5 Strategies From A Friendship Expert On Making Adult

Making friendships is difficult. When you’re an adult, they are even harder to make. Adults are often busy addressing multiple systems of need (their family, already established friends, their career, themselves, etc.). Adults also have preexisting likes, dislikes, belief systems, and narratives by which they live their lives. This all culminates in feelings of fear, overwhelm, confusion, and distress when the thought of entering a meaningful platonic relationship comes up.

Even if we decide we need more adult friends, we are unsure where to start. How do we find a friend? In our school years, we found them by convenience. They were located in our classrooms, school halls, and school playgrounds. We were around each other routinely enough to gain comfort and feel in control of our friendship-making. Now that we’re grownups, this ease is gone. The environmental opportunities have shifted, and there are layers of barriers. Even worse, some of us didn’t have opportunities growing up where even the convenience of being in the same school was enough to allow opportunities for blossoming friendships.

Enter Friendship Expert Danielle Bayard Jackson. She helps adults, especially women, make friends. She has a podcast titled Friend Forward, where she answers questions she receives from women about how to develop adult friendships. She has even created a coaching program, Friendship Elevated, where she teaches strategies and tangible skills to build friendships. Jackson is a prolific woman who has helped many individuals navigate adult friendships.

I have sent many clients episodes of her podcast to help them build confidence and gain skills in their quest for friendship acquisition. On her TikTok account, @thefriendshipexpert, she shared 5 strategies out of her 23 researched-based friendship-making strategies. These 5 are a great place to start if you, like my clients, have found that you want to build friendships:

@thefriendshipexpert #stitch with @loewhaley ♬ original sound - Danielle Bayard Jackson

1. Create A Routine: Create established predictability of who you see and engage with by developing a routine that regularly takes you out of the house, increasing your comfort with your environment. Individuals in those environments also become more familiar with you. When others see you regularly, they are more motivated to engage with you. Additionally, the more you’re aware of familiar faces in familiar places, the more willing you’re to initiate the connection.

2. Social Media: You can take advantage of multiple apps designed to create opportunities for friendship development, such as Bumble BFF, Geeks Who Drink, or Meet Up. Avoid applying the false narrative that you’re weak by resorting to social media to find friends. Reauthor that thought by reminding yourself that using these apps is clever. When tackling a goal, we should utilize every tool accessible to us to achieve it.  If we apply the societal pressure developed to create stigma towards dictating the resources we utilize, we inadvertently reject opportunities to achieve our goals.

3. Start The Conversation: Take a pause and see who is near you and bring up a topic at the moment to create a connection. You can comment about the environment, such as noting the comfortable weather, remarking on the reorganization of the grocery store, or highlighting a billboard advertising an upcoming event. You can provide them a compliment, like praising their outfit, admiring their fandom pins on their backpack, or making platitudes about their organization skills. You can even allow them to take control of the conversation by asking them a question, like what breed their dog is, inquiring about local cuisine, or sharing curiosity in what they are binge-watching. This strategy aims to take advantage of the opportunity to create a connection with those nearby. When coupled with the strategy of a developed routine, it makes more opportunities as the individuals of proximity are individuals who are used to seeing you and you’re used to seeing them.

4. Super Friends: Do you have a friend who seems to have a lot of friends or makes friends quickly? Do they appear well connected to others or have an extensive social network? Then reach out to this friend! Let them know your goal of making adult friends and ask for recommendations for connections. Allow them to give you advice and help be your bridge to the people and places they know that are primed for friendship development.

5. New Friends Not New People: This strategy involves shifting your mindset and setting intentions. You want to remind yourself that you aren’t attempting to “meet new people.” That your actual goal and focus is to make a friend. Jackson defined friendship in her TikTok as “the art of cultivating something meaningful with another person.” When you start to take on this definition of a friend, you see that friendship doesn’t have to be formed simply with new people. Do you have acquaintances, neighbors, or other individuals in your life that you are familiar with and therefore have the potential to develop a friendship? Sometimes, because of our insecurities, belief systems, or lack of awareness, we dismiss individuals in our network that can be potential friends. Take some time to re-evaluate the people around you and see who you’d like to develop a bond with.

These are some excellent starting points that adults who want to develop friendships can take on. Review them and decide which is the best for you. Remember that not all of these strategies are easily implemented or may not mesh well with an individual's current lifestyle. Additionally, we are still in a pandemic. It may be discomforting to try and imagine implementing these strategies with social distancing and masks in mind. That’s why it’s essential to review them and choose the ones that best suit you or can easily be adapted.

For example, many women are advised not to make a predictable routine in order to protect themselves from predatory people. Therefore, this strategy may be one to bypass or to tweak. Ways to adapt this strategy can include creating a predictable routine in safe spaces, such as routinely attending a women’s only gym or picking three go-to grocery stores, and cycling at random going to each. Or familiar environments may include digital spaces you regularly interact in. Maybe your potential new friend is someone in an online forum who regularly posts memes you engage with or is someone you often wait in the video game lobby for in order to team up.

As long as you review and integrate the strategy that most aligns with you and your lifestyle, you are more likely to develop opportunities for friendships.

Have you tried these strategies out? Did you follow the podcast for more tips and tricks? Please let us know in the comment section below!

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