How to Make Friends: The Forgotten Science of Adult Friendship
Making friends as an adult is surprisingly difficult. Most of us know this from experience. We retire, move, lose touch with coworkers, relocate to a new community, or find ourselves looking around one day and realizing our social circle has become much smaller than it once was.
Yet when people talk about making friends after retirement, the advice is often frustratingly vague.
Join a club. Get involved. Put yourself out there. Be social.
To this I say, “horse shit!” While none of that advice is wrong, it doesn’t really explain how adult friendships actually form. Because it’s incomplete.
It’s like telling someone who wants to lose weight to “eat better.” Technically true. Practically useless.
The real question isn’t whether you should join a club. The real question is why clubs work.
How to Make Friends – And Why Clubs Work
Fortunately, a social psychologist named Leon Festinger may have figured this out over seventy years ago. Festinger’s research explored a concept called propinquity—the tendency for people to form relationships with those they encounter regularly. In simple terms, friendships often develop through repeated passive contact.
People become friends because they keep showing up in the same place. The neighbour you chat with every morning. The volunteer who works the same shift. Or the person who always seems to be at the woodworking club, photography group, golf course, coffee shop, or dog park.
Most adult friendships do not begin with two people actively trying to become friends. They begin because two people repeatedly occupy the same space. Not like kindergarten, where you met your new bestie over a juice box or eating paste.
Friendship simply emerges; they’re not forced. Friendship isn’t an activity; it’s an outcome.
Other Ways to Make Friends After Retirement
That may explain why hobbies, volunteering, clubs, and recreational activities become so important in retirement.
They aren’t valuable simply because they keep us busy. They place us in environments where repeated passive contact can occur. The woodworking club and the photography group. The church coffee hour, the walking club, the dog park, and the volunteer committee. Consider the community garden, curling club, local museum, and the weekly trivia night.
The pickleball court is a tried and tested location for a “no-brainer” conversation. And so is a birdwatching walk or standing in line at the farmers’ market you visit every Saturday. Carrots are conversation bait! Especially the organic ones!
The specific activity almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that the same people keep showing up. And so do you.
Volume and opportunity.
More people. More interactions. Equals more chances for conversation. More opportunities for friendship to quietly develop.
Low Pressure Makes Making Friends Easier
If the hobby, the event, or the activity is what what gets gets you in the room. Then the shared familiarity of it is what makes starting a conversation from scratch so much easier. It also provides you with topics of conversation that are basically “no-brainers.” The state of the pickleball court, the quality of those organic carrots, who’s walking their dog at the dog park (and forgetting the motto – if it’s your dog, it’s your poop).
Pressure-less conversations.
It’s not like going on a blind date, where the conversation is stilted and phony. Conversations in these places tend to evolve organically. No one you meet expects anything other than light conversation, civility, and maybe a bit of witty banter if they’re lucky.
Looking back, many of my strongest friendships formed this way. Not through networking. Not through effort. Through proximity, shared interests, and time.
Work Was a Friendship Factory
The funny thing is that most of us have already experienced Festinger’s theory firsthand. We just didn’t know there was a theory attached to it.
Think about work.
For thirty or forty years, many of us spent five days a week surrounded by the same people. We shared coffee breaks, meetings, frustrations, successes, office gossip, and countless small interactions that seemed insignificant at the time. Some of those people became friends.
Not because we sat down one day at the conference table for “the let’s become friends meeting”. We didn’t attend a seminar on friendship, and definitely not because we networked strategically.
You became friends because we kept showing up in the same place, day after day, and year after year.
Given enough time, familiarity became conversation. Conversation became connection. Connection became friendship. It was so easy, almost effortless (except for the one guy in accounting)
Looking back, work may have been one of the largest friendship incubators many of us ever experienced. Then retirement arrives and, almost overnight, that entire system disappears; along with the coworkers, the lunchroom disappears.
The casual conversations disappear. The repeated contact disappears. And then we wonder why making friends suddenly feels so difficult.
The truth is that nothing may be wrong with us, and we haven’t forgotten how to make friends.
We’ve simply lost the environment that quietly created them in the first place. And we may have lost a few of those “make friends muscles” since it was so easy.
How To Make Friends – Not Chemistry of Luck
The older I get, the more I suspect that friendship is less mysterious than we make it out to be. We tend to think friendships are built through chemistry, luck, or personality. Those things certainly matter.
But they may not matter as much as proximity, repetition, and time. The secret may not be learning how to make friends. The secret may be putting yourself in places where friendship has an opportunity to happen.
Then showing up often enough for it to do its work.
Retirement doesn’t eliminate our need for friendship. If anything, it increases it. Fortunately, the solution may be simpler than we think.
Find something that genuinely interests you. Then keep showing up.
Don’t Get Frustrated
I noticed when my parents moved to a “retirement community,” my mother ( a very shy and kind of lonely lady) assumed moving there would suddenly provide her with all the “friendship” she could handle. Then, she was frustrated when they arrived, and friendships didn’t happen quickly.
But friendship rarely operates on that timeline. Festinger’s theory isn’t really about charisma. It’s about repetition.
Friendship requires exposure. My suggestion was the bridge club or bowling. Conversation requires familiarity. Trust requires time.
In many ways, friendship behaves more like gardening than shopping. You can’t force it. But you can create the conditions that set you up for success. Then you keep showing up.
The hobby gets you in the room.
Friendship often follows.
Continued Reading
- Hobbies for Retired Men: The Best Years of Life
- Why Old-School Skills Matter More After Retirement
- Before You Retire: 10 Things No One Tells You to Do
References
- Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing. Stanford University Press.
Cynthia Ross Tustin retired early to pursue her passion for writing. Turns out, she's equally passionate about retirement! This author has spent 1000s of hours researching all the best that retirement has to offer. What you'll find here is a well-curated resource of amazing places to go and fun things to do as your retirement approaches. Not retired, no problem! There's plenty here for all of us that are "of a certain vintage"!
