Making friends as an adult: "THAT one"

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Making friends as an adult: "THAT one"

by Jen Davies, nerd

July 1, 2026

Making friends as an adult is a lot harder than making friends as a child. As a child in school, there are typically two dozen kids in a class (and more in the overall school) who might be candidates, and you spend 6 or 7 hours every day with them, forced to interact in class and at recess and on the bus. Kids in the neighbourhood you live in are all often versed in the same set of 5 or 10 games (jump rope, Tag, or Minecraft), so they're all candidates for friendship too.

As an adult, you never know what someone is "into" - the range gets a lot broader as we get older and we have different life experiences and develop different interests. We get pickier and more set in our ways, too (that's a different topic for another blog post). Our pool of candidates often gets smaller as well: we aren't surrounded by two-dozen or more people for 6-7 hours each day. If we're lucky, maybe we interact meaningfully with that many people in a week! And when we see our neighbours we are usually going somewhere (like to work) or doing something (like gardening or lawncare).

I'm in my mid-forties, and I can say with complete confidence now that making friends, both as children and as adults, feels like a crapshoot. Maybe there's science behind it, but it doesn't feel that way! Let me give a few examples.

My spouse

I was a young adult when I met my spouse. In a previous blog post I wrote about the day I first saw him. TLDR: it was significant interest at first sight for both of us, for flimsy reasons. Some part of each of us said, "THAT one." And for whatever reasons (nope, no kids), we stuck to each other in spite of some significant difficulties, and (with the help of some counselling) we are still together 25 years later. So weird.

Old friends

I lost touch with most of my childhood friends when I went away to school. I wasn't someone with a huge network of friends to start with so that wasn't hard to do. Since moving back to my hometown I have reconnected with a couple of people and it feels really easy with them. As kids I believe we were friends of convenience (like I said, we were in the same classes and/or lived nearby to each other). And somehow that is translating into adult friendship fairly well. Weird.

New friends

Making friends at work who I would socialize with outside of work has not worked for me, in great part because I like to keep those parts of my life separate. I have not looked at the people at work as possible friends, except for being caring and kind at work. 

The best success I've had at making friends as an adult is through people I already know. For example, someone I became good friends with was an ex-coworker from a part-time job of my spouse's (I didn't really know him then), who I met at a birthday party of another school friend. We hit it off. Why? No idea why at the time, but since I've discovered we both have the inner sense of humor of 12 year old boys. Shared sense of humour helps. I've got lots of these kinds of relationships.

Otherwise, I've had not bad luck meeting people through some shared hobbies. For example, I have met some lovely people through the local board games club (and in the past, through RPGs). Don't know yet if they'll be longtime friends but I'm optimistic. The hobby type helps: we spend a fair amount of time joking, talking through problems when it's a cooperative game, and playing games gives the opportunity to see how good a winner or loser someone is! This has worked well as a strategy for identifying friends.

And sometimes I see someone speaking or overhear a conversation and I think to myself, we could probably be friends. Maybe it's a turn of phrase, or the way they explain something, but it happens. I don't or can't always follow up so I have no review of this strategy. Maybe one day! 

There it is. Not sure how helpful this is, it's just something I've been pondering. I chose not to include being friends with family members because I am strangely lucky that I grew up liking everyone I am related to, so I'm probably not a good example (from what I hear). I would like to validate the experience that maybe others have had, that sometimes we just know and "THAT one" is a perfectly valid way to find a friend.