How to make – and keep – friends as a grownup, according to science

By Meg Tirrell, CNN

(CNN) — One day in 2008, when she was in her early 20s, Jaimie Krems stumbled across Gchat messages between one of her closest friends and her housemate. They’d been written on her own computer, which her housemate had borrowed, and it turned out the two had been talking all about her.

It wasn’t good.

“I was just really devastated,” Krems recalled. “And since then, I wanted to understand.”

What could cause two friends to act in such a painful way to a third? The experience spurred Krems to pursue a career studying adult friendship, a field she laments as hugely neglected in terms of both attention and funding, passed over in favor of a focus on romance or, conversely, dynamics that lead to stereotyping and discrimination.

“Understandable,” Krems said of the latter, “because it’s horrible and affects a lot of people.” But, she added, “I would argue that friendship affects even more people.”

Krems cited an analysis from researcher Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad that found that lacking social connection affects health similarly to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

And we’re increasingly feeling bad at it, she pointed out, citing Google search trends: The query “how to make friends” reached an all-time high last spring and vastly outpaces searches for how to find a date or fall in love. An epidemic of loneliness, a feeling experienced by more than half of US adults, prompted a US Surgeon General’s Advisory in 2023.

But there are things we can do about it, research from Krems and others has found.

“Even though friendship feels like magic, it does involve these teachable competencies,” said Krems, who’s now director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research. “If we were able to teach that, I think that we’d solve this epidemic of loneliness, which is a health problem, a public health problem, a civic problem. It’s an economic problem, and everybody’s unhappy.”

The recipe for making friends

There are two main “ingredients for friendships to form,” Krems said, citing research from Dr. Daniel Hruschka at Arizona State University, among others: “frequent interaction and mutual attraction.”

Being in the same place with the same people repeatedly, even if it’s as simple as writing in a journal in a coffee shop at the same time each week, is enough of a start. And it’s the part of the equation that’s easier for us to control, Krems pointed out.

“If you could do frequent interaction, maybe there will be somebody with some mutual attraction,” Krems said. “You need both of these things to create a friendship.”

One way to maximize your chances of success on both those fronts is to identify what Dartmouth researcher Dr. Janice McCabe calls “friendship markets” – essentially, “places where many people are open to making friends,” she told CNN.

It’s particularly helpful to think about aspects of your own identity in considering friendship markets, including ones you might not expect, said McCabe, a professor of sociology who studies how and why people connect.

“So if there is a new identity that you’re looking to explore, look for places where people are meeting regularly and have a chance to get to know each other,” McCabe said, particularly ones with built-in times to interact, such as a running club where you can chat along the way, or improv or art classes.

Expat communities, she added, are an example of “great friendship markets.” Often, people living in another country might hope to make friends with locals, but they can also find strong ties among others living the same experience as “foreigners,” even with different countries of origin.

“To me, the lesson here is to notice when you’ve moved into a new identity, even if it wasn’t intended, and seek out others who share that new identity as they may also be open to connecting on that identity that they also find themselves in,” McCabe said.

Ask for help

In turning acquaintances into friends, asking for favors can actually deepen relationships, research shows. It’s become less common for us to ask for help as “we have all these apps on our phones that do what friends used to do,” Krems said: “They’ll take you to the airport. They’ll pick up your groceries when you’re sick. They’ll probably babysit your kids and install your TV, or help you carry a couch.”

But asking someone for a favor, if that person helps you, turns out to actually make them like you better, Krems said.

“We don’t want to feel like a burden,” she acknowledged. But a way to avoid that is to “put yourself in the other person’s shoes. If I can do a favor for one of my friends, I feel like a god. I feel so good. I’m on a high for a day. Imagine if you could give that feeling to somebody.”

Along those same lines, opening yourself up to show a little vulnerability in a conversation has a similar effect of increasing trust, said Dr. Alison Nagel, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who directs the Connection Project, which aims to combat loneliness and social disconnection among adolescents and young adults.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that self-disclosure begets self-disclosure,” Nagel told CNN. “That folks who are somewhat self-disclosing are more liked and are perceived as more trustworthy by others.”

As a guideline for assessing whether you’re self-disclosing or just making conversation, Nagel recommends considering whether you’d share the same thing with a stranger on a bus.

“If not, then maybe you’re broaching into a little bit of vulnerability,” she said.

Of course, Nagel added, boundaries are important as well: “You can be authentic without asking for more than the relationship can give you in that moment,” she said. “Going slow and steady feels like a pretty safe approach.”

Don’t wait for the perfect window

This one’s about friendship maintenance. Don’t wait for the perfect two hours to call a friend to catch up, Krems said. “Just call them.”

“Those five minutes of genuine connection are so much more valuable than the call you keep meaning to have,” Krems said in a TedX talk at UCLA in August.

And do take opportunities to stay connected when they arise.

“Say you want to bake a special meal that you remember your aunt making you when you were a kid,” Nagel said. “Are you going to call your aunt and get the recipe from her and maybe chat for a minute? Or are you going to Google it and see what comes up and try it?

“These kind of little shifts” – to a Google search instead of a phone call – “can prevent really kind of casual, but important, strengthening of loose ties.”

And the benefits of connection return multifold.

“It’s related to handling stress better, better immune functioning, so you get sick less,” Krems said. She cited studies suggesting that friends and social connections among older adults reduce the risk of dementia by a third and the risk of stroke by half.

“If friendship were a drug,” Krems said, “it would be the most prescribed medication in history.”

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