When you make a new friend

Hello, Guest!

Article about when you make a new friend

But there must be somebody out there who wants to grab a burrito with me. I Gave Myself a Month to Make One New Friend. How Hard Could That Be?

GO TO SITE

Americans have become terrible at forming and keeping friendships. But there must be somebody out there who wants to grab a burrito with me. In my twenties, I had a friend who used to show up at my doorstep uninvited with a six-pack of Red Stripe. She had a terrible job and a worse boyfriend, and whenever either was bumming her out, she’d plop down on the orange couch that my roommate had gotten from her dead great-aunt and tell us everything. In 2017, she moved to Montana, and I suppose if I had to pinpoint it, I’d say that’s when the trouble began. One day it became undeniable that I had a friendship void in my life. I didn’t lose my friends. There was no big dustup or disaster. No romantic rivalries or fights about politics had gotten in the way. They didn’t even go missing, exactly—I knew where they were. After Red Stripe landed in Missoula, the couple whose deck we used to grill sausages on decamped to Vermont. Around the same time, L. A. started acquiring my friends at an alarming rate, and the ones who remained all seemed to have colicky babies or punishing home-renovation projects on their hands. I admitted to myself that I’d had a hand in it, too: After all, I hadn’t changed cities in fourteen years, a job in five, or a romantic partner since Obama’s first term. I am not alone. (Except, I guess, literally.) Americans have become terrible at making and keeping friends. Here’s an incomplete list of phenomena that experts in the subject have blamed for this: apartments without dining rooms, Covid-19, “technology,” babies, not enough hiking. Whatever the cause, we’re a nation afflicted. This is particularly true for men. (If you cannot name even a single close friend, you’re not the only one: 20 percent of single men are stuck in the same position, trapped in what is being dubbed a “friendship recession.”) In 2023, a surgeon general’s advisory declared loneliness and isolation an “epidemic,” and I was showing worrying symptoms. I had a spouse, a child, a dog, a career—and almost nobody else to hang out with. But the magnitude of my problem didn’t become overwhelming until a gorgeous spring evening when I texted the group chat after one member reported having “a shitstorm of a day.” Did anyone want to grab a bite and talk it out? Not one person said yes. I was, in fact, ridiculed for the very suggestion. (“You love a last-minute plan lol” came the reply.) Related Story. I knew that I technically had friends, but none of them ever seemed to want to hang out. Even if the six-pack friend still lived in Brooklyn, I had a hunch that now that she has a toddler, her visits wouldn’t be as frequent or as spontaneous as they had been a decade ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I had gotten a text that said something like “what’s up tonight?” New York City, where I live, has more than 8 million residents, and apparently I did not know even one who’d be willing to grab a beer with me on a Tuesday night. So I briefly fantasized about moving, thinking it might give me an excuse to cultivate new friendships in my mid-thirties without seeming like a loser. Maybe a friend group in Portland or Tucson or Ann Arbor would invite me to join their trivia team or their supper club? We’d swing by one another’s tastefully shabby houses with some kind of homegrown fruit to share. Perhaps I would crash and eventually come to dominate a pickleball group. In this new city of my dreams, everyone would have a firepit, and everyone would use it regularly. But all it took to quash that fantasy was a little reading. When the Atlantic writer Katharine Smyth moved to a new city at forty with “a long list of people whom my friends, and friends of friends, had suggested that I meet” in hand, it wasn’t all that easy. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “these contacts weren’t as eager as I was about the prospect of new friendship.” Why it’s so hard to make friends as an adult isn’t rocket science. Dr. Marisa Franco, a psychologist and the author of the book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends , described what it takes to Boston radio station WBUR. There are basically two conditions that need to be met for people to develop a friendship “organically”: “continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.” This made intuitive sense to me. I do have friends, close ones (have I said that enough yet?), but with few exceptions, they’re people I met in high school, college, or those years after college when “shared vulnerability” is less of a precondition for friendship than it is an entire lifestyle. When you’re in college, “continuous unplanned interaction” is the name of the game. When you live with roommates, same deal. “Shared vulnerability” is almost impossible not to feel when you’re on your third or fourth Natty Light at the house party. It also helped me feel less embarrassed about the fact that although I’m friendly with my coworkers, I can think of only one who might reasonably describe me as a “friend” to a third party. In an office, there’s plenty of continuous unplanned interaction, but vulnerability rarely goes much further than shared gripes about budget cuts or the boss man. Outside of work, it takes a Herculean effort and untold Google Calendar server space to coordinate so much as a happy hour. I liked Dr. Franco’s description so much that I bought her book. But things got off to a rocky start from the jump, with these words: Proud of me? Insulting! Didn’t Dr. Franco hear me when I said I already had friends? They were just busy right now! I collected myself. I realized that I sounded like a sixth grader describing his beautiful girlfriend “from camp” and read on. Dr. Franco rightly points out that people destroy their own chances at friendship by fearing rejection. I was guilty of that, no doubt. She’s big on authenticity and vulnerability. Sometimes she verges on the obvious, suggesting that readers “share helpful information with friends” as a way of expressing generosity, but for the most part—and to my great dismay—the advice in the book is pretty much sound. I felt confident that enacting it would be excruciating. I was going to have to “muscle through [my] fear of rejection to say hello.” I decided to give myself one month to make one friend. That was it. If I couldn’t do it in a month, I figured I probably couldn’t do it at all. To keep myself accountable, I would write about it. I’d start with a list of rules. First, I’d have to define “friend” for our purposes. Deceptively tough. Would meeting for one coffee do the trick? Surely not. What about four? What if we did something a little more involved, like seeing a concert or taking a cooking class? We’d have to develop some recurring jokes, memories, shared enemies for it to count. Friendship requires a knowledge base, too: Can you really declare yourself friends with someone if you don’t know their brother’s name or what their girlfriend does for a living? How much work should it take?

When you make a new friend