This article is not like the others on the same topic. I won’t try to make it sound easy, I’m not going to list a hundred ways to make friends as an adult in an enthusiastic fashion and pose myself as your savior as if I was giving away free money for the homeless. Let’s be honest, you’re not searching for a way to meet new people, you already know how to do it. You don’t need advice from anybody on this regard.
“Join a club”. Done, I’m still at home every evening. “Say yes to every invitation”. What invitation? Who said I was invited somewhere?
To be fair, this isn’t wrong advice. It’s just incomplete, there are some things that should be said that nobody says.
I’ve been living this problem for most of my life. I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved it, I’m the last person to talk to when someone wants to start having a social life. I can tell you what I’ve tried, what partially worked, what didn’t, and why — plus one observation that I’ve never seen in any guide on this topic.
Table of Contents
Why it’s so hard
Everybody knows adult life is busier than teenage life. It’s impossible to deny, but that’s not the only problem. There are several others that are worth mentioning that are not easy to solve.
Let’s start with the basics: we usually have a job. It takes away time, but it also takes away something just as important: your energy. If you’re here, chances are you’re an introvert, just like me. If you spend your social energy because of your job, what is left to give to someone else to try and form a friendship? Depending on how your day went, you might want to throw yourself onto the bed as soon as you come back home. I’m not going to criticize you for that, it’s understandable and I’ve felt it many times. We should both keep in mind that it’s not going to help us, though.
There was a time when my office was ninety minutes from home — forty-five kilometers each way. At the end of my day I was completely finished, there was nothing left of me even for myself to enjoy the little evening I had remaining (this is especially true for those working long hours). My life essentially stopped existing. It’s not a coincidence that this was also when I reached my highest weight. Since the only thing I could do for myself in those days was eating, might as well enjoy it, too, am I right?
There’s also another issue I’ve never seen anybody point to: how do you make friends when the people around you already have their own friends and aren’t interested in making some more? Does this make it impossible? Of course not, but it gets much harder for introverts.
What I tried
When I moved to a new city, I started using an app designed specifically for meeting people — not dating, just putting people together in the same room to help them socialize. The experience was simultaneously better and worse than I expected.
Better: I had genuinely good evenings. I laughed, I met people I liked, I was reminded that I’m capable of enjoying company. I even started a relationship through this app, which wasn’t what I was looking for but hey, these things can happen.
Worse: almost none of it converted into lasting friendships. Most users, probably including me (if we consider my behavior), were oriented toward a single good evening rather than toward building something ongoing. Many were people who had close friends elsewhere and were simply looking for occasional social activity in their new city — not a new core group.
The app also eventually moved most of its features behind a paywall that I found both expensive and humiliating, so I stopped using it.
What else have I tried? I went to events — fairs, public gatherings — partly to practice being around people I didn’t know. I joined karate, which put me in regular contact with people I genuinely like. None of it produced what I’d call close friendships in the full sense of the word.
I’ll be honest: at this point I’ve also partly lost interest in actively trying. The discomfort of not having a rich social life is real, but it hasn’t been strong enough to consistently push me toward doing something about it. That’s a mistake on my part, one that I should not have let happen, and you shouldn’t either. When you stop caring everything becomes even harder than it already was.
The friends who are not really friends
Here’s an observation I’ve never seen in a guide about adult friendships. To me this is both very important and very depressing.
I believe adult socializing wears the mask of a friendship to hide how deeply lonely we can be. Let’s share an example.
I can talk to anyone at karate. I have people I joke with, whose company I genuinely enjoy. But if I’ve never seen them outside of the dojo, can I call them friends? I don’t think so — at least, not with the meaning I give to this word.
Same with colleagues. You exchange messages, you share memes, you have a standing joke during the coffee break. But if you’ve never organized an evening together, never seen each other in a context that wasn’t work… what is that, exactly?
I believe the problem with adult social life is that it’s full of these almost-friendships. Relationships that (even when they are real, warm and pleasant) never quite cross into the territory where you’d call someone at ten at night because something happened.
Ok, but what can I do?
The advice to join activities you enjoy is technically correct and significantly oversold.
Yes, shared activity can create connection. Also yes, regular proximity helps. But the people you meet at a running club or a pottery class or a karate dojo might already have their established social circles, and they might not be looking to expand them. You can spend months in the same room as someone and never move past pleasant exchanges.
My advice is this: do the things you enjoy because you enjoy them. If friendships emerge, they’ll emerge from a real foundation — people will have seen you in a context where you want to be, they’ll have seen your best. They’ll have seen what you really are like.
When I’m at karate, I’m not thinking about social strategy, I’m thinking about karate. The relationships I’ve formed there are real precisely because neither I nor the other person was performing. I’m never trying to force a friendship, if it comes, it comes. What I have now might not have the right to be called friendship, but it definitely has the right to be called real.
Show up as yourself, in contexts you actually want to be in. That’s the closest thing to a reliable method that I’ve found.
It might not work for months. It might not work at all, at least in some environments. That’s not a failure of the method — it’s the harsh reality of adult connection. Don’t lose hope, keep giving it your best.
Be a friend of yourself first
Yes, now I’m spitting out a cliché, but it’s true. Be yourself, completely, without the mask. The friendships that form around a performance aren’t friendships with you.
It might take longer than you want. It will almost certainly be more awkward than the guides suggest. You might do everything right and still end up with a smaller social life than you’d like (if you end up with one at all).
This is important to accept. Doing everything right doesn’t guarantee the outcome you want. Adult friendship requires the right person, the right moment, the right energy from both sides. You can create more of those circumstances, but you can’t manufacture the chemistry.
What you can do is stay in the game, keep showing up, and refuse to disappear into a life organized entirely around avoiding the discomfort of trying.