how to make some friends

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Article about how to make some friends:
Be bold, take the initiative, and you’ll be surprised how many people are pleased to connect
How to make friends as an adult. is a psychologist and author. She writes regularly about connection for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert in publications including The New York Times , The Telegraph and Vice.

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She is currently writing a book, Platonic , on how to make friends as an adult. She lives in Washington, DC. is a psychologist and author. She writes regularly about connection for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert in publications including The New York Times , The Telegraph and Vice. She is currently writing a book, Platonic , on how to make friends as an adult. She lives in Washington, DC. Friends are a treasure. In an uncertain world, they provide a comforting sense of stability and connection. We laugh together and cry together, sharing our good times and supporting each other through the bad. Yet a defining feature of friendship is that it’s voluntary. We’re not wedded together by law, or through blood, or via monthly payments into our bank accounts. It is a relationship of great freedom, one that we retain only because we want to. But the downside of all this freedom, this lack of formal commitment, is that friendship often falls by the wayside. Our adult lives can become a monsoon of obligations, from children, to partners, to ailing parents, to work hours that trespass on our free time. A study of young adults’ social networks by researchers at the University of Oxford found that those in a romantic relationship had, on average, two fewer close social ties, including friends. Those with kids had lost out even more. Friendships crumble, not because of any deliberate decision to let them go, but because we have other priorities, ones that aren’t quite as voluntary. The title of the Oxford paper summed up things well: ‘Romance and Reproduction Are Socially Costly’. Such is the pace and busyness of many people’s adult lives that they can lose contact with their friends at a rapid rate. For instance, a study by the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst found that, over a period of seven years, people had lost touch with half of their closest friends, on average. What’s especially alarming is that many of us seem to be losing friends faster than we can replace them. A meta-analysis by researchers in Germany published in 2013 combined data from 177,635 participants across 277 studies, concluding that friendship networks had been shrinking for the preceding 35 years. For example, in studies conducted between 1980 and 1985, participants reportedly had four more friends on average, compared with the participants who’d taken part in studies between 2000 and 2005. If we’re not careful, we risk living out our adulthoods friendless. This is a situation that’s worth avoiding. Friends are not only a great source of fun and meaning in life, but studies suggest that, without them, we’re also at greater risk of feeling more depressed. It’s telling that in their study ‘Very Happy People’ (2002), the American psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman found that a key difference between the most unhappy and most happy people was how socially connected they were. Friends give us so much, which is why we need to invest in making them. Here’s how. Make a deliberate effort to meet new people. When you’re an adult, friendship doesn’t happen organically because you aren’t in many spaces with continual unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. If you’re passive about making friends, you won’t make any. Assume that people like you. This mindset will make you more likeable and motivate you to start showing up at social gatherings and engage more with people. Initiate. When you do show up at social events, make sure you introduce yourself to people and ask some to meet up outside of the event, even if you don’t yet know them that well. Keep showing up. To capitalise on the ‘mere exposure effect’ – the finding that people will like you more the more familiar you seem – plan to join events that are repeated over time, such as classes or social clubs. Get vulnerable. To turn an acquaintance into a friend, start practising vulnerability. Share more about yourself and ask the other person questions to get them to share about themselves. What to do. Make a deliberate effort to meet new people. Making more friends in adulthood is going to take some deliberate effort on your part. It’s an exciting challenge in theory, but one of the first obstacles you’ll encounter is having enough confidence. Especially if you are shy by nature, putting yourself out there can seem scary, triggering fears of rejection. These fears might lead you to engage in two types of avoidance that will inhibit your ability to make friends. First, you might practise ‘overt avoidance’, by not putting yourself in situations where it’s possible to meet new people. Instead of going to your friend’s movie night, with the chance to meet others, you end up staying at home. Second, you might find yourself engaging in ‘covert avoidance’, which means that you show up but don’t engage with people when you arrive. You go to the movie night, but while everyone else is analysing the film after it’s over, you stay silent in the corner, petting someone’s pet corgi and scrolling through Instagram. Assume that people like you. Both these forms of avoidance are caused by understandable fears of rejection. So imagine how much easier it would be if you knew that, were you to show up in a group of strangers, most of them would love you and find you interesting. This mindset actually has a self-fulfilling quality – an American study from the 1980s found that volunteers who were led to believe that an interaction partner liked them began to act in ways that made this belief more likely to come true – they shared more about themselves, disagreed less, and had a more positive attitude. This suggests that if you go into social situations with a positive mindset, assuming people like you, then it’s more likely that this will actually turn out to be the case. Of course, you might still be reluctant to assume others like you because you don’t believe it’s true. If this is you, you might take comfort from research that found, on average, that strangers like us more than we realise. The paper, by Erica J Boothby at Cornell University and colleagues, involved having pairs of strangers chat together for five minutes, to rate how much they liked their interaction partner, and to estimate how much their partner liked them. Across a variety of settings and study durations – in the lab, in a college dorm, at a professional development workshop – the same pattern emerged. People underestimated how much they were liked, a phenomenon that Boothby and her colleagues labelled ‘the liking gap’. What wisdom should we take from this research? It can remind us to go into new social events assuming that people will like us. It can keep us from being paralysed by fears of rejection, pushing us to question some of these fears. Try working on your internal dialogue, your inner voice that perhaps makes overly negative assumptions about how people will respond to you.













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