How I Make Friends As A Grown-Up
No gatekeeping here.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
As a kid I did not enjoy school, but I did enjoy the friend buffet it provided. An endless trough of human beings exactly my age, with the same worries and hopes as me, and at one point we were all super into Soundgarden. You won’t come to this shocking realization until you’ve had your last-ever graduation, but it’s never going to be as easy to make friends as it was when you were held captive with so many of them for eight hours a day. Most grown adults are either intimidated by the idea of making new friends or simply don’t know where to start, and since I’ve spent so much time on this activity (with success!) I thought I’d share the findings.
Adult friendships are weird, I’ll say it. We’re either actively outgrowing the friends we had from our youth or we’re cobbling together new relationships and promising to get dinner once a month but really it happens once a year. What I’ve noticed as a single, child-free person is that parents have the best friendship situation going. They form these kind of friend families that get to take vacations together and have barbecues and one of them always has a pool. The lives of parents fit so seamlessly together into friendship it makes you think about getting knocked up. I am extremely fucking joking.