By: Hawi Bussa
Here’s the thing no one really wants to say out loud. Making friends as an adult is awkward. It's clumsy. It's like trying to join a group chat you were never invited to but still desperately want to be part of. And in the age of voice notes, TikTok confessions, and curated vulnerability, real connection has somehow gotten harder to come by.
You would think that with all our apps, meetups, events, and personality quizzes telling us exactly who we are and what kind of people we vibe with, making a new friend would be easy. But no. These days, making a friend feels like dating without the flirting and ten times the existential dread.
We’ve romanticized the idea of a soulmate. We’ve obsessed over finding the one. But where are the think-piece articles about finding your platonic soulmate? The one who will ugly laugh at your jokes, send you unhinged memes at 2 AM, and talk you down from your spiraling thoughts without making it weird. That kind of connection feels rare. And for most of us, it’s not that we don’t want friends. We just don’t know how to start.
Remember when you were six and you just walked up to another kid on the playground and said, “Wanna be friends?” That was the whole pitch. No overthinking. No curated version of yourself. Just vibes. Now, we stand around at social events with drinks in our hands and phones as shields, waiting for someone else to make the first move. We’ll make eye contact and nod like we recognize each other from somewhere, then immediately scroll like our lives depend on it. It’s not that we’re rude. It’s that we’re scared.
Making new friends means showing up as you are. Not as the filtered version. Not as your highlight reel. And in a world that rewards polish, that’s terrifying.
Some of us are lucky. We’ve got those ride-or-die friends we made in college, in high school, or in some divine twist of fate on a flight or in a bathroom line. But life happens. People move. Get married. Have babies. Get consumed by work or burnout or healing. Suddenly, your weekend group chat is silent, your go-to lunch buddy is now remote in another time zone, and you’re left realizing you haven’t laughed over coffee with someone new in months.
So you try. You say yes to the invitation. You show up to the gathering. You brave the awkward small talk. You ask someone what they do for a living and then silently scold yourself because it sounds like a job interview and not a conversation. You try to connect over music or books or pop culture, but everyone’s already in their own world, and you wonder if you’re too late to be let in.
But here’s the catch. Everyone else is wondering the same thing. Everyone’s lonely. Everyone’s craving connection that doesn’t feel transactional. Everyone wants someone who just gets them.
The truth is, friendship in adulthood is less about finding someone identical to you and more about finding someone who wants to try. Who wants to show up. Who wants to laugh over the same dumb internet video three times in one night and call it a memory.
Maybe it’s not about perfect alignment. Maybe it’s just about effort. Answering the call. Sending the text. Asking the person you keep bumping into at work or church or the gym if they want to grab a bite. Risking a little bit of ego for a shot at something real.
Because here’s what they don’t tell you. Friendships now don’t fall into our lives like they used to. We have to build them. Brick by brick. Moment by moment. And sometimes, the start of something beautiful begins with a simple question:
“Hey, do you wanna hang out sometime?”
Not profound. Not poetic. But maybe, just maybe, enough.
And that’s all we’re really hoping for these days. Something that’s enough. Someone who sees us, laughs with us, grows with us. Someone to do life with, one meme or messy moment at a time.