How To Make Friends In Your 40s
No partner, no kids, no built-in community? I've got you.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
You will have better luck trying to find new friends than you ever did trying to find a new relationship. It’s true, it bothers me too, but we can swim against the current or float along with it and enjoy. As we get older it becomes harder to lie to us, and it’s more of a betrayal for us to lie to ourselves. Continuing to participate in dating culture becomes a comical waste of time, and a genuine concern for real community as we get older arises. I also observe that more romantic relationships at this age occur as a result of community rather than dating, so this is a win all around.
You’re not bad at making friends, we just never actually learned how. If you really think back, how did you learn to make friends and who taught you, apart from trial, error, and maybe a smidge of bullying? Making friends is not a skill set, it’s a default setting we’ve relied on since we were in school, surrounded by tons of people our own age with a shared perspective, every single day from toddlerhood through grad school. We didn’t have more friends back then because we were better at making friends, we had more friends because we had more opportunity. In adulthood, life—with all its charms and bills—begins to hack away at our opportunities to make friends from a time perspective, an opportunity perspective, and most of all—it stops being effortless. Making friends as a grown adult is going to take some effort. Don’t throw up your hands in helplessness, waiting for new friends to suddenly appear and make plans with you every weekend. I see what you’re doing, I used to do it, too. Let’s talk about what to do instead.