My biggest challenge making adult friends is that most of them are still children.
Why making friends as an adult is harder
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Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#92I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person. Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work. Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play…
Depends on the sport. I used to play pickup basketball. Whereas I recognized the players week to week, I never knew any of them. I only accidentally ran into one of them outside the game once. BTW, I loved the game and remember the players well. They just weren't friends. Then I sailed, crewed raceboats. I got to know many people quite well. There's a lot of social coordination and communication in sailing. Just sitt…
I agree, sailing is a particularly good sport for making friends… however it tends to be mostly older people. I just decided to make friends with people my parents age, and I’ve made a lot of good friends that way regardless.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#93If you make a little effort it gets easier once you hit 50s or 60s. People in their 30s and 40s are very busy with family and work. This changes once kids are gone and people near or have reached retirement.
Even if younger, keep your mind open to finding friends that are more than middle-aged.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#94I came to California, in part, because my family in the Midwest is a bunch of Jesus freaks - not the "love thy neighbor" kind, more like the "God hates fags" kind. So when a girlfriend (in California) invited me to her church for some volunteer work, I went prepared to hate on everyone. However, I was blown away, as they were the nicest people I'd ever met in my life. They all went out of their way to help one anothe…
I am sometimes jealous of religious people. They have a clear vision of the meaning of life and churches give them a social group they can join. Us atheists don’t really have something like that.
Look into the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. I'm a recently retired atheist and moved to a new city. My wife was brought up UU and they welcome all beliefs. We started attending services at a local fellowship a month ago and have been welcomed and are starting to make some friends there.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#95I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person. Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work. Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play…
I’ve been cognizant of this for several years now, but almost immediately after I began to act on it, the pandemic hit and threw it all into disarray.
Since then I’ve moved which has enabled a massive CoL reduction which is great, but at the same time I’m not sure this is where I want to be for even the next 5-10 years and so I’ve been resistant to putting down roots. Needing to drive to do anything also doesn’t help, as I find driving on anything but practically empty roads unpleasant.
There may be a pedestrian/cyclist-friendly city with great public transportation in my future, and so if I make a point to go out and do things consistently it’ll probably be there.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#96My biggest challenge making adult friends is that most of them are still children.
Sounds like your problem is rather looking down at other people, I can imagine it would be hard to make friends that way.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#97I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person. Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work. Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play…
A lot of people will simply not do this, even if they know they should. For this reason I think WFH is a massively more risky social experiment than most realize. It works for folks who were either already inclined to "go out and do things" or those who already had established social groups. We will see how this pans out in a generation or two. Having to have everything scheduled weeks in advance is utterly exhaustin…
I don’t think I’d have agreed to volunteer at church as much as I do without WFH.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#98I confess I largely stopped paying attention after the "as a kid, it was easy" comment.
As a kid, having playmates was easyish but having friends was tricky. As an ND intellectual multilingual round peg in a town of unilingual anti-everything square holes, I had acquaintances but no good friends until high school, one or two then, none in uni, though there were sufficient like-minded people that it mattered less, and, from then until 10 years ago, at most one or two.
In late 2014 I bought a Jeep and joined a hardcore offroad group (rocks, not mud). They are the most diverse group I've ever hung with, and I have half a dozen people I would consider close friends and rather more who would drop everything and drive 50km in a snow storm if I needed help.
I lucked out. But to say it was ever easy is misaligned with my experience.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
#99I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person. Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work. Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play…
> Find a group. This is obviously great advice, but most groups don't organically sprout around interests. Sports, especially, are something that I have a very difficult time imagining enjoying. And with the slow enshittification of meetup, where do you find these groups? Your local library?
Have you tried DnD? My father has a biweekly DnD session where he’s met a ton of people.
Re: Why making friends as an adult is harder
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