A Confession

I’m 35. And I’m here today to confess that I’ve spent most of the last 14 years moaning and grieving about how hard it is to make friends as an adult. I’m an introvert, so it’s always been challenging for me anyway, but why is it even harder now? It’s not fair! I still need friends. But asking for friends seems to be like asking to win the lottery. Good luck with that. Some people strike it rich, while the rest of us stare from the sidelines.

The Study

Some smart people did a study on this. According to their research, it takes (drum roll, please)…time. That’s it. They say it takes 50 hours of time spent together to move from acquaintance to casual friend. Just a casual friend! It takes 40 MORE hours to move to regular friend status, and more than 200 hours together if you want to be considered close friends.

I think we all knew this. It’s not shocking, is it? Maybe the actual numbers are a little. The reason it was so easy to make friends in college was because that is the time you generally live with your friends, whether in dorms or in apartments. You have the responsibilities of school and maybe part time jobs, but not usually the full weight of adulthood, so there is plenty of time to just spend time with your friends.

Then you become an actual adult. The responsibilities of adulthood are total time suckers. If you get married, naturally much of your time will go to that person. And don’t even get me started on what happens to your time when you have babies. The point is, time is a finite commodity, and as you move through your life you have less to spend on friends. It’s just the way the world works. There’s a reason it’s so hard to make friends as adults, and especially as mothers: we simply don’t have a massive amount of time to spend on the front side.

The Answer

My answer is two-fold, for all the moms and adults out there who are scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to fill this need that we all have:

1. Remember it’s hard for everyone

Everyone has exactly the same amount of hours in a day as you do. And most people probably have the same kinds of responsibilities that you do too, with their marriages and families and work responsibilities. There aren’t any magical unicorn people out there who have nothing but time for their friends. They are all trying to navigate this life too. Hopefully that will allow you to have grace for them and grace for yourself.

2. Show Up

SHOW UP.

That’s it. So all you can do is show up. Show up every single time that you can. It might feel useless, if all you have is an hour or less, but time adds up. And that’s the point, isn’t it? It takes time to develop friendships, so you might as well start that clock ticking and put in every single minute that you can. Time that you have invested doesn’t go away. So show up and let those minutes and hours start to build.

A note to introverts

I know it seems like extroverts get to skip these steps, because they are friends with everyone, right? Wrong. They are acquaintances with everyone. Enjoyable ones, most of the time. But the whole 50 hours/90 hours/200 hours thing is true for them too. They also have to invest the time to move through the stages of friendship. So don’t despair and think you’ve missed something. You haven’t.

What do you think? Did I miss any magic steps in friendship making?