If you have kids and your friends don't, expect that to put a strain on your friendship because you won't have time to spend the way you did once upon a time. You will plan more because your time is no longer free, just borrowed from your spouse or whoever else is watching your children. You will lose those serendipitous moments that form the contours of your relationship.

As an entrepreneur, I have found it really difficult to make friends. I have a business partner and a distributed team, it is extra hard to make new friends. If you work in an office, you come across people. I always found it easy to make friends at work and took it for granted. Now, it's nearly impossible to do. Then again, my mom has exactly zero friends and gets by so I have to imagine friendship is not a necessity.

There are a lot of popular tropes and memes about adult friendship being a series of “we should catch up soon” back and forth until one of you dies.

It doesn’t mean the friendships aren’t real. But having children and a job can pretty much suck the oxygen completely out of the ability to have and maintain frequent contact with friends.

I’m in my 50s and have several friends that I would consider very very good friends. We all have very different schedules and family obligations. If I’m very lucky, I might see them once a month. This isn’t like college when you might see your friend every day for several hours.

So if you’re a single person and your friends have families, it’s real possible to be lonely in the spaces between when you get to spend time with your friends.

Those sorts of events really deepen a friendship. I don't experience anything like that with my adult "friends". That limits how friendly we can realistically be. Sure, I've made friends as an adult, but they're just people I know and enjoy seeing once in a while.

Maybe having really deep relationships as a child makes it that much harder to make friends as an adult as they suffer by comparison.

>You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.

This is exactly my experience as well. My best friend and I originally met before we can even remember, we must have been 3 or 4 years old. There are pictures of us running around in pajamas and bowler hats, play fighting with plastic pirate swords, stuff that I can't really remember now.

We actually didn't really get to see each other more than once or twice a year, because we lived so far apart, so I guess we bonded even more intensely for the couple of weeks we had every summer. We lost touch around the 6th or 7th grade, and didn't really see each other for 10 years or so, apart from sporadic chats on Facebook and such.

But we finally got back together in 2014, and it was almost as if no time had passed. We had burgers and a few beers, and talked for 6 hours straight. Completely separately from each other, we've both become huge metalheads, so now we go to concerts and festivals all the time, and he invited me to join his music quiz team. We're annual champions for three years running now, and the guys have become my closest friends.

They've also gotten me into pen'n'paper roleplaying games, and introduced me to further new friends through that.

It is definitely harder to make friends as you get older, you have to hit just the right shared interests to make it work.

But for adults, I would say that this is not the best method. It can work, to be sure. But as adults, when various demands pull at your time (be it your job, your family, etc.) you can easily get in a state where...

> Pursue your own interests and the truth of your circumstance as fully as possible, as often as possible, and - crucially - for its own sake. Not to meet others, but to meet more of yourself.

...just leaves you still without friends because everyone else is also focusing on themselves and their own interests. This is especially rough in 2023 when people spend so much time online, alone, and so much of their hobbies revolve around being online, alone.

I have a lot of friends, and I think I'm pretty good at making and keeping friends. Friendship in adulthood looks different than childhood friendship. One of the ways it does is that it requires a certain amount of concerted effort by both parties to maintain the friendship, at once because you share interests, but also because the reciprocal effort is part of the friendship, it's constitutive of the very loyalty that typifies great friendships. It's about how despite all those competing demands on someone's time, you still decide to spend time together as friends.

It will feel unnatural and like "work" only because the preexisting social context of school or a job does a lot of work in the background. But once you realize that making and maintaining friendships takes a certain kind of effort, you can find it very rewarding. You also have the benefit of making lots of people different from yourself your friend, which people could probably use more of nowadays. I'm far more left leaning than some of my friends, but one thing that I think saves me from going completely off the deep end like some people I know is the exposure to alternative POVs that I get from my more right leaning friends.

The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that friendship is something you make time for (to the detriment of your other pursuits) seems to be very modern, very Western and an absolutely terrible idea.

Just anecdotally, the friendships where people rely on one another for assistance - helping one another achieve their goals rather than hindering them - seem to get stronger and stronger whereas the "let's catch up" friends seem to wither over time.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, doing simple things like giving a friend a lift when their car breaks down, providing them with meals when they're unable to cook for themselves or helping them move house actually cause you to value the relationship more.

You get them back, you know? If you want to? We ended up with a superset, of the social circle we had just before we had kids (I was super young so it's weird to talk about "friends I had before we had kids", but we have a bunch) and the friends we made because we had kids.

What's really corrosive is having to move a bunch.

What's striking to me about this is, I'm not exactly the most sociable, go-along get-along person on this site. I'd have assumed if these were huge problems I would have experienced them.

The first issue is your friendships begin tracking your life stage. Using a normative example, single people will tend to be friends with single people and married people will tend to be friends with other married people. Likewise, people will children will tend to be friends with other people with children.

This acts as a shared experience just by proximity. If people aren't in the same life stage that friendship tends to be trasnactional or unstable. By "transactional" I mean you might be friends with people in your softball league or who play basketball with on the weekend but mostly those friendships will tend to revolve around that common interest or activity. maybe that'll develop into a deeper friendship but the odds are against it.

Likewise, you will develop "work friends" by virtue of spending so much of your time at work. For the most part however these aren't friends at all. If you leave that job, that shared shared experience ends and you will likely never see them again. Maybe you'll promise to catch up. Maybe it'll happen once or twice but again it's now in an unstable state and won't tend to last.

As time goes on your friends will be replaced by family.

The only way friendships in adulthood tend to survive (IME) is by scheduled activities. You set the expectation that that's what you'll be doing at a particular day and time. That's why you'll see sports so often here because a softball game needs to be played at a particular place and time. Pick-up basketball however is less the case for this so you'll likely see the same people less.

It's also why parenthood tends to spell the end for many such friendships. If you have 2 young children at home it makes it harder to maintain a scheduled activity long-term. There'll be times your children will be sick, you'll need to go to school or whatever.

This is separate from my belief that friendships form via shared context not shared activities: https://billmei.net/blog/friendship

The way the society is structured might help develop these friendships or might prevent them. For example, were I was growing up (in ex Soviet Union), the school was structured such that you could end up being in the same class with mostly the same people for 12 years. Not just the same school -- but the same class. So if you never move (more on that later), you would end up knowing the same 30 people very well. One or two of them might become your good friends.

Now school is just one factor, the other is how transient people are. It used to be that people would be born, grow up and live most of their lives in one city. That means you probably will still have your fiends from since you were 5 living in the same city. In some countries, people move more, mostly because of jobs I guess. It is very hard to form deep friendships when you are moving every 4 years. Yes, you have many acquaintances but not too many friends.

I thought about this quite a bit. By now I lived half of my life in the "old world" and half in US. I can still skype, chat and email back and forth with my childhood buddies, but it is just not the same. I think good friendships need real face to face contact. I am making friends at work, but there is always an apprehension and competitiveness involved. They'll never be the same kind of friends I had growing up. Or maybe I became a different kind of person (too apprehensive, too withdrawn) that nobody would want to be best friends with ...?

The ratio of people actively befriending me, is lower than people I befriend. Maybe 3:1 Making me think most people don't put much effort into making friends.

My advice would be:

1. Networking is not making friends. If you want to leverage someone, it's a business relationship not a friendship.

2. People who befriend you might not be the kind of person you would choose to be your friend, but they obviously like you enough to make an effort so give them a chance and reciprocate. People probably try to befriend you but you don't even notice.

3. Let bad or superficial friendships go and concentrate on making good ones. I have loads of really close friends, but keep my Facebook friend count (relatively) low.

4. If a friend is having a problem, help them. This is how you move past the superficial friendship. Prove you are worthy of being a friend.

5. Never screw a friend over. See rule #1. If you intend to play a zero sum game with a friend, be willing to lose that friend. (I do business with good friends, but only if I know I will never be in a position to have to choose between my wealth/happiness and theirs). Also always be honest. Friendship requires trust.

6. Make an effort. Ask people out for a drink or a coffee. Invite them over for dinner. It's hugely time consuming. This week I am running out of time with friends wanting to hang out and friends who need help. But it's worth it.

7. Join clubs, organizations and/or religious institutions. Not just one. Friends of mine had good success with dance classes.

8. One close friend is worth hundreds of superficial friendships.

In practice, you make them at work - and that's it, because that's the only place where you end up spending enough time with others to actually form meaningful social bonds. I've also made friends when I've been thrown into an atypical experience with a bunch of other people simultaneously - an incubator in South America, a long boat trip to somewhere remote. But just going about your normal life - eh, it hardly ever happens. Even when you put work into it by inviting people out to do something fun, most adults are busy enough that you just can't see them often enough for a real friendship to develop.

If you find a decent solution, come back and tell me what it is.

You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.

School is the next big one, where for most kids they will struggle alongside each other for 13 years straight. The mixing up of classes year to year again hurts the likelihood of strong friendships forming, but you can also just have kids your age in your neighborhood as a strong peer group. You have massive amounts of commonality at that point - you are taking the same classes, you live in the same area, you know the same people, you are subject to the "same" pop culture of your school.

That is where those high school clicks emerge from. The most bonded peer groups of before specialize as they age.

The same hold true into college, but I definitely don't see the same commonality and uniformity there. Going through puberty is really the cutting off point where divergent personalities specialize your interests enough that finding commonality becomes much harder, and you start having much less to offer your peers over their cumulative experiences and engagements.

It only gets worse from there. The more years into life you are, the more interests and specialties you have as a person that makes finding compatibility all that harder. People force themselves into relationships and marriage out of societal pressure. Nobody forces you into friendship nearly as much, so over that hump the lack of compatible people drops to near zero. Its why I think most marriages fail - they are trying to force the highest degree of friendship, when the older you get the harder it is.

Pokemon Go, and video games in general, are extremely effective ways to get people a commonality to force them together and interacting in ways that can build meaningful bonds. A common challenge is essential to bonding. The more passionate you can be about it the more likely it works.

But even then the 30 year old comes with baggage. They already have their favorite movies and musicians. Likes and dislikes. Hobbies and things they want to avoid. Because they have experienced so much more a fraction than they would have as children they are that much more set in stone. The adage of how you can't change a person applies here - even children demonstrate dramatically declining malleability as they gain experience in life. As you gain magnitudes more life experience your flexibility personality wise declines by similar magnitudes. It is trying to fit together puzzle pieces - if the pieces are made of clay you can mold them to fit. If they are tried out and set in stone they are rigid and it is much harder to find a match, and those matches are much easier to fracture and break.

The commonality and struggle are the prongs of a puzzle piece. The more impactful on your life, the happier it makes you, the more passion you can have for it the more pronounced those prongs can be. Early on you only need the simplest commonality as being the same age or living near one another to forge bonds - as you get old and your piece gets more defined and nuanced, it takes larger struggles and stronger forces to bind pieces together.

- Enjoying one another's company is in greater measure a bi-product of friendship than the cause of the friendship, as it is often assumed to be. - Anecdotal evidence: - I spent a lot of time doing un-fun things with my friends before we started to do fun things together. We gained the ability to make each other laugh after having spent many hours together not laughing or having much fun. - We did not start out having many shared interests, but our shared interests have grown over time on account of us loving one another and being interested in each other's lives.

  - Thus
    - trying to be fun and entertaining is a poor way to go about trying to make friends.
      - People are significantly less receptive to attempts at humor and play from people with whom they are not close.
    - Finding people you instantly 'click' with is both difficult and unnecessary.
    - Finding people with shared interests is great but not strictly necessary.      

- Doing work together is a better way to build relationships than trying to have fun. - You don't have to be interacting the whole time. You could be doing separate things on your computers, side by side. - Enduring suffering together bonds people. Doing anything together bonds people, especially if it is by choice that you do it together. - Building relationships requires lots of time, and it is much easier to spend lots of time with people when you are doing together what you would be doing by yourself if they were not there. - Spending many hours doing work together relieves the burden of having to make conversation or entertain. When conversation starts to flow, it is natural and unforced. Having fun becomes spontaneous, rather than by appointment.

- Actionable steps - Try to put yourself in the sort of context which is conducive to making friends - If possible, live in a walkable community. - Be a regular somewhere. - Talking to strangers is kinda weird, but after you've seen the same people in the same place enough times, it starts to become weird not to talk. - To the extent that you live in the sort of context which is not conducive to making friends, realize that you cannot just go with the flow and expect good things to happen. - If you're in school, invite people to study with you. Don't worry about having fun. That part comes with time.

Then again, part of the problem is that people have forgotten what real friendships are like. "Friends" these days are just people you go to restaurants/clubs/concerts/vacations/hiking/camping with so that you don't have to go alone. That's not friendship. That's just people you hang out with.

It might cure the itch for a real friendship, but don't confuse it for one.