Making New Friends as an Adult

If you would have told me when I was a teenager in the South that when I was thirty-four, I would be living in Silicon Valley, married, with a baby, I would have said that you’ve lost your mind. Yet, somehow that’s exactly what happened. After years of living in NYC, one fateful day I met an irresistible man at a dinner party, and life changed forever. We immediately fell in love, and I was more than happy to accept his marriage proposal and start a new life.

When one dreams of a new life, one does not usually dream about the emotional components. You see the superficial things, the new city, the new ring, maybe even a new kitchen—but you don’t imagine how desperately you will miss your friends, you don’t imagine the loneliness felt sitting in a new house on a new street in a new town where no one cares about you. You don’t consider how much effort and energy it takes to start over. Finding a new job, a new hair stylist, finding a favorite gourmet food shop to buy something a little too indulgent on those days when nothing is going right—those things aren’t always easy to find. But by far the hardest thing to find as an adult in a new town is a GREAT set of friends.

Finding friends felt easy when I was a girl; I remember any negotiation in my childhood neighborhood ended with the promise: “I’ll be your best friend. I’ll do anything you say. I’ll invite you to my birthday party.” This oath sealed many deals on the playground. What deals? Oh I can’t remember exactly. Probably something about ice cream. Then in middle school finding friends wasn’t that difficult either: the popular girls gravitated to each other, so did the awkward girls (like me). High school was spent trying to impress each other and make sure we were all like everyone else—so while high school felt truly awful and hard, in retrospect, finding friends was mostly easy (even for the still-awkward girls like myself, again I just found the other still-awkward girls).

College was even easier. Alcohol fueled a bit of the friendship making, yet those college friends—with art, boys, and finals dominating every conversation, party, and event—they were the kind of deep friendships I always dreamed of having. While we were each starting to find a way to express our “true selves”—not the self who wanted to impress the high school quarterback, or the self who wanted the approval of the most popular girl, but the real self who was hiding inside all along—in college, somehow, while all of us were discovering, embracing, and eventually celebrating what made us different and unique, this allowed us to find like-minded others. And this very special time created lifelong friendships—friendships that are still, ten years later, impossible to replace.

After a few months of being in this new town, with my wonderful husband, our beautiful baby, and our boxes finally unpacked, I was missing my friends so much it hurt. I wanted to meet new friends, kindreds who would hopefully fill up some of the loneliness that had been created with the absence of my college friends. But I found myself stubbornly saying no to lunch invitations, and leaving mama-baby groups early, resisting other women’s kind efforts to get to know me.

I continued to stay in touch with my college friends: we texted, we emailed, we Facetimed often. But after several seemingly endless games of phone tag, I realized that nothing can match face-to-face time. Not even Facetime.

With that in mind, one day I got myself and the baby dressed, and we went to our baby music class where I accepted a lunch invitation with a group of friendly mamas, an invitation I’d previously declined. I finally felt ready and happy to give these potential new friends a chance. Most of all I just felt grateful that they were giving me a chance.

“Make new friends, but keep the old” is what they taught us in Girl Scouts. So I’m curious, have you struggled to find new friends as an adult—and if so, how did you break out of your comfort zone? And how do you manage to nurture your old friendships, while keeping your heart (and calendar) open for new ones?