Hi, today I will write about how to make friends as an adult. Making friends gets harder as time passes. When you are a kid you can go up to someone and literally say... (Wanna be friends? ) and for the rest of young life it's still relatively simple.
Sociologists say that there are 3 main factors in making friends. One is proximity, two is repeated, unplanned interactions and three is an environment that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in one another. School gives us the proximity plus the relationships and let us admit it, when we are younger most of us tend to open up a lot more because we haven't been hurt or disappointed yet. So the questions we have to ask ourselves are Is making friends as adult worth it? and also Is it possible?
And the answers are... Yes. We'll get to the how-to in just a second, but first it's worthwhile to talk about why friends are important. As the saying goes we are social creatures and although our culture tends to emphasize the kissy-kissy brand insert screaming rock band in the background of relationships above everything else.
Friendships can have just as profound an impact on our quality of life. As it happens, they can also take a large effect on our quantity of life. Most famously, an experiment known as the Australian Longitudinal Study demonstrated that people who have a strong friend network live an average of 22% longer than people who do not. Other studies have shown that gaining a strong friend network is as physiologically beneficial as quitting smoking. We all have stressful events in our lives, and the emotional sustenance that friendship provides us, allows us buffer some of the psychological effects of stress. Otherwise it's very easy to get caught up in what psychologists call rumination which is a kind of mental death spiral. So, how do you actually make friends?
Step one is to remember one of the great rules of life. Once you become an adult, life is a Do-it-yourself project. With no manual and much assembly required. You create the structures of your own life, which is scary and also wonderful. In school you probably hung out with people with the same interests as you. You both played tuba, you had the same major, you wanted to build an interstellar communicator so that alien friend can telephone home and go away before he died. Well you can still find people with the same interests. There are many ways to do this. Obviously connecting with people at work can be both cool and convenient. But, it will be different for everybody. Maybe for you it's a kick ball league, or a church group, or your schools alumni group, or going to the dog park, or just the gym at a regular time and seeing who else is around.Technology gets a bad rap in relationships a lot of the times, but it can be very helpful. Sites like meetup or girlfriend circles or even Craigslist can help you find people with similar interests. So that takes care of proximity, so what's step number two?
Start a conversation. To get the conversational ball rolling, you can use points from your environment. Nice dog park we've got here. Ask people about themselves, and be genuinely interested. And inquire open ended concerns like What's your- your favourite thing about the city? And open body language like an appropriate smile and non-crossed arms can be big help too. Just remember to take it easy and don't over share too soon.
And if that goes nicely there's step 3: propose a post activity. Ideally this'll be something that doesn't require a lot of time or money. And if they say no, that is okay. You can try again with them or someone else later. And remember that success in this area could hinge on something as simple as the day of the week. So please do not get discouraged.
Now a few of you guys, asked what about negative friends. What about those psychic vampires that just suck the life out of you. Well I want you to know- it is okay to break up with friends. You can do this by letting the friendship fade away, by just turning down a few invitations. If they ask you can just politely tell them that you wish them no ill will, but you think the friendship isn't working any more.They might not like that, but your happiness has to be more important than their anger. Actually now that I think about it, that is another one of life's great rules. Never let anyone make you feel guilty for wanting to become more awesome.
Most of all, remember that making friends takes time, and you're not going to have a deep connection with everybody. If you keep at it you're likely to have friends in different contexts. So you'll have your church friends, or your kick ball friends, or your alien friends, or your panel game buddies, and that's fantastic. And it is also good to try to find those friendships where you can bare yourself, where you can tell people what you're afraid of and what you want from life.For some people, me included, this can be really hard to initiate or to receive, but it's important to remember that those feelings of vulnerability are precisely what makes friendship worthwhile in the first place.
We have to share our hopes and our fears. We have to help and allow ourselves to be helped, because as grown ups that is how we structure our lives. That is how we adult. We help each other make sense of a chaotic world, inoculate each other from some of its pains and generally make the journey on this wonderful, terrible, beautiful, crazy spinning globe a more pleasant experience.
