relationships - I think we all should query ourselves:

1. How many close friends do you have that you could turn to in a crisis?

2. Is there anyone you would like to have a closer relationship with? How might you create a closer relationship with them?

3. If your relationships were flowers in a garden, which ones are blooming from care? Which ones are withering away from lack of attention?

4. Are you afraid of letting others get close to you? Why?

5. Who in your life do you trust the most and what did it take to build that trust?

6. What places or communities do you turn to for peace and comfort?

7. What do you do to create a strong community that you can call your own?

8. Are there any relationships that matter to you that you’re unhappy in?

9. If you could choose one person you could strengthen or improve your relationship with, who would that be? What’s a small action you can take today to do that?

There’s a chicken-and-egg situation. We need to be vulnerable to connect, but connection is what makes vulnerability feel safe. How do you build the trust that makes vulnerability possible without being vulnerable first?

As Brené Brown observes, “We are hardwired for connection, and connecting requires courage, vulnerability, and conversation“. But that vulnerability feels riskier as adults because we’re more aware of the potential for rejection, judgment, and pain.

Perhaps, like me, you have developed a suit of armour; we keep conversations to the mundane, we proclaim ‘we’re fine’, when that’s likely a pretty loose interpretation of our genuine emotions. Like my LinkedIn, we have loads of lightweight connections and conversations, but nothing that goes deeper than the shallow, pleasant interactions that never deepen into actual friendship.

At some stage, you have to take the plunge, show up authentically, and admit to someone you’d like to be friends with, whilst risking that these overtures might be rebuffed.

Social media presents relationships as infinite and interchangeable. Dating apps encourage us to swipe endlessly in search of the next possibility. We’ve developed what psychologists call “the paradox of choice”: more options make us less satisfied with our decisions. When friendships require effort or become inconvenient, it’s tempting to fade away and look for easier connections elsewhere.

But as I’ve learnt, when friendships end through ghosting or slow fades, they leave us with unanswered questions and unresolved pain. Being ghosted is associated with grief-like emotions, self-blame, rumination, and trust issues that affect how we approach future friendships.

Despite all these barriers, making friends as an adult isn’t impossible. It’s just different. It requires more intention, more effort, and more courage than it did when we were seven.

First, we need to accept that modern adult friendships rarely happen organically. We need to be deliberate. That means putting ourselves in situations with the magic ingredients: regular contact and shared context. Join something that meets weekly. Show up consistently.

Second, we need to get comfortable with making the first move.

Research by psychologists Erica Boothby and colleagues shows we consistently underestimate how much people like us after initial conversations - a phenomenon they call “the liking gap.” We assume we’ll be rejected, even though, more often than not, the other person enjoyed our company more than we realise.

“We found that following interactions, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company, an illusion we call the liking gap. We observed the liking gap as strangers got acquainted in the laboratory, as first-year college students got to know their dorm mates, and as formerly unacquainted members of the general public got to know each other during a personal development workshop. The liking gap persisted in conversations of varying lengths and even lasted for several months, as college dorm mates developed new relationships. Our studies suggest that after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.”

Third, recognise that friendships don’t have to be all-or-nothing. You don’t need to schedule epic three-hour conversations. Ten minutes here and there add up. A text. A forwarded meme. A quick coffee. Small, consistent connections matter.

Fourth, consider group friendships rather than solely one-on-one relationships. Research shows that friendships embedded in groups are more sustainable because there are multiple touchpoints. If one person is busy, someone else can reach out. The connections maintain themselves more naturally.

Finally, we need to challenge our own assumptions about self-sufficiency. Needing friends isn’t a weakness. Admitting loneliness isn’t failure. As philosopher Alain de Botton puts it, “A friend is someone who lets you talk nonsense and still respects you“. We all need spaces where we can be imperfect, uncertain, and still valued.

Making friends as an adult is harder than it was in childhood. The infrastructure has collapsed. Time is scarce. Trust is harder-won. Vulnerability feels riskier. These are real barriers, not imagined ones.

But the alternative to trying is accepting loneliness, and loneliness, as research consistently shows, is as harmful to our health as smoking or obesity. We didn’t evolve to be isolated. We need each other, not just for happiness but for survival.

The good news is that whilst you might be feeling lonely, you’re not alone in that feeling. Research from Harvard’s Leadership & Happiness Laboratory suggests that 42% of adults feel they’re not as close to their friends as they’d like to be. That means nearly half the population is walking around wishing for deeper connections. They’re probably just as nervous about reaching out as you are.

So reach out anyway. Send the text. Suggest the coffee. Join the group. Show up consistently. Be willing to be the one who tries. Accept that it will feel awkward at first, because everything worth doing does when you’re learning.

Adult friendship requires what it’s always needed: vulnerability, consistency, and courage. The difference is that as adults, we have to create the conditions for connection rather than having them handed to us. It’s harder work, yes. But the rewards, genuine human connection and all the health, happiness, and meaning that come with it, make that work worthwhile.

Being the person who tries is better than being the person who never does. Imperfect friendship beats perfect loneliness every single time.