LogFAQs > #980296916

MrMelodramatic posted...

Yeah why does making friends suck so hard. Even keeping friends is a whole ordeal.

A huge part of making friends is simply being exposed to a person for long enough to get to know them and to mutually realize you want to be friends. It's easy in school because you're stuck with same few dozen peers (who live in the same area and are a similar age to you and therefore already have a couple things in common) for several hours a day for a couple years straight, plus whatever extracurricular activities you do, and every year you get a new batch of peers rotating in to get another shot at being friends.

As an adult, though, group extracurriculars tend to fall off and work takes over the role of consistent day-to-day interactions. Work involves longer exposures than school, but tends to have lower turnover, involve directly interacting with relatively few people, and has fewer guarantees of common traits/experiences, so you get relatively few chances to meet new people and the odds of finding compatible people are lower with each attempt. Other than that, meeting new people is mostly relegated to things like going to bars/parties or chance meetings in special interest businesses (like a library or game store), and those are unreliable enough that anyone not extroverted enough to recognize and latch on to a potential friendship immediately probably won't get another chance (complicated further by the fact that so many people doing that are looking for a romantic relationship that anyone on the receiving end who doesn't want that is likely to blow off attempts at simple friendship).

Consider the last year, and ask yourself how many different people you spent more than 20 hours with in that year, whether that's actively interacting with them (in person or remotely) or just being present near them. 20 hours is an arbitrary number, but it illustrates the point pretty well: That's not actually very long (hanging out for a total of two hours each month beats it), but outside of coworkers I'm guessing you haven't achieved that for many people that aren't already friends/family. That's why it's so much harder to make friends as an adult: The structures of your everyday life rarely expose you to new people for long enough to develop new friendships, unlike the structures of everyday life when you were younger, and that means you have to actively try instead of just relying on circumstance to make friends more naturally.

If you want to make friends, the best thing you can do is join some sort of regular extracurricular activity like a sports league or musical ensemble. That gives you that structure of regularly spending time with people with whom you share at least one common interest, usually also with at least a little bit of turnover so you get some new opportunities periodically.