Making New Friends as a Grown Man

Time to go Dudeing

Brian Abbey
ILLUMINATION-Curated
8 min readFeb 19, 2020

--

Making friends as an adult is challenging and nuanced. I’ve made four life-changing moves in the past sixteen years, involving three states and two foreign countries. At each stop, once I no longer felt like a tourist, loneliness set in, requiring me to find new friends. At each stop, I had to go dudeing.

Dudeing is simple, in theory. One dude meets another dude and they magically become friends. In the second grade, I turned to the red-headed boy next to me at lunch and said, “Do you want to be my friend?” He nodded, quite nonchalantly for an eight-year-old, and presto! We were friends. Making friends back then wasn’t always that easy but school was full of kids.

Low-Hanging Fruit

The direct approach worked in 1982 but it would be weird if I trotted it out today. However, I’ve used the low-hanging fruit tactic in each move, from Texas to Romania. Begin in the workplace, that stable environment of mature adults harmoniously coordinating their efforts toward a common goal while respecting one another’s unique talents. Yes, it’s a crapshoot but the workplace is the lowest hanging fruit at your disposal and offers several different friend types.

First is a guy you mesh with who likes you. You have chemistry and neither of you report directly to…

--

--

Brian Abbey
ILLUMINATION-Curated

expat, ex-philosopher, ex-entrepreneur writing on society, relationships, & AI singularities. VICE, Salon, & misc humor sites @brianabbey brianabbeywriter.com