I gave myself a month to make one new friend

This hits really close to home and was comforting to read.

My situation: mid 30's, got out of a domestic relationship mid-covid. By the time the pandemic ended, every single friend in my group had moved out of state for lower cost of living. My close family also moved far away or had passed away, and I found myself in a weird situation of living alone, working remotely, and spending 99.999% of my time alone.

I like being alone - probably more than most people. I would not describe myself as "lonely" but the lack of a friend/support group is a clear deficiency in my life and not one I feel easily able to rectify. All the usual meeting spots pre-covid where I'd meet people don't seem to really be the same anymore or I feel too old to really hang out at some of them (some trendier bars).

I am not religious so church doesn't really feel like an option but I am starting to consider it. Another issue is that in your mid 30's almost everyone has settled down and started having kids and only really prefer socializing with other people who have settled down and have kids, leaving you in an awkward place.

> Then came the question of method. The resounding advice was “Get a hobby.” But I had only a month, and I didn’t think I could learn a new skill while trying to make friends.

As she later wrote in the article, it's not necessary to possess a skill to hang out with others, mere interest is often sufficient. Many hobby "tribes" (for a lack of a better word) have plenty of enthusiasts who will be more than happy to welcome a newcomer and show them around. That may be a friendship in of itself, or that may lead to other friendships centered around some common interest.

The deepest of friendships often start in the shallowest of ways, so lowering expectations at the beginning may be useful.

I haven't read the article yet, so my apologies for what might be a dumb take.

> I Gave Myself a Month to Make One New Friend. How Hard Could That Be?

I'm subscribed to a subreddit that's about bringing people together, and posting events to attend with others. At least once a month we have someone post about just "getting together for deep chats", and I always sigh.

A lot of people are lonely, and want the depth of a long-term friendship without realizing that it's not a video game you can speed-run. You cannot any% a deep, meaningful relationship. It takes time and vulnerability, and you cannot really offer the latter in an authentic way if you don't have the former.

There are some techniques that help move things along faster, and of course there's lots of ways to do this wrong, but in the end, I'm not sure if you can make an actual friend in a month. You'll just have a good acquaintance you enjoy the company of, and if you both keep at it, eventually it'll become a friendship.

I spent a bunch of time in China recently, and it's interesting how effortlessly people in larger Chinese cities seem to make new friends.

First of all, a lot of their life just takes part outside, together with other people. They meet to do their Tai Chi exercises in the morning, hang out in front of stores and schools during the day, meet at little hot pot places to eat together, play with their kids outside in the evening, and then do some line dancing before going to bed. It's much closer to the kind of social interactions I used to have as a student than I have now as an adult.

Second, it's interesting how easily they exchange contact information. I bought shaving utensils, and the salesperson gave me their personal WeChat contact so I could talk to them in case there's a problem with my purchase. Somebody asked to take a picture with me, and then exchanged WeChat contact info to talk to me more. A kid asked for my WeChat so she could exercise her English. We met a couple on a walk at night, and we exchanged some words, and then our WeChat contact info. And in each of these cases, there was some follow-up, and in some cases, regular chitchat.

I don't know what the reason for the difference is, but it's one of the things I really enjoy about living in China.

This feels like less of a case of 'American loneliness' and more a case of the author idolizing being in her 20s and projecting the same standards onto her 30s, when people typically have many more responsibilities.

Of course people who you don't even work with (and thus don't share a schedule with) likely won't be available on a whim. Even more so if they have young kids to plan around. Once the kids are a bit older, it gets easier again, as the kids can take care of themselves to an extent, and you can find common ground with and befriend the parents of their friends.

I've found as an adult that most people don't seem to be looking for new friends, not really

They either have a well established group of friends, or they have other things keeping them too busy for new friends

New friends kind of take a lot of work! If you don't spend time together it's very easy for it to slide away. So to make new friends you have to have some shared free time that you're both willing to give up to try and build that friendship

That's why so much advice about making friends isn't about the person, it's about finding a shared activity to spend time with that person. So you're both still making use of that time even if the friendship winds up not working out

How to make a friend:

Ask an existing friend to set you up on a friend date

Randomly talk to people and expect a deep friendship

Only have a month - skip joining an activity

Tell everyone you have a project so no serious friendship will develop

When opportunity to make friend is presented get judgemental because you never really wanted a friend

The type of friend this person wants could be found by going to the same bar or place everyday.

The real friendships others crave she already has. They just can't drop everything to eat at a New York restaurant at a moments notice. Neither can she if they tried this as she has child(ren), a husband, etc

In the end all that we learned was esquire is all font no substance. And this writer has LA envy and plenty of close people in her life.

The sad part is she never tried being a friend first. Helping someone else. That builds bonds for real friendship.

Loved this piece for the style and rumination, though I focused less on the "did it work? were the approaches reasonable?" aspects that other commenters seem to be highlighting.

Not quite the same, but for years I moderated a few big subreddits for friendmaking, and was part of such communities myself. ('til the API fiasco neutered the tools I had for catching bots, harassers, and pedophiles.) At risk of sounding absurd: I think friendmaking subreddits were awesome, but they did put pretty broad swathes of people in a hellish loop. People fall for a lot of the same known traps described in the article like fear of rejection. You need a paradoxical combination of thick skin, patience, effort, and also willingness to play the "numbers game"[1] to succeed with any amount of expediency. (And time can be of the essence for some people, particularly the depressed/suicidal.) Some people simply don't want to deal with that shit (fair enough). Very loose observations on this in the digital world:

* Some people are lonely / don't really click with many others, but find someone they do click with, only to blow it by clinging hard.

* High-effort users who spend a lot of time and feel little return get burnt out, meaning that a lot of posts in the new queue are low-effort shotgun posts; your best bet at finding high-effort friends is catching new posters in their first few posts.

* Reddit's "front page" mechanic works well enough for a first-approximation on who MIGHT be a high-effort friend but very often falsely bubbles a bot to the top (especially now). If it's not a bot, then the poster is likely overwhelmed with responses and even if they're otherwise high-effort: they're treading a tightrope between responding to everyone (with cut corners or delays), or responding to a subset of respondents. If you're a high-effort respondent, neither feels good to be on the receiving end of.

* In general, men don't get as many responses as women. Though the responses they do get tend to be from women. Men just don't use those sites to make other male friends much.

[1]: "numbers game" referring to seeing value in maximizing the quantity of interactions with unique people (there's kind of a distasteful red-pill-ishness about this when taken too far wrt dating, but really: people are so different that there really is an effective upper bound on how quickly you can find the people you're looking for without just talking to more people.)

I feel like video games just solve this problem entirely for me. I've got people in my book club I met in DotA pubs, we check in and talk about life, I've designed toys for their kids. I probably add one or two friends per year that stick around long term. I guess multiplayer video games aren't for everyone but I find that if you're kind and communicative on the mic the friends make themselves.

I've been living in the Netherlands for 3 years so far and now I've already given up the idea of making friends here. I'm not local but finding even an acquaintance is nearly impossible. Though there are some articles that claims Dutch ppl are one of the most difficult ppl to make a connection with, even with other expats I am not able to make any kind of connection.

I tried sport activities, hanging out with colleagues, hanging out on parties - nothing worked for me. I tried even finding a musical band to play in it and completely failed.

Now I moved to Amsterdam I don't even want to start searching. It takes so much energy w/o any outcome. Also, I work from home for an US company now and don't even have colleagues in the Netherlands.

Self-disclosure theory gives some good ideas about it. See also [1], this came out of self-disclosure research, there was not the intention to make people fall in love.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-o...

I always felt since I was in high school that if I wasn't looking for anyone, they would never find me. Like I always had to put something into the relationship because the other person never would. I was never sought out by any company. So as the years went by I was less and less motivated to make new friends

You can't make a friend in a month, so what the author sets out to do is nearly impossible.

Real, meaningful friendships take years to develop. They take years to get tested through thick and skin.

Otherwise, what you've made is an acquaintance that you maybe share a hobby with.

This is the `/thread` to any post from WFH advocates who tell people that miss the social aspect of the office to "make new friends." It is absolutely not easy to make friends as an adult.

Am I the only one who just doesn't really want new friends?

I have a wife and two kids, and all my social energy goes into them. What I really want is more alone time for my hobbies.

When I was single, I had plenty of time by myself for doing stuff I wanted, so I had time for friends. Now that I am married with kids, I can't imagine how I would have time for friends.

> Even if the six-pack friend still lived in Brooklyn, I had a hunch that now that she has a toddler, her visits wouldn’t be as frequent or as spontaneous as they had been a decade ago.

Well no shit. How can you be spontaneous when you are responsible for another human being 24/7? As someone with a family, I can't just make choices for myself anymore... everything I do affects other people, so I have to coordinate with my wife and kids on who is doing what when. If someone just drops by, but I need to take my kid to her soccer practice, I can't just drop what I am doing.

Honestly, that kind of friendship just doesn't seem realistic or desirable anymore.

You can definitely make cursory friends in a month - don't expect anything deep though

American culture is so doggedly hostile to friendships and really, any casual social interaction, that it's the least fucking surprising thing in the world that tons of us struggle to maintain relationships.

For starters: work. Most of us work, at minimum, 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. Most of us have an hour lunch in there, so that's 9. The average commute is just shy of half an hour one direction, so let's round that up to 10. We're already at 42% utilization for 5/7 of your average days, or 30% of the entire week, and I emphasize: this is the minimum. Many people have WAY more than this, both commute and work hours, voluntarily or by necessity. Statistically: you spend 3 out of every 10 of your hours alive either going to, being at, or returning from work.

If you're a healthy person you're getting ballpark 6-8 hours of sleep per night, we'll say 7 to make the math easier. So on the work days, before you do a SINGLE THING for yourself, that's 17 hours of your day already accounted for leaving you a measly 7. A full 50% of your theoretical week is gone already. We have not even approached the subject of child-rearing, which if you have that in your life, that remaining 7 might as well be fucking zero. Any time you don't spend at work will statistically almost certainly involve if not be entirely centered on your child.

Add in the obligations you have to your spouse, the absolute ton of things any regular old person is responsible for to constitute and maintain a "normal life" in our modern era (bills need paying, appointments need making and attending, cars need oil changes, lawns need mowing, the wife really wants that new shelf hung in the closet, did you do your taxes yet, what do you mean you forgot the groceries in the car, there was milk in there) and like.. where the hell do friends go here?

I'd like to note here, I am privileged as FUCK on this issue. I work from home, so no commute, apart from the odd business trip. I'm adamantly child-free, I have an extremely flexible and trusting employer that I love to work for who lets me slack off the schedule basically at my convenience to get appointments done, run errands, resolve family emergencies, or just have lunch with people. And despite that straight flush of "I have this the easiest I can have it" I STILL struggle to find time to fit in all the just miscellaneous bullshit that it's my responsibility to get done, and, since all my friends (of which I have about four give or take in my immediate area) DON'T have that straight flush, scheduling things with them is also a nightmare and often results in cancelled plans because people are fucking exhausted, overworked, underpaid and stressed the shit out.

I don't understand how anyone is surprised at this. We have optimized every ounce of slack out of our lives, there is ALWAYS something that needs doing. Never mind that I have no places to make friends or meet people, never mind that I haven't really made a new one since school that wasn't connected to another: WHEN. When the fuck am I meant to fill my proverbial social bar. And, for that matter, there is NOWHERE I can go right now to even try, that won't cost be money to do.

This story would be very different for a guy

I went from the service industry where I met new people literally every single night and got to work with my closest friends (and frenemies) every shift to tech, and I really miss it as much as I'd never go back.

I'ved lived in 10 major US cities, always places where I don't know anyone initially. I just go do my own thing and enjoy my hobbies, shows, sports, etc around the city and often I meet people but I'm much more limited now since I can't stay out until 3am running to 5 different places or events every night. If I see someone I know who might be interested in something I'm doing, I mention it and just tell them drop by if they want to check it out, I'll be there.

I actually meet far, far more people and typically have a much more fun time when I go out alone then when I spend hours with the same person/people in our own world. Sometimes they even become a drag on my night and I break off and go do something else.

Author appears to be a woman, though. As a former bartender, night-to-night I'd see far, far more men making friends with other new men than women befriending new women. And that definitely might put a wrench into attending a lot of the stuff I do (raves, metal shows, clubs, kink nights, etc) alone, safety speaking.

The amount of people who can't bring themselves to go do things alone is really, really strange to me, but I'm also a military brat and constantly moved/changed schools so I just dive into anxiety inducing situations as much as I can.

> In fact, she’d gotten so close to this group that she and Barbara, seventy-four, were writing a romance novel together. None of what she was describing appealed to me at all. I told her I would never do that, and she shrugged as if to say, “Maybe that’s why you don’t have any friends.”

This line stands out to me. I've had a lot of friends like this where they're not willing to do anything that I like to do that they don't or might not like. I get if you don't want to spend $250 on a concert ticket because you don't love the artist but I'm willing to go to just about any show/concert if its a reasonable price to my expectation/desire level. I've gone to a ton of free-$40 shows of artists I had never heard of before because a friend invited me. Even if I don't love the music I'm still enjoying my time with friends and that can't be a bad time. I don't enjoy scrabble but I'll go act like I enjoy it for an hour if theres beer.

I used to bartend at dive bars and there's a specific type of contrarian clientele that would always walk in, typically dragged by friends out of an Uber Black Suburban and pretty much audibly gasp "Ugh, you chose a dive bar?" and just generally act miserable to be there. Dude, it's a dive bar. Everyone can have fun at a dive bar. Pick your music and grab a beer and enjoy the time you get to spend with your friends.