Most of my friends are either childhood friends, high school friends, or college friends. They were people that I saw regularly and were able to build some camaraderie and connection with.
Early in life, friendships happen so naturally that it’s hard to even remember how you became friends with someone, it sort of just happened. As life progresses, everyone moves in their own direction. As we search for meaning in our lives and make the changes we see fit, it’s common to find yourself on a different life path than your childhood friends.
If you’re at a place in life where you would like to meet some new people and make new friends, it’s important to understand why making friends is harder after college and how friendships are formed so you can be proactive in building them.
The Two Factors of forming relationships
It’s common to hear young adults ruminate about how hard it is to make friends after college and here’s why:
Friendship is built through two main things:
- Time spent together
- Intensity of experiences shared
Of course there are other factors such as chemistry, shared interests, upbringing, etc. But even if someone shared all the same interests and worldviews as you but you only met them in passing, you wouldn’t have time to form a bond. These two factors are what it takes to form a bond and build a relationship.
College Is A Bubble
Remember the excitement of being a college freshman? No parents, beautiful people, a palpable energy in the air. In college, everyone is more or less in the same boat. Everyone there has the shared experience of being a student at that university and if you’re remotely social, you probably had some pretty wild experiences. I remember being at a party with a now very good friend of mine and watching him fish a goldfish out of a 55 gallon tank with a red solo cup, pour it in a beer, and give it to a random kid and challenge him to a chugging contest. What a hilarious story to share with someone.
In college, especially freshman year, everyone is in the same point in life. We all just finished high school and are about to embark together on a four year journey. Since everyone is new, everyone is open to making friends. There’s an openess to the environment and if you propose hanging out with someone, they’ll likely oblidge.
So then what changes and why is it so hard to make friends after college?
9 to 5 Autopilot – Engaged
Uh-oh. Here comes the real world.
So you’ve graduated college and now you’re heading to your first “real world” job. Doesn’t take too many days of 9 to 5 life before you realize the what you’ve been sentenced to. 40 years of this might as well be a life sentence.
Once you start working, the people that you’re around the most are your coworkers and the way you act at work probably isn’t how you really are outside of work. It doesn’t really pay to be vulnerable at work so it’s hard to connect genuinely. You also no longer share the same demographics you did in college. Often you’ll work on a team with people who have kids or are close to retirement, it’s not as easy to find common ground on which to build a relationship.
Now that you’re working full time, you no longer have the luxury of spending the majority of your time in an environment conducive to building friendships. So we’re left trying to socialize in small windows with people that we don’t necessarily have much in common with.
Overall, in our day to day lives of working our jobs and coming home tired, we start to go into an autopilot mode and close ourselves off from the world. We take fewer and fewer chances socially and when we do, often times the other person is closed off socially as well.
Break up the routine without throwing yourself desperately out there
When I moved to New York, a few people had put me in touch with people they knew out there. I met up with those people but soon decided that I’d rather go at it alone than hang with people I quite frankly didn’t like.
If you’re doing things just for the sake of being social, it’s good you’re getting out of your comfort zone but I’ve never had much luck just hucking myself at an activity I had little interest in with the hopes of finding friends.
It’s more important to find out who you are and what you like doing than it is to find friends. Some people are totally malleable in their personality in order to fit in with their “friend” group but how can those people ever really connect if they’re not being genuine? They can’t.
So what’s the solution?
Time spent together
Rarely do you get to know enough about someone to get to know if you really like them the first time you meet them. To form a bond (or decide if you even want to) you’ll need to meet them several times. This is especially true in day to day life where people tend to be less open.
If you can find something you really enjoy where you see the same people on a consistent basis, that will yield the best results for making new friends. My brother is a pretty shy guy but he is really in to outdoor stuff and goes to the climbing gym several times a week. He has done this for a couple years and has A TON of friends from there. He knows everyone and he’s not the type of guy to strike up a conversation.
To illustrate how much time spent together matters, look at your relationship with some of your friends you’ve known for over ten years. If you met that person today, would you have enough in common to think “this person will be a great friend of mine?” – probably not. When you made that friend you were probably in a very similar situation, but since then you may have changed, a lot. But since you have those shared experiences that bonded you, you likely will always see them as a friend and be comfortable around them because you understand who they truly are.
Intense experiences bonds you faster
Which brings me to the second part of relationship building: intensity of shared experiences. For me outside of my friends I made before and during college, the best friends I’ve made are through traveling.
When you travel, you open up and come out of your shell. You have to, that’s the beauty and the purity of traveling. The majority of deep and meaningful connections I’ve made over the past three years have come through yoga teacher training, hostel stays and van lifing.
This past summer I was staying at a hostel in Prague and remember sitting down in the kitchen area by myself trying to look like I was doing something but really just waiting for someone to talk to. As the night progressed and people started getting more chatty, I found myself talking to the two guys from California. Our conversation immediately turned deep and we were talking about our fears of not really knowing what we wanted from life. Skipping the small talk, I felt like I knew them right off the bat. Over the next 5 days, we took in all Prague had to offer together and now I have a couple friends for life.
I’ve realized that I want to spend more time in environments where people are required to be more vulnerable and open. It’s so refreshing to actually get to see people instead of their burnt out corporate autopilot selves.
In Summary
- Find things that genuinely interest you
- Do those things in a social environment as much as possible
- Take chances, open up, be vulnerable