How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult
Do you wish you had more friends like when you were a child? Or maybe you’ve never felt confident about meeting or developing friendships, and it hasn’t gotten easier as an adult.
It can be hard to admit that you are lonely but think of it as an invitation. I think loneliness is a sign we need to reach out to others. But what’s stopping you from connecting with others?
You are not alone. It is much harder to make friends after you start your own family or enter the workforce. Your friends no longer live in your neighborhood or go to the same school. It is harder to have consistent contact when you are balancing jobs, kids, and marriage.
In Shasta Nelson’s book, Friendships Don’t Just Happen (The Guide to Creating a Meaningful Circle of GirlFriends), she gives hope to adults wanting to make friendships work amidst their busy, mobile, active lives. Shasta sheds light on assumptions we make as well as offers practical tips for meeting new people.
4 Ingredients for Co-creating Meaningful Friendships
While Shasta’s book is packed with practical tips and stories about friendship-making endeavors, I think the following highlight her main points. In co-creating meaningful friendships, it is important to add these 4 ingredients:
1. Embrace Variation in Friendships: The friendships we create won’t all be our best friends. Embrace all friendships, even though they possess varying levels of intimacy. We need more types of friendships than we think. In her book, Shasta identifies 5 types of friendships along a continuum.
“I developed the ‘Circles of Connectedness Continuum’ to help women visualize the varying shades of relationships based on two primary factors that create friendship: consistency and intimacy.” ~ Shasta Nelson, Author & Coach
When you realize all of your different types of friendships are valuable, you can more readily enjoy each of them. You may even invest more in the ones you want to get to know better. And you will stop stressing about the ones that aren’t as deep as you would like.
2. Keep Your Arms Open to Friendship: Once you realize that no one friend will completely meet all your needs, you start to welcome all new friends into your life. It’s unrealistic to think that one friend will relate to all of your interests and be with you through all of life’s stages. If you accept that friendships will always be changing, you are less likely to fear getting hurt. There is always another friend to meet, grow, and let go of.
“We are all amazing women, even when we feel lonely. Our worth doesn’t drop one iota when we recognize that we need to make new friends.” ~Shasta Nelson
3. Make Consistent Contact: I keep thinking friendships will just happen like when I was a kid. It took reading Shasta’s book for me to realize that they didn’t just happen, it was just easier to have consistent, regular contact when I was I was younger. We never had to pull out our calendars to fit in time with our friends, we just literally walked down the street or across the hall.
There is no shame in realizing you have to schedule your friendship time. I schedule my kids’ play time, so why not our own. Find ways to make contact and keep making it. When the contact isn’t reciprocated, it’s not personal.
“The strength of our friendship isn’t as dependent on how much we like each other, but more on how much time we spend together developing our friendship in broader and deeper ways.” ~Shasta Nelson
4. Be Known & Get to Know: Many friendships are valuable just relating on a common activity or life stage. But if you want to deepen a friendship, you eventually have to share more of yourself. It is so tempting to talk about our kids (if you have them) or someone else. Friendship is a process, so to be known you will eventually want to share a little more about yourself. And as always ask meaningful questions, so you can get to know your friend too.
“Sometimes the greatest intimacy isn’t knowing who you could call, it’s actually having someone you do call.” ~Shasta Nelson
All too often, we feel lonely and we wait on people to make a move toward us. It’s like wanting a date, but not making the first move to introduce yourself. If we want more friends, we need to muster the courage to meet more people. And if we want the friendship to be more intimate, we need to be more intimate too.
When you embrace the process and stages of friendship, you can let go of your fear of rejection and hurt. You can also embrace friendships that come, stay, and even go. You no longer have to take this personally. Instead, cherish the level of friendship just the way it is.