The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult

Ah, that looks very interesting. The ones currently closest to me seem about an hour's drive away in LA, but I'll keep an eye on it.

And yeah, that's the thing I've run into with Meetups. Great place to find a particular activity, harder to find people looking to meet people beyond just the activity.

I hadn't really ever given this much thought, but now if I categorize the overwhelming majority of my friends, they fall into the following buckets:

High-School Friends (who I still stay in touch with, although only peripherally, as I don't still live where I grew up)

College Friends (which includes a subset of High School friends, who I do a better job of staying in touch with, but who also mostly live back where I went to school)

Work Friends (the overwhelming majority of my friends are people I've worked with at one time or another. Reservations about mixing work with pleasure aside, people in my line of work tend to have a lot in common)

Photography School Friends (I suppose similar to college, but they are more recent, and local. This group is unusual in that the entire class ended up becoming really really close)

For whatever reason, I've never had trouble meeting people. What has proven to be a lot of work is actually committing to spending time with people (as my natural state is to never want to leave the house under any circumstances).

I've found online presence exacerbates that, as it's easy for me to convince myself that I'm being social merely by responding to people's Facebook posts (which doesn't really cut it).

It's definitely challenging.

One part is actually meeting people with whom you click. Unless you go to a lot of meetups and similar events, overall, you won't be meeting that many new people besides co-workers. And meetups tend to have a theme other than just having fun, whereas that's what most college activities are about. So you meet people in a serious context, and you need to bring the fun with you.*

So, you first need to come across someone with whom you click, and then you have to fuel that relationship. What's difficult there is that you need time. Once married with children, grabbing a beer after work is not as simple. You also have that awkwardness as pictured in "I love you, man" (and I believe a Louis CK sketch in his TV show): you have to acknowledge pretty fast that there's something going on and that you feel you could indeed become friends! It's one meetup, you're awkward now with that guy who seems cool, or you might never see him again.

But as you grow older, you also lose a lot of that casualness that you had before: you don't just invite them over after work to play video games. Now that you're a "grown-up", it's "a dinner". And since you're a grown-up, your home has better be somewhat clean, and you can't just serve pizza. What was a spontaneous interaction before is now a whole event that needs planning, some cleaning, some cooking, etc. (until of course, you become real friends) So these happen less, and friendships can be like making mayonnaise: if you don't make it go right now, you'll never make it go at all.

* I'm not saying meetups are no fun, just that it's not the end-game for everyone. Some people are there only for "professional" reasons and you need to figure out what people are looking for.

There's another factor. In my observation, people on the east coast make truer and deeper friendships than people out west. I'm a lifelong westerner and when I first started spending time in the east I felt, in this respect, like I had come home for the first time. People I met (socially, not on the street) would actually do things like make eye contact, listen to what each other said, and respond to it. They were noticeably more contactful.

On the west coast, things don't work that way. People seem nicer on the surface but it's a cool sunniness. They don't really mean the friendly things they say and they shy away from deeper connection. It's an alone-together vibe. The social ecosystem is less hospitable to bonding.