Why Making Friends as an Adult Feels Impossible & What to Do About It

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Hey, it's your friend Mel, and I just want to take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so excited you're here and I'm especially excited about what you and I are going to talk about today. This is research and insights that changed my life. It has made my life better. We're going to be talking about friendship. You're going to love this. You're going to want to share this with people that you know, that you love. And in fact, if this is one of your first episodes, I want to take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family because you made the time to listen to this particular episode. Here's what I know about you. I know that you're the type of person you value your time, number one. Number two, you made the time to listen to this, and that means you're interested in learning about ways that you can improve your life.

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Because what we're also going to discuss is rules about adult friendship that you need to know. These are rules. I had no idea existed. I didn't discover them until about three or four years ago. These rules are going to change the game entirely just like they changed the game of friendship for me. So whether you're listening right now and you're in your twenties and the only thing that is holding your friendships together from college is a text chain. And that text chain, it is getting quieter and it is getting quieter. Or you're in your thirties and everybody is suddenly in different stages of life, or maybe you're in your forties or your fifties like me, and the chapter of your life is changing profoundly, which is impacting your friendships or you're older. I mean, we all need friends. I don't care how old you are.

 

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I was just talking to my father the other day and my dad is 80 and I was saying to him, Hey, so dad, have you and mom thought about where you might want to go in terms of a retirement community? I mean, are there any friends that you have that are living in one that they seem to love that you would want to go to one where your friends are? And he paused and he said, well, Mel, unfortunately a lot of our friends are older and they're starting to die. And I thought, oh my gosh, that's true. And then he paused and he said, so I guess mom and I are going to have to make new friends. What an amazing thing to say, isn't it? We all deserve friendship and that's why we're going to talk about this. It's a huge part of your life.

 

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And so no matter how old or young you may be, no matter where you are in the journey of friendship, you deserve great friends. And so if you're finding that it's impossible to create friends as an adult, you're not alone. But what I'm going to promise you is this, not only is our conversation today going to be eye-opening and empowering, but I'm going to make you feel better because you will embrace the simple truth that some of the best friendships of your life are ahead of you and you are fully capable of creating them no matter where you are, where you live, how old or young you are. So thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to listen to this because your life is going to get better. And also thank you for taking the time to share this with people that you know that may feel lonelier.

 

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Heck, everybody, because we all deserve to have incredible friends. 

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I mean, just think about it. When you went to school, you sat in classrooms with kids your age on the weekends you were playing town sports, you were riding the bus, you were constantly around kids who were the same age as you, going through the same things. And just think about it. You're learning the same subjects in school. You have the same schedule during the day. You are celebrating the same milestones. You're reaching 14, 15, 16, you're going to prom, you're going to homecoming, you're graduating. All of these things that were happening in your life where you were little, the play dates that your parents set up, the team dinners before the big games, all of these things created this environment where you just expected friendship to happen. You just expected that you'd be around people your age all the time because you were. That's why friendship was so easy when you were little because the conditions for it were set.

 

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And then when you graduate from high school, what happens? Oh, you typically go on to college or you go into the military. And again, you're now not just with people your age all the time, you're living with them, you're eating with them, you're going through the semesters with them and you're on the same breaks during the summer, you're moving through life together. And so when you're little, not only are the conditions present for you to meet people your age, connect with people doing the same thing, you can relate to everybody because you're going through the same experiences, but you also have something else in common. And what is that? Friendship's a group sport. Everybody kind of expects to be invited, right? I mean, why wouldn't you? You're on the same team, you're in the same friend group, everybody's going to the prom, so there's going to be a pre-prom party.

 

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And so your childhood conditioned you because you live near your friends, you ride the bus with your friends, you're seeing your friends all the time to just expect that friendship would be easy. And because you are naturally as a kid in all these groups, whether it was a classroom or it was a team or it was a sorority or a fraternity or a dorm room floor, that you would just be expected the things because if the group is invited, then of course if you're part of the group, then you're invited too. And that's why nobody sees the big change coming. When your twenties hit, your childhood trained, you just like it trained me to expect friendship to be easy. It made you believe to expect that you'd always be invited, that there's always something going on because there's always something going on in college. There's always something going on in high school.

 

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There's always something going on in your friend group, right? But then something happens and none of us see it coming and it happens when your twenties hit and what is it that happens? Well, I call it the great scattering. All of a sudden everybody graduates from college and boom, they scatter in a million different directions. All of these people that you used to see every single day that lived in the same place as you, that were on the same timeline as you, that celebrated the same milestones as you, they move and boom scatter, which means the conditions and the structure for the friendships that you enjoyed and loved when you were little gone. Everybody that you love is moving in different directions. They're on different timelines, they're doing different things. They move to different cities. And next thing you know, the only thing that is holding together that tight-knit group of people that you lived with during college is some text chain that slowly gets quieter and quieter and quieter because people are naturally focusing on the lives that they're building and wherever they are and the people that are right in front of them.

 

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And that's when it hits, right? When you get into your twenties is when the great scattering hits and all of a sudden you're like, where did all my friends go? Why am I not invited? Why are people living together over here and I can't find a roommate over there? And then you make a major mistake because you don't understand that there are conditions and rules around friendship, and those conditions were present when you were a kid and just served up to you and taken care of. You don't realize that friendship just went boom from a group activity to an individual sport. And because you don't see it coming, I didn't see this coming. You then grip and you clinging and you make it personal and you try to hold onto people and then you think that you need to break up with people. That is not the rules of adult friendship.

 

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There is a different way that I want you to approach this, but unless you truly embrace what I'm talking about, that friendship changes when you hit 20, you will forever be working against the rules of adult friendship and you will feel like it is so hard to make friends as an adult. And I'm going to teach you today that there are great scatterings that happen throughout your life because when you hit 20, that's just the first time that it happens. You move to that new city, you're all excited. It might be your dream city and your dream job, or maybe you're going off to medical school or graduate school and you're so excited to be there, but then boom, you get there and you don't have any friends. And so now you're going to be in it again and it's going to happen again in your thirties when all of a sudden the friend group that you had in the city, they start getting engaged and moving in with their partners, and then they might be buying a house or having a family and moving to the burbs and boom, they scatter again.

 

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And it's going to happen again. When you hit your forties or your fifties, maybe you go through a divorce, you change jobs or heaven forbid you're experiencing some tragedy or massive loss in your life and it's just consuming you. Anytime there is a life change, anytime your life changes, there are these mini scatterings that happen. And even my father, when I asked him, where do you think you and mom might want to go if you think about moving to some sort of awesome retirement community? And he says, well, our friends are dying, that's a great scattering again, which means you have to be reminded that great friendships are ahead of you. And if you understand the three rules of adult and you embrace the truth of what I'm telling you, which is friendship is not a group sport, friendship is an individual sport, and you have the ability to create fantastic friends wherever you go.

 

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If you embrace this truth of what I'm telling you, you can change your relationship to friendship. You can create these extraordinary friendships in the future. And that loneliness that you feel and that sense that you have no friends or that you don't know where to start that is going to disappear. Because I'm going to teach you step by step by step exactly what you need to know exactly what the rules are that nobody's told you, and then you are going to have the roadmap to just starting to create fabulous friends. And one more thing I want to say before I teach you these three pillars of adult friendship. And once you see these, you're going to be like, oh my gosh, why didn't I know this sooner? I just want to talk a little bit about loneliness because it's a very real thing. But what I've come to realize, and I think you're going to find this is going to lift a big weight inside you, is that the only reason why the loneliness is there is because just like me, you've probably never heard of the great scattering.

 

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You didn't know that friendship changed from a group sport to an individual sport. And when you don't know that and you don't understand the pillars of adult friendship and the rules that you need to follow that I'm going to teach you today, you start to make it personal. You think you're the only one that doesn't have any friends, you think that your friends have left you when actually they're just living their lives. They haven't gone anywhere, they're still there. You start to grip tighter, which only makes your friendships feel more strained. And so I want you to know something. The reason why the loneliness is there, the reason why friendship feels so hard, which it does for everybody, is because you simply don't see the bigger picture. And neither did I. And so this is going to be liberating and eye opening, and it's going to dissolve all of that conflict and tension and the kind of loneliness and sadness that you feel you can do something about this.

 

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And the first step is seeing the bigger picture. So we've covered the great scattering, which is just the fact that when you hit 20, the conditions for friendship when you were a kid, boom, gone, everybody scatters. And from this point forward for the rest of your life, now that you know this, you also know that people are going to be scattering all the time, which is why you have to be more flexible and you also have to stop making it personal. It's not you. It's all of us. And we're going to talk about these three universal pillars that I discovered in researching friendship because I felt like I had no friends and I wanted to do something about it. And these three pillars are so awesome because it makes you realize, wait a minute, I see it very clearly now and now I know what to do.

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So a study at MIT found that the single most important factor for determining friendships is physical proximity. Meaning how often do you bump into somebody? How often do you see them? How often do your paths cross? And the reason why this matters has to do with the fact that an order for you to connect with people and create great friendships, you got to spend time with them, right? I mean, obviously, and there's even research around this. And so I want to bring the research in so that you understand that the three pillars of friendship that I'm about to unpack for you, this is grounded in deeply respected science. And when I know that it's easier for me to go, oh, I'm not the only idiot here. Now this makes a lot of sense, now I can get my emotions out of the way and I can operate within the truth of the facts.

 

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So the research that I'm about to share with you comes from the University of Kansas. So they studied friendship and they studied friendship of all ages. And the study is fascinating because the study found that it takes 50 hours, 50 hours of time with another person to become kind of casual friends. It takes about 90 hours with somebody for you to consider them a friend. And check this out, you need approximately 200 hours with somebody in order for you to consider someone a close friend. Now, let's unpack that. And first I want to unpack that inside the context of friendship when we were little. If you think about your life when you were in elementary school and middle school and high school or in the military or in college or in a community college or a trade school, you are around people your age all the time.

 

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That proximity pillar, boom, handled by your life, I mean riding the bus. There's some time playing on the field, there's some time sitting in a classroom, there's some time being in a sorority. There's some time sitting in a dining hall. There's some time. I mean, you are literally clocking in 50 hours every single week with people your age. But then what happens? Boom, your twenties hit. Oh my gosh, you barely see people your age. Why? Because you're all working. You're working all the time. And so when you really put this first pillar of proximity into the truth about your life and the fact that you got to spend 50 hours with somebody to feel like you're a casual friend, you got to spend 90 hours with somebody. So that's like an average of 59, 70 hours to be a friend. That's a lot of time. No wonder it feels so hard or almost impossible to make friends as an adult.

 

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Why? Because you have to be in proximity to people in order to spend the time with them. It makes sense, doesn't it? Of course it makes sense. And you want to know how important this is. They've actually done research about who makes friends with whom based on proximity. There was a famous study done about the state police, I believe it was in the state of Massachusetts, where they were just curious when the cadets kind of meet each other freshman year or the first year of the police academy, who becomes friends. And they started to notice this trend that people that reported to be friends were very close in the alphabet. Why? Oh, well, because at the police academy, they were lining up an alphabetical order. They were sitting in classroom in alphabetical order. They found the same thing about chemists, that you were more likely to be very good friends with the bench scientist and chemist that was at the bench next to you doing lab research rather than the one in the lab across the hall.

 

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Why proximity matters. This is why you had such opportunity when you were a kid. It was a group sport. The proximity was handled. This also explains why it is so challenging and it feels impossible to make friends as an adult because you're not bumping into people anymore. And by the way, this also explains why once the great scattering hits or you go through a major life change, positive or negative, you are going to feel like you don't see your friends anymore. Why? Well, because you might not be right in front of them anymore. Anytime you move, even if you're excited, guess what? Proximity changes anytime you change your job. Guess what? Proximity changes. Anytime you change your relationship and the patterns of your life and you're no longer bumping into people all the time that you used to see proximity just changes. It's about the pillar.

 

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It's not personal. Oh, why didn't I know this sooner? And so if you're in your twenties and you're really struggling because you feel your friendship slowly fading away, its proximity. It's a pillar. It's not personal, but it does beg the question. Okay, Mel, I embrace the study from the University of Kansas. I got to spend 50 to 90 hours with somebody to be a friend. I got to spend 200 hours for somebody to be a close friend. Got it? But I don't want to get depressed because that's a lot of time and I don't have a lot of time. Why do you not have a lot of time? Well, according to the American time study, because between the ages of 21 and 60, guess where you and I spend all our time, we spend all our time at work. So it begs the question, if proximity is a extremely important pillar for creating friendships as an adult, why aren't we best friends with people at work?

 

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Great question. I thought the same thing because if I'm spending all week long, 60 hours a week in close proximity with people that I actually like, why am I not hanging out with them all the time? Why are they not my best friends? I'll tell you why. The second pillar, timing. See everybody at work, even though you love them, they're in a different time of their life. Timing just means what chapter of your life are you in? And when you're at work, you're working with people who are all over the map. You might have people who are married who are in their fifties or sixties. You might have people in their twenties. You might have people who are single, who are not single, who have kids, who don't have kids. You might have people who are healthy, who are not healthy. Everybody's all over the place interested in different things.

 

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Yes, work puts you in close proximity, and these may be people that you like, but if you go out every weekend and get drunk and you're throwing up in a garbage can at Monday morning, you're not going to be yucking it up with everybody who spent the weekend with their adult kids or their grandkids out in the suburbs. You like these folks. You spend a lot of time with these folks, but you're not in the same time of life. When I reflect on moments of my adult life when friendship actually came very easily, do you want to know when it was? Interestingly enough, it was when our kids were really little because when our kids were really little, my husband and I were in a suburban community surrounded by all these other people in the same time of our life. We were all raising kids the exact same age, and we kept bumping into each other at school drop-offs or at meetings at school or on the fields, on the soccer games, on Saturdays.

 

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And we had so much in common. Why? Because we had kids the same age. And so two of the pillars were present proximity and timing, which creates the conditions for you to meet people who are going through the same thing that you can relate to and connect on and to keep spending time together, which creates the conditions for friendship. But a funny thing happens when your kids go from middle school to high school. There's this scattering that happens and the boys teams and the girls teams separate and suddenly you're not seeing the same people and your kids start to hang out with their own friends and they may not be hanging out with the kids their same age from the friend group that was bigger. And then you start to scatter and then you stop seeing all the people that you hung out with when you were in elementary school and middle school.

 

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You stop seeing them so much and then those friendships start to scatter. You are going to experience this over and over and over again. And the mistake that I made that turned me into a walking red flag is because I didn't know about the great scattering. I didn't understand these three pillars of friendship that I have discovered that I'm talking and teaching you right now. So I thought this was personal. I thought people didn't like me. I thought I had to grip onto my friendships when I saw people getting together, I kind of expected to be included, and when I wasn't, I was hurt and I took it personally and then I started to clinging and grip and feel insecure, and then I'm putting out really weird energy. And that brings me to the third pillar of friendship, and that's energy. See, you are not going to be in control of proximity and you're not going to be in control of the timing of life that you're in, but I'm here to tell you, you are in control of your energy.

 

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And energy is one of those things between people that it either clicks or it doesn't. You either feel this thing with somebody or you don't and you can't force it. The second that the energy shifts or it's off, it's off. What I've noticed, and this is again, a big mistake that I've made, is that when the energy feels off when I was in my twenties, thirties and forties, oh my god, I just hit the accelerator and tried to force it, which only makes the energy worse if the energy's off trust the energy because the energy can be off for a bazillion different reasons. It might be off because you're just two different types of people. It doesn't mean you have to hate each other, just means they're not your people. If the energy's off, it might just be because you're interested in different things. You might be somebody that doesn't drink and this is a big party crowd.

 

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Energy is going to be off. You might be somebody who's crazy into health and fitness and reading personal development books, and the person you're talking to just thinks that's kind of cheesy, not going to work. You might be somebody that is a very deep person and you might be talking to somebody who's just loving stuff kind of on the surface. That's okay. The energy's a little off though. Don't try to force it. Trust the energy. Trust that if you just show up with an open heart and you show up as yourself and you're kind of a kind open-hearted person, that energy is guiding you toward your people. So you get into a mistake when you try to force it, that's where you're going to get insecure. That's where you're going to be a red flag. That's where you're going to get passive aggressive and clingy, and you're going to take everything personally.

 

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Don't do it. And that's where the Let Them Theory has changed my life, learning to say, let them be a person that I don't click with and still wish them well. Let them come and go in my life and not make it personal. Let me take a more flexible and open-minded approach to adult friendship because everybody's got a lot going on. There's great scatterings all over the place. People are going to come and go in your life. The energy is going to shift and change between you and people that you love. And that's a beautiful thing. I see so much online about breaking up with friendship and when a friendship ends, what if a friendship never ends for real? Just entertain that idea for a second. What if a friendship never ends? What if friendships go through seasons? And there are times where you're connected with people and times where you're not.

 

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I mean, have you ever had an experience in your life where you had a friend that you were in close proximity with? You're in the same time of life, you're into the same things, and so the energy just was the energy and then it either fade or you had a falling out or some such thing like that and years go by and next thing you know come back around and you see this person at a reunion or a funeral or a wedding, or you just randomly bump into them in some city or on a vacation. And all of a sudden with all that distance and with the changes and the growth that you've both had and the things that you've experienced along the way, you come back together in a moment of proximity and timing. And the energy's there. Interesting, isn't it? There is a fundamental rule that you have to follow about adult friendship that I did not know until a few years ago.

 

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And that is take a flexible approach. Let people come in and out of your life. Let the energy be off, let it be on. Let people move, let them move on. Let them get married and have babies while you're still single. And don't make it personal. Wish them well, I didn't know this. I just literally felt like if I wasn't talking to somebody or seeing them all the time or being invited to things that they were doing that we weren't friends. It's not true. This whole notion that you got best friends and friends for life, it is a modern construct that actually sets us up to fail. Friendships don't actually end. They just come in and out of your life. And the let Them theory and learning to say, let them them live their lives. Let them change. Let them move on. Let them scatter in different directions.

 

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Let them meet new friends. Let them live with other people. Let them not invite me. Let them have a social life without me. Let me stop expecting other people to be responsible for my relationship with them. Let me take responsibility for creating it. Let me take a more flexible approach. Let me wish people well. Let me grow up and be mature and realize that just because I'm not seeing somebody all the time or we're not really clicking right now, that doesn't mean they're my enemy. One of the things that I write about in the Let Them theory is people hold no power over you unless you give it to them. And so all of those people that you think are no longer your friends or are your frenemies or you're against, that's you giving people power. What if you were more flexible? What if you embraced the three pillars, proximity, timing, and energy, and you recognize before you're quick to judge that person's this, this person's that.

 

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It's not personal actually, this is the law of friendship, proximity, timing, energy. And anytime a friendship starts to fade or feels forced or you're frustrated or you're on the outside looking in or you get kicked out of the friend group or somebody stabs you in the back or gossips behind you or whatever it is that's happening, or you feel lonely, like it's impossible to make friends right now, how am I even going to build friendships? I'm totally overwhelmed that anytime that that happens to you, instead of bashing yourself or the other person, you go, wait a minute, the great scattering. This is not a group sport, it's an individual one. I can no longer expect friendship to happen. I have to take responsibility for creating it. And I am adopting a very flexible approach to this. Anytime that a friendship starts to fade, I'm going to ask myself, did any of the three pillars changed?

 

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Because if proximity changes, your friendship is going to change. If the timing of your life or their life changes, your friendship is going to change. If the energy starts to shift and energy shifts for a good reason, you want to know why energy shifts is because it's a sign that you're changing and growing in new directions and it's a sign that they're changing and growing in new directions. And that's a good thing. And that's why I am saying before you blow up a friendship, before you sign off and say there or this or that or the other thing before you feel sorry for yourself and you blame yourself, ask yourself, have any of these three pillars of adult friendship changed? Because if they have, it's not personal. It's a pillar. And you need to take a more flexible approach. 

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And I think we've all been in one of those friendships where you've been super, super close, one of you moves or one of you changes jobs or one of you starts a family and next thing you know, they're so busy you never see each other. And then every time you get on the phone it's like, I never talked to you. And then you feel the guilt trip and then you're like, but it doesn't have to be this way. And then you cannot find any time to get together. And as you look at your calendars, it's like why do we need a scheduler who runs logistics for UPS to figure out our two calendars? And why are we unable to find the date except for a Tuesday, seven months from now, for a two hour window? I'll tell you why. Because the timing of everybody's life has gotten crazy.

 

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People get stretched by the demands of their life. If you have to spend all week at work or in graduate school or caring for an aging parent or for little kids, you have very little free time. And one of the things that has really surprised me is that I'm in my fifties. I thought I would have way more time for friends Now I thought I'd be dancing around and all this stuff. Are you kidding? I have less time because I have three adult kids. I have a full-time job. Any free time that I have, I'm trying to spend time with either my kids or my aging parents. I've got so much going on just like you do that the tiny amount of time that I have trying to get that to line up with somebody that I care about that may not even live near me, the proximity's gone.

 

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This is what I mean by the rubber band stretching. And I want you to have that visual because guess what? The rubber band is still intact. It's just stretched because one of these three pillars is no longer present. And oftentimes for me it's proximity. My most favorite people in the world literally don't live near me. Like my closest friends, my oldest friends, I'm mad at them. Aren't you mad at the people that you love that don't live near you? Why can't they move near you? Proximity's not there. The rubber band is stretched, but it's still intact. And guess what happens with time with more mini scatterings, it comes back into shape again. The most important reason why I want you to think about this is because of you clinging and you grip and you become like I was really toxic and yanking on that relationship and making the other person wrong and having passive aggressive energy because you weren't invited.

 

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And guess what's going to happen? You are going to snap that rubber band. You are going to be the one that breaks it because your energy shifts. And then nobody wants to hang out with you because you're not being flexible because you simply didn't understand the three pillars and you made it personal. And that's not going to happen anymore. And the reason why it's not going to happen anymore is because you're going to take a flexible approach and you're going to remember the rubber band and you're going to check yourself. Let me check myself before I start taking it out on somebody else or making myself feel like a loser or telling myself that this is impossible and I'll never have friends and everybody's moved on and this is I'll never find my people. You're going to remember these pillars and you're go, wait, it's not personal.

 

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It's about the pillars. And that means I have the power to create incredible friendships. And so I know you're thinking, okay, I'm in Mel, thank you. This is so eyeopening. I've already forwarded this episode to 15 of my friends that I need to be flexible with. I forward it to my adult kids. Everybody needs to hear this. And I agree with you, and I am going to teach you the exact approach that I used in order to find some of the best friends of my life at the age of 52 when we moved to a brand new community. I had to start all over. I was incredibly lonely. But first, I want to address something because you're going to have to be flexible with this. It's not going to be easy in the beginning because none of us like to put ourselves out there. 

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People are going to come and they're going to go in your life. And the more flexible you are, the more they come and go. And it's such a beautiful thing to let them. I want you to focus on the second part of the theory. Let me, because that's what's in your control. Let me be understanding. Let me make an effort. Let me check in without expectation, but just because I care. Let me make the plans. Let me trust when the energy feels off. Let me call or text if someone crosses my mind. Let me act with the belief that some of my most favorite friends, I haven't even met 'em yet, let me go first. Let me go first. That is how I embrace these three pillars of proximity, timing, and energy. That is how I learned a more flexible approach to friendship. That is how I took responsibility for creating more fun and a social life and finding and having some of the best friendships of my entire life.

 

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The Let me go first part because I'll tell you, I've wasted years of my life feeling sorry for myself. I've wasted years of my life sitting alone, bitter at home, feeling like everybody's life was some giant party that I wasn't invited to. The Let Them theory woke me up to a simple truth. Friendship matters. Friends are going to come and go, and friendship is there for you to create, but you got to take responsibility for it, which means you got to get out of your house. You got to be the one with the open approach. You got to be the one making an effort. You got to go first.