Does Anyone Know How To Make Friends As An Adult?

If you’ve cracked the code, please do share

Last year, my husband and I had a small, intimate wedding. We only invited a handful of guests consisting of close family members and lifelong friends.

My criteria for putting the guest list together was simple:

If I don’t have a high degree of confidence this person would jump in front of a bullet for me, then they aren’t invited.

That may sound harsh to some, but it really helped to narrow it down quite nicely.

Essentially everyone that attended (aside from a few plus ones) had been in our lives for about a decade or longer. Given that we were married at ages 27 and 29, that’s pretty significant if you ask me.

When reflecting on that fact, we joked and said,

“Oops, didn’t make any new friends this decade — I guess we’ll try again next decade.”

And really, it’s half true. We’ve certainly made a ton of new friends and acquaintances, but I suppose none that made the “you’d take a bullet for me” cut.

Somewhat sad, but also understandable I suppose. These things take time.

And then it hit me. The chances to form those lifelong relationships seem to be fewer and farther between for me as time goes on.

In college and prior to that, I made new friends all the time. Everywhere I went, there were tons of people my age that I could easily bond with.

It was completely seamless.

Life is just different now…

• My husband and I moved across the country 2 years ago, to a place where we didn’t know anyone to begin with. So the whole “meeting friends through other friends” thing is kinda hard to get rolling here.
• We were here for just a few weeks when COVID first hit. Obviously, the lockdowns didn’t help in terms of meeting new people.
• We both work from home full time (forever, not just due to COVID). While we do have coworkers we’re friendly with, they are spread out all across the country. Personally, I’ve never met 95% of my coworkers in person.
• Being married of course eliminates the “I make new friends through dating apps/being out at bars and mingling with people I’d potentially date” route. These techniques work well for my single friends, but not so much for a married couple.
• We (stupidly, in this context) built a home gym in our house, which is probably just about the only place we’d go on a daily basis after work and could strike up conversations with people.
• We do go out to places like bars, restaurants, etc. — but somehow it seems odd to just walk up to another couple and start talking to them?

I will say, despite all of the above, we are lucky to have made several friends recently through various extremely random circumstances.

But those, quite frankly, happened kinda by accident (but grateful they did nonetheless).

All of this to say: what exactly is the appropriate strategy to regularly meet new friends at this age and in these circumstances or similar?

Does anyone truly know?

We can’t be the only ones in this weird limbo phase (I hope).

Many people tell me that we’ll probably meet a whole new slew of people after we have kids and we become friends with the other parents.

This seems to be a reasonable assumption, but still, that might not happen for several more years.

When I was younger, I never realized what a unique privilege it was to be surrounded by so many of my peers all the time.

Now, I’m lucky if I even meet a new person once every few months!

I never thought I’d reach a point in life where I had to be so intentional about meeting and making friends.

But here I am. Life is just full of surprises!