When Did Making Friends Become So Hard?

On losing the easy friendships of youth and building intentional ones in adulthood

Dec 20, 2025

Two simple wooden figures without faces holding hands on weathered wooden surface, representing friendship and human connection in adulthood

Do you remember how you found friends as a teenager or at university?

Because I don’t. I didn’t look for friends.

Sometimes I woke up in my shared apartment and there were ten people in the kitchen, half of them strangers. I wanted to make coffee, but someone had already made one for me, so I lit a cigarette and got to know five new people before I even got dressed. At university, I attended various seminars where I mixed with different people almost every week. Standing outside the classroom and deciding not to go to the seminar, deciding instead to go get a drink with someone, wasn’t uncommon.

We had all the time in the world.

I didn’t need a strategy to find new friends because I spent my days with many different people. Not all of them became my friends, but the probability of finding the right ones was extremely high, like a lion that doesn’t need to learn how to hunt when prey is abundant.

Then we graduated and started thinking about other things besides spending the whole day together, drinking, and partying.

All the fun things were replaced by responsibilities, goals, work, and plans. Friends moved to other cities or countries to pursue their own lives.

At my first job, my colleagues and I tried to live the same life we had in college, but that wasn’t sustainable.

The evenings we spent together became shorter. A meeting at nine the next morning would send us home after one beer.

“I have to get up early tomorrow, so I have to go home.”

This sentence became the standard way to call it a day. I also got more tired because working full time is something different from attending a couple of seminars at university.

So I started seeing people less and less. I realized I needed to pay more attention to my body, so I replaced “hanging out” time with gym sessions, jogging, and cooking. Other people replaced me with quality time with partners, visiting parents, or decorating their new apartments. Road trips together were replaced by resort vacations on an island with romantic partners.

The time I spent with people kept shrinking.

Everyone became extremely busy.

Full weekend get-togethers turned into one-hour coffee meetings, just a quick update on how we were doing, then back home because tomorrow was work.

I don’t blame anyone.

I also started to focus on my own dreams and decided against going out every weekend like I used to.

Still, there’s a need for good company, but this need has changed over the years.

At college, I wasn’t choosy at all. Hanging out with people who wanted to party and have a good time was easy.

Everyone wanted the same thing.

In adulthood, we know much more about what we want. People have specific hobbies and varied interests, and it’s rarely about just drinking and partying anymore.

We have higher standards, and finding those like-minded soulmates became difficult. The old way, having no strategy to find new friends, won’t really work in adulthood. But the good thing is that we’re not completely helpless.

There are ways that can help us meet those soulmates in adulthood as well, but we need to do a bit more than we did in our younger years.

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What Changed (And Why)

Before we get into the strategies, it’s important to understand why making new friends is so difficult when you’re an adult.

The Great Scattering

When you finish school or university, everyone disperses. People chase jobs in different cities, move countries for opportunities, or return to their hometowns. The tight-knit bubble you lived in for years, where everyone was within walking distance, suddenly explodes. Your social circle, which once felt permanent, scatters across the map.

This isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just what happens. But it fundamentally changes the conditions for friendship.

The Loss of Natural Structures

Think about how friendships formed when you were younger. You didn’t have to try. You sat next to the same people in class every day. You lived in the same dorm. You saw each other at the cafeteria, at parties, in the library. You had built-in proximity, repeated unplanned interactions that happened naturally.

As adults, these structures disappear. You work in an office (or remotely from home). You commute alone. You run errands alone. The natural containers that once held your social life, classrooms, dorms, daily hangouts, are gone. And without them, friendships don’t just happen anymore.

Social psychologists have studied this for decades. They call it the “proximity principle,” people who are physically close to each other and interact regularly are far more likely to develop friendships.

In childhood and college, this was automatic. In adulthood, it requires intention.

The Time Factor

Here’s something that surprised me when I first learned it: it takes about 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend. It takes around 90 hours to become friends. And it takes over 200 hours to develop a close friendship.

Let that sink in. Two hundred hours.

When you’re in college, spending 200 hours with someone happens almost by accident. You take the same classes, you study together, you hang out on weekends, you grab meals together. The hours accumulate quickly.

But as an adult? When you’re working full time, managing a household, trying to exercise, maybe raising kids or caring for aging parents, finding 200 hours to spend with someone new feels nearly impossible.

A one-hour coffee date once a month means it would take over 16 years to reach that threshold. No wonder adult friendships feel so hard to build.

The research is clear: time is the most important factor in friendship formation. And time is exactly what adults don’t have.

Competing Responsibilities

Work demands more from you than university ever did. Romantic relationships take energy. If you have kids, they consume entire evenings and weekends. Aging parents may need your support. Your body requires more care, gym time, meal prep, actual sleep instead of pulling all-nighters.

All of these are important. All of these are worth doing. But they leave less room for the leisurely, spontaneous socializing that once defined your life.

And here’s the thing: everyone else is dealing with the same squeeze. So even when you do have free time, coordinating schedules becomes a logistical nightmare. The friend you want to see is traveling for work. Another is dealing with a family emergency. Someone else just had a baby and hasn’t slept in three weeks.

It’s exhausting. And it makes friendship feel like just another task on an already overwhelming to-do list.

The Three Missing Pillars

Motivational speaker Mel Robbins talks about three essential conditions for friendship: proximity, timing, and energy.

Proximity is about physical closeness, how often you actually see someone face to face.

Timing refers to being in similar life stages. When you and your friends are all navigating the same challenges, graduating, starting careers, getting married, raising kids, you share a living thread of experience that makes connection almost effortless.

Energy is harder to define, but you know it when you feel it. It’s chemistry. It’s whether you click with someone, whether conversations flow naturally, whether you actually like how they move through the world.

In childhood and college, all three pillars were usually present. In adulthood, they rarely align. Your closest friends might live across the country (no proximity). They might be married with three kids while you’re single and traveling (different timing). Or you might meet someone at the right time and place, but the energy just isn’t there.

When even one of these pillars is missing, friendship becomes much harder. When all three are missing, it can feel impossible.

Here’s the key message: It’s not you. It’s structural. This is completely normal.

You’re not broken. You haven’t “lost your touch” with people. The conditions that once made friendship easy have simply changed. And once you understand that, you can stop blaming yourself and start working with the reality in front of you.

How to Rebuild the Conditions for Friendship

Now that we understand why adult friendships are hard, let’s talk about what actually works. The ingredients for making new friends are the same as they’ve always been: proximity, recurring exposure (time), and depth (energy). The difference is that now, as adults, we have to create these conditions intentionally instead of having them handed to us.

Show Up Consistently

The single most important thing you can do is put yourself in situations where you see the same people regularly. This isn’t about networking events or one-off meetups. It’s about finding activities you genuinely enjoy and committing to them week after week.

Join a running club. Take a weekly yoga class. Volunteer at the same organization every month. Sign up for a book club, a language exchange, a pottery workshop. The specific activity matters less than the consistency.

Why? Because familiarity builds connection. Psychologists call this the “mere exposure effect,” the more we see someone, the more we tend to like them. The first time you see someone at a running club, they’re a stranger. The third time, you recognize each other. By the tenth time, you’re chatting before the run starts. By the twentieth, you might suggest grabbing coffee afterward.

Consistency matters more than intensity. You don’t need to spend eight hours with someone once. You need to spend one hour with them eight times. The repetition is what creates the foundation for friendship.

Quick note: Having the same interests, like running, yoga, or playing video games, is not a guarantee of being soulmates. These activities only give you a platform for recurring exposure to each other.

Be the Initiator

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most people are waiting for someone else to reach out. Everyone wants connection, but no one wants to risk rejection by being the one who suggests plans.

Be the person who takes the risk.

After a good conversation with someone at your running club, say, “Hey, would you want to grab coffee next week?” When you meet someone interesting at a work event, follow up with a specific invitation: “I’m going to that new exhibit on Saturday, want to join?”

Yes, some people will say no. That’s okay. They might be genuinely busy. They might not be looking for new friends right now. It’s not personal.

But many people will say yes. And you’ll never know unless you ask.

The worst that happens is a polite decline. The best that happens is you find a new friend. Take the chance.

Invest the Time

Remember those numbers? Fifty hours for a casual friend. Two hundred hours for a close friend.

There’s no way around it. You have to invest the time.

This doesn’t mean you need to dedicate your entire life to one person. It means being intentional about spending time with people you want to grow closer to. Say yes to invitations. Invite them to things you’re already doing. Suggest a monthly dinner or a weekly walk.

And here’s an important detail: time spent working together doesn’t count nearly as much. The research shows that hours logged at the office or on work projects don’t build friendships the same way that leisure time does. You need time where you can actually relax, let your guard down, and have real conversations.

This is why activities like grabbing a beer, going for a hike, cooking dinner together, or just hanging out and talking are so valuable. They create space for the kind of connection that builds friendship.

Look for Repeated Touchpoints

One-off hangouts are nice, but they don’t build friendships. What works is creating a regular rhythm.

Weekly runs with the same group. Monthly game nights. A standing coffee date every other Friday. Book club on the first Tuesday of the month.

These repeated touchpoints do two things.

First, they remove the friction of constantly planning. YYou don’t have to coordinate schedules every time, you already know when you’ll see each other.

Second, they build anticipation and continuity. Your friendship isn’t dependent on remembering to text, it has its own momentum.

Find or create these rhythms wherever you can. They’re the adult equivalent of seeing someone in class every day.

Not Everyone Needs to Be Your Best Friend

In my opinion, adjusting your expectations is an essential part of making new friends. Many people go out with a black-and-white mindset: if somebody doesn’t invite them immediately to the next barbecue party and doesn’t share their deepest personal secrets, they’re disappointed and stop investing in the relationship.

Quick note: Here comes one of my favorite rules of life, the expectation fallacy. It means that everything in life will take longer than you expect. It applies to making new friends as well. Keep it in mind.

But there’s one more thing about expectation adjustment, and it’s this:

Not every person you meet and connect with will become your friend.

This was a crucial learning in my life because it helped me adjust my behavior toward people I regularly meet. For example, people in my gym. I see them regularly, and we say hello, ask about our weeks and how we’re doing, but then that’s it. Just because we’re in the same gym and share the same interest doesn’t mean we have to be friends.

After I understood this, I was much more relaxed in these short small-talk situations. I learned how to exit the conversation naturally: “I’m happy to hear that you had a great week. Enjoy your workout! See you!” , and that’s it.

But don’t get me wrong.

These connections are not less valuable just because we don’t share our deepest thoughts. These are acquaintances. And I welcome them very much because I always have people around me in the gym I can talk to, but I don’t have to. Of course, there’s always a chance that one of these connections will naturally deepen over time, but you don’t have to push it if it doesn’t feel authentic.

Until then, accept them as an enrichment to your life.

These lighter connections, what researchers sometimes call “weak ties,” actually matter more than you might think. They reduce loneliness, make daily life more pleasant, and create a sense of community even without deep intimacy. Not everyone needs to be your best friend. Some people are just friendly faces in your life, and that’s perfectly okay.

The Marathon, Not the Sprint

Making friends in adulthood is hard. It takes more effort, more intention, and more time than it did when you were younger. The structures that once made friendship easy, proximity, unplanned interactions, shared life stages, are gone.

But you’re not helpless.

You can create the conditions for friendship. You can show up consistently. You can be the one who initiates. You can invest the time. You can adjust your expectations and appreciate the different kinds of connections that enrich your life.

It won’t happen overnight.

Remember the expectation fallacy, it will take longer than you think. But if you keep showing up, keep reaching out, and keep investing in the people who feel right, you’ll find your people.

The journey back to yourself and to real connection is a marathon, not a sprint. And like any marathon, it requires showing up, mile after mile, even when it’s hard.

The friends you make in adulthood might not form as quickly as they did in college. But they’ll be built on intention, shared values, and genuine effort.

And that makes them worth every hour.

Until you make some new friends, you should also focus on another important aspect of life: learning to be happy alone.

Thanks for sticking with me through this one. If you’re going through something similar, or have your own experience with this, drop a comment. I read every one. — David