Episode 11: Making Friends as an Adult

In this episode,

Lizzie examines the different types of friendship in her life, the benefits of acquaintance-ships, and how to meet new friends as an adult, once you're out of school.

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Post-pod questions to consider

Can you identify a few of your friends in each of Lizzie's categories? Do her definitions mesh with yours?

Episode Transcript

Hey, you're listening to Midnight Philosopher with Lizzie. Thanks for tuning in. 

Today, I'm going to talk about making friends as an adult. Making friends as an adult is really tough. Once you're out of school and past the teenage years where you can bond over a lot of first experiences and forming your identities, making friends becomes a lot more difficult to start with. The definition of friendship can be sort of broad and and hard to pin down. 

And I guess the way I've conceptualized it is I like to think of my closer friendships as sharing deep emotional bonds and my more lower level acquaintance friendships as doing the same activity together and having fun. And the different levels of friendships definitely play into adult friendships too. And I think it's important to realize that making friends can mean a wide variety of things to many people. So I guess I'll talk about some of the friendships that I've made as an adult.

After I graduated from college, I did a teaching fellowship. Now, this wasn't any, just like any sort of teaching fellowship, it actually provided housing. So not only was I working with all my coworkers, but I was also living with some of them. And I ended up living with four other women, and one of them would go on to become one of my best friends. 

So Mel and I hit it off almost instantly, and I like to think that we were kind of a similar vibration of weird. We started getting closer and opening up to each other about our vulnerabilities. We had a lot of shared experiences together. For example, there was a room, there was a wall in my room that Mel and I would hang pictures. We drew up, we called it the art wall, and we'd spend a lot of time drawing pictures together to hang on the art wall. And this really bonded us. 

And this type of young adult friendship kind of blossomed because we were able to embrace each other's personalities, including our quirks. And we were able to work through small conflicts together, such as when I used all the toilet paper and never replaced the role. And it helped that Mel and I had similar values. We were both interested at the time in teaching, so we were doing this fellowship together, and we both cared about helping people and being there for them. So this recipe for friendship was sort of about our values, our vibes, and our shared experiences together. 

Now I'm gonna talk about another adult friend friendship. You know, fast forward a couple years to my mid twenties, I was feeling kind of lonely and I felt the need to kind of branch out and meet some new people and make some new friends. But honestly, I was kind of terrified to put myself out there. I didn't really know what to do, but I took a leap of faith and I joined an adult dodge ball league. It was what they called a draft league. So captains would pick their players one at a time. 

And I later learned I was drafted near the end because no one knew me, but Mo drafted me onto her team because she liked the sound of my name. And Mo would become one of my really close friends. So we started off just playing dodgeball together every week. And we didn't really, I mean, we, you know, talked a little bit, but we mostly just threw balls at the other team. But as time went on, we started to hang out outside of dodgeball and we became better friends. 

And I realized that Mo kind of really saw me. So I wasn't drinking at the time, but when we went to the bar, Mo ordered me a water shot so I could do shots with the team. She always made a a, a really big effort to include me, and that meant a lot. And as she likes to say, she then adopted me into her group of friends. So some of Mo's friends became my friends. So the recipe for this friendship was doing an activity that I enjoyed, just doing it over and over with the same group of people. But then also having someone like Mo who was really welcoming and saw me for who I was, was exactly what I needed at the time. 

Okay, fast forward a couple more years. I was now in my late twenties and early thirties and you know, a lot of my friends were maybe what I like to call nesting. They were settling down with families, maybe having kids, and I was, you know, feeling a little bit out of place or a little bit in a different stage of life than a lot of them. So I decided, I tried to make a few more friends and I thought back to when I was in my mid twenties and I was like, okay, I'm gonna join a new activity, something that I think I'll like, because that worked for me in the past. 

So I joined improv and I really enjoyed improv. I enjoyed learning a new skill and getting better at it. And I was friendly with a lot of people in the improv community, but I was kind of having trouble making lasting and meaningful friendships. You know, I'd have a lot of friends that kind of came and came and went. And that's when I realized that, you know, acquaintance friendships are really important. That friendships don't always have to be the most best intimate friendship you've ever had. To be meaningful. Sometimes even short-lived friendships do serve that purpose to feel connected and to feel, you know, like you're bigger than yourself. 

And the longer I did improv, the more people I became, you know, acquainted and connected to. And although I might not have an improv bestie who I go and gossip to all the time, there are a lot of people in the community who I kind of float in and out of touch with depending on what team I'm on or who I happen to run into. 
And I have people in the community I enjoy. I enjoy grabbing a drink with or playing board games with, and definitely tons of people who I enjoy doing improv with. And that's important. Having people to do a fun activity with is a type of friendship, and I think it should not be undervalued sometimes. Just having that group of people to do something fun with is, is really important. 

So adult friendships are really tough. And sometimes you might luck out and have an awesome roommate like I did, but usually as an adult you have to seek out friendships and be intentional about them. So join activities that you love, like dodge ball and improv. You'll meet people who also like those activities and who are interested in the same thing. Now the key is to do that activity over and over and over with the same group of people. 

You'll get to know people a lot better that way, and there's a chance that you'll hit it off with some of them. And I know if you're on a budget, that can be an extra challenge because activities like dodgeball and improv can sometimes cost some, some money. So there's also a lot of free activities out there. If you check out things on meetup.com or you know, if you volunteer at a place the same week every time, it doesn't really matter what activity you're, you're doing so much as that you kind of enjoy the activity. 

And here's the catch. You do it consistently so much. Show up, show up, show up. Make yourself stick with it. Stick with this activity. Make yourself go for six weeks in a row. Try it as an experiment. Either prove me right or wrong. If you stick with this activity for six weeks, the chances are in my opinion, that you'll at least be friendly with someone. 

Well, that's my show. Thanks for listening. I'm going to go join a hiking group now. Have a good night.