Growing Adult Friendships
Why friendships deserve as much time and attention as any other relationship.
The phrase adult friendships, like adult films, feels a little bit illicit, as if it’s something we shouldn’t be talking about. Aren’t adult friendship just regular “friendships” — the natural evolution of the ones you made on the playground as a kid? Shoehorning the word “adult” in there feels like putting an insert in a sneaker to make it more supportive. The truth is that adult friendships are a special beast.
The truth is that adult friendships are a special beast.
On a literal level, the phrase simply connotes a friendship between adults, but what if the word “adult” was an adjective and not a noun? In that case, it would refer to the maturity of the relationship itself, rather than the biological ages of the participants. If you examine all the friendships in your life, I’ll bet that some feel like capital “A”, capital “F” Adult Friendships, others may feel more like simple friendships (lower case “f,” no adult) — maybe because you’ve been friends forever or because you’ve just met.
Adult friendships are unique relationships with the potential to enrich our lives immeasurably, and yet they are frequently neglected. When we grow up, our friendships don’t naturally transition into adult friendships. It takes effort and intention to ensure that your friendships develop in step with you as you get older. And it’s a lot harder to make friends as adults than it was when we were children.
The fact that we are taught to appear more sorted out and buttoned up as adults makes it harder to connect with people.
As kids, we are still developing emotionally and physically and we have a surplus of non-directed time on our hands with fewer responsibilities and obligations than we have as adults. This makes it easy and obvious to fill our time making friends, having sleepovers, running around and playing.
The fact that we are taught to appear more sorted out and buttoned up as adults makes it harder to connect with people. In order to make friends, you need to be open to sharing yourself with others — there’s a vulnerability required that often feels at odds with what we are socialized to believe that a grown-up must continually project.
Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet & Why It Matters and speaker on the TED stage, talks about how we are trained to present ourselves to strangers (especially in a professional context) as perfectly baked loaves of bread, which is a shame because it is our dough that makes us interesting. It is our questions, our challenges, our fears and our uncertainties that make us compelling. It’s terrifying to speak openly about the stuff we haven’t figured out yet, but it is the way to make meaningful connections.
Sometimes life makes us doughy. We’re more open to making new friends in the wake of big life transitions, like moving, breaking up or starting a new job, because that’s when we are at our doughiest.
Sometimes life makes us doughy. We’re more open to making new friends in the wake of big life transitions, like moving, breaking up or starting a new job, because that’s when we are at our doughiest. When you get out of a relationship or move to a new city, you have more surface area exposed. You don’t yet have a routine around how you get to work, what you do at night, where you eat dinner. This vast expanse of newness makes us open up by necessity. In large part because we are lonely. What if we could engineer more openings in our lives, less traumatic than these big transitions, but equally effective in terms of creating room for exposing our doughy selves to new connections?
I have never understood why we don’t give more attention to the shapes of the friendships in our lives. Most of us have friends, but we don’t think about them on the same level as we think as the people in the orbits of our familial or romantic relationships, yet they have a similarly profound effect on us. A quick library search yields almost twice as many results for “relationship books for adults” (90,000) as “friendship books for adults” (40,000). But research shows that not only can friendships make us happy, they can also keep us healthy. So why do we pay them such little mind?
Whether you have a robust gang of friends, or just a select few, chances are, you don’t spend too much time thinking about your overarching friendship dynamics. If you want more friends, it might be more like a dull ache rather than a sharp, specific shooting pain. If you’re overwhelmed with the feeding and watering of your current friendships it probably feels like an abstract, frustrating gauze as opposed to a specific list of troubling symptoms.
There are very few role models or manuals for fostering healthy, fulfilling adult friendships. If we spent more time letting ourselves construct the outlines for an ideal friendship (an ideal which can shift over time) like we so often do for romantic partnership, we’d be more likely to know when we had it. What if we screened potential new friends, and examined existing friendships, more thoughtfully, and took a drivers seat role in determining what the relationship would become?
What if we screened potential new friends, and examined existing friendships, more thoughtfully, and took a drivers seat role in determining what the relationship would become?
I’m not talking about the amount of time we spend hanging out, or the frequency with which we text. I’m talking about zooming out and thinking about the structure and quality of our friendships. I’m talking about having open conversations about the relationships we have built, the dynamics that have taken root over time and asking ourselves what’s working and what isn’t. The norm is to function on friend autopilot rather than intentionality. But our friendships deserve better than this. Friends make life worth living. Life without friends is just breath and a heartbeat. It is a skeletal version of the full-color, adventure-filled, laughter-fueled mural that is a friendship-rich existence.
Cultivating rewarding adult friendships requires two things: being open and zooming out. Neither of these things are chill.
There are different altitudes of interaction and we have the power to shift between them. Society loves us to stay on ground zero, being chill and going with the flow, but maturity requires us to level up and think more (and talk more) about what is actually happening, where it’s going and whether it serves us.
Cultivating rewarding adult friendships requires two things: being open and zooming out. Neither of these things are chill.
How wild would it be if we took a break from a regularly scheduled group Happy Hour hangs to sit down one-on-one with a friend (new or old) and ask each other deep, zoom-out questions like this:
- What’s your favorite way to keep in touch? (Text, email, phone calls, Instagram direct message, something else entirely?) Do you like a constant stream of contact or are you more into sporadic outreach?
- How frequently do you like to hang out with friends? (Every night? Only on weekends? Just school nights?)
- Do you generally prefer group hangs or 1 on 1 meet ups? When does your preference change?
- What could I do to make you feel most supported when you are feeling really bummed out? (Leave you alone, whisk you away on a trip out of town, show up at your home with takeout and watching movies together all night?)
- What makes you feel celebrated? (Going out to dinner? Getting a handwritten card? Having a big party thrown for you? Flowers?)
- How will I know if you are frustrated? (Do you get silent, or scream and yell? Any red flags I can look out for?)
- How much alone time do you need?
- Is there anything you’re working on that you could use my support with? (A project? Drinking less alcohol? Seeing more art? )
So weird! But also interesting, right? The actual questions don’t matter so much, it’s more about the intentional ritual of stating explicit needs and preferences out loud. Doing so makes concrete the often invisible threshold we pass over together when we become friends. This exercise turns something blurry into a tangible milestone.
One reason that this questionnaire exercise might make you squirm is that it is hard to answer these questions for ourselves! It requires a level of self-reflection that few of us delve into regularly. It asks us to shift from a reactive stance into a reflective one, and that means putting yourself out there.
Asking these questions, and sharing your answers is also a hard sell because it’s aggressively un-chill, and friendships should be chill, right?
It depends. Sometimes having a chill time with friends is exactly what we need. But when I think about the last time that I was wholeheartedly grateful to a friend, it was for something like letting me sleep on their couch when I was going through a hard time at home. Or meeting me at the bar with a moment’s notice and buying me a drink while I wept. Or reading over my shoulder a scary email I was about to send out to a huge group of people and helping me press send. The friendship rubber hits the road with the messy, dramatic stuff and we should line our friendship containers accordingly.
Trans activist and writer Dean Spade proposes a more intentional approach to friendship in an essay on polyamory called For Lovers and Fighters. “One of my goals in thinking about redefining the way we view relationships is to try to treat the people I date more like I treat my friends,” he writes. “Try to be respectful and thoughtful and have boundaries and reasonable expectations — and to try to treat my friends more like my dates — to give them special attention, honor my commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in our futures together.” This line of thinking is powerful on many levels, and can be downright revolutionary — especially for queer people who may have been alienated from their families of origin or are unable or unwilling to participate in traditional, nuclear family structures. As Dean puts it, “questioning how the status and accompanying behavior norms are different for how we treat our friends versus our dates, and trying to bring those into balance, starts to support our work of creating chosen families and resisting the annihilation of community that capitalism seeks.”
Fulfilling friendships are fundamentally transgressive to the culturally sanctioned path of life that is paved with heteronormative, monogamous, capitalist, Hallmark-holiday milestones.
There’s something radical about getting what you need from your friends. Fulfilling friendships are fundamentally transgressive to the culturally sanctioned path of life that is paved with heteronormative, monogamous, capitalist, Hallmark-holiday milestones. We are comfortable with friends as an extracurricular activity but when they move in on the emotional real estate that is reserved for nuclear family (husbands, wives, children, etc.), eyebrows get raised.
You have the power to transition existing friendly relationships into fulfilling adult friendships, and to go make new adult friends that you desire and deserve. Children don’t raise themselves, and neither do friendships. We need to cultivate our friendly relationships in order to create the self-actualized and rewarding dynamic that is the truly fulfilling grown-up adult friendship.
This essay is part of a series about relationships, dating, and friendship, sponsored by Chorus, the matchmaking app where friends swipe for friends.
