
I have two aims for this post: to dispel one of our most harmful cultural myths, and to help make you at least one lifelong friend.
It’s worth saying again that good friends are the best thing in the world. They make the good times great and the bad times not so bad. They make you wiser, kinder, smarter, and more interesting. They help you develop your strengths and survive your weaknesses. Nothing else I know of does all of those things.
Friendship is precious, but it doesn’t have to be rare or elusive. You may have been told, like I was, that it is “very difficult” or even “virtually impossible” to make friends once you’re done school. After a few decades of heeding this warning, I now recognize it as a self-fulfilling nonsense belief we should all ignore. Since abandoning this myth, I’ve had a steady stream of new friends and friend circles, and it is probably the most fulfilled area of my life.
Before we continue, a crucial point: I am not especially talented at friend-making. I have a history of social anxiety and general awkwardness, and I possess correspondingly underdeveloped small-talk skills. I miss obvious cues and say things at the wrong moment. I’m definitely in a lower bracket of the natural friend-making ability scale.
And that’s a very good reason to listen to my advice, rather than that of a networking expert who worked in real estate for thirty years. If I’m able to make friends as an adult, chances are excellent that you can too.
Why people say it’s hard
So why do people say it’s so hard to make friends as an adult? Aside from “because everyone else says so,” I believe it’s because people have no idea how they made friends as a kid or a teenager either.
My guess is that for most people, childhood friendships just sort of happened, because the school years come with an almost perfectly fertile environment for accidental friend-making. You’re put in a room for ten months with thirty other kids your age, then encouraged (sometimes forced) to work and play with them. This regimen is repeated for twelve to fifteen straight years.
If you made friends this way, and that led to even a few adult friendships, you might never have needed to make friends on purpose. So you don’t know how, and never did.
In adulthood, friend-making needs to become intentional if it’s going to happen, and intentional friend-making looks quite different from the haphazard method that sufficed earlier in life. Once an adult accepts this need for intention, and rejects the Great Friendship Myth, they can make friends on purpose. It comes down to doing one particular thing most people avoid.
How to do it
Basically, you make friends out of acquaintances — people you know but are not friends with — and the crucial friend-making act is this: you have to ask a not-quite-friend if they want to do something. This proposal doesn’t have to be anything date-like, just an invitation to do something that does not involve the buffer of a mutual friend.
I call this act the Small Leap. It’s so simple, but it’s all you need to grow a few friends from a batch of acquaintances. It is a leap, because there’s some uncertainty involved. But it is also small. Leaping over a puddle small. Getting a cookbook down from the top shelf small.
The Small Leap is usually a single question, asked in person or via message, referring to something you have in common. Something like, “I’m going to a flea market Saturday, if you want to come” or “Hey, you were talking about Scrabble the other day, want to have a game?” The smaller and easier it is, the better. Saying yes is a leap for them too.
It is never completely comfortable to do this. But if you don’t do it, all you can do is hope someone else does, and directs their leaps your way. Wherever there is a friendship, someone made a Small Leap.
As I put it in a recent post:
Friendships are born only when one acquaintance takes a certain kind of risk, which is to invite the other person to something. It could be anything – a walk, a poker game, an exchange of soup recipes, whatever. If you both enjoyed it, the precedent for such invitations has been set, and you’ve graduated from acquaintancehood.
Some people do a lot of this, and most people probably never do it. You might have noticed that people with tons of friends don’t necessarily have irresistible personalities. They just make Small Leaps on a regular basis.
Leaping your way to even one new friend kicks off a wonderful compounding effect. Each friend tends to come with more acquaintances, and usually they’re highly qualified friend candidates.* Thus, a few leaps can change your life.
The cost of making the Small Leap is that sometimes people say they’re busy, or they don’t get back to you, and that might feel momentarily bad. (And I mean might – often it feels like nothing.)
As far as I can tell, that’s it. Our aversion to that little risk costs the world millions of friendships a year. Imagine the great friendships — your great friendships — that never happened just because it seems more important to proof ourselves against small pangs of rejection or awkwardness.
This aversion is so low-key that you barely feel it, and that makes it insidious. It feels natural not to make these leaps, so it’s easy avoid them altogether — even though you’re risking basically nothing, and the eventual reward can be pretty much the best thing in the world.
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Photo by Kevin Curtis
*If you’re starting from zero acquaintances, then that is your first step, but the principle is the same. If your workplace, family ties, and day-to-day interactions haven’t yielded any acquaintances, you can make some by doing the things people usually recommend for making friends: clubs, classes, group activities, and events. The Small Leap between stranger and acquaintance is only to talk to a person to the point where you know each other’s names and one mutual interest, and usually those activities provide a context for doing exactly that.
I love the simplicity of this "Small Leap" idea. Makes logical sense. Why do you say it doesn't have to be date-like? Why's it any different from dating (minus the romance/sex)?