Nobody Warns You About the Friendship Admin
Making friends as an adult is strange.
When you’re younger, friendships kind of just happen to you. You sit next to someone in school, you both hate the same teacher, one of you has a PlayStation, and suddenly you spend every afternoon together for the next four years.
Very scientific process.
As an adult, it’s different. You can meet someone you like and still need six weeks, three calendar checks, two voice notes, and a “sorry this week is crazy” before you manage to drink one coffee together.
It’s not that adults don’t want friends. I think most people want deeper connection than they admit. The problem is that adult life is not built for friendship in the same easy way.
Work takes time. Relationships take time. Family takes time. Laundry somehow takes more time than it should. People move cities, start businesses, have kids, change priorities, disappear into work stress, come back, disappear again.
And then one day you realize you haven’t made a new close friend in years, and you’re standing in your kitchen eating cereal at 23:40 thinking, “Is this normal or am I becoming weird?”
Probably both. But mostly normal.
Why Adult Friendships Feel Harder
One reason adult friendships are hard is simple: we don’t get thrown into the same room with the same people every day anymore.
School did a lot of the work for us. So did university, sports teams, shared flats, first jobs, and all the other messy places where you see people often enough that eventually someone becomes “your person” by accident.
Adulthood removes a lot of that accidental closeness.
You can like someone and still not see them again. You can have a great conversation at a party and then both return to your separate little life islands. You can think, “We should hang out,” and then never make it happen because nobody wants to be the person who sounds too eager.
This is where adults are funny. We say we want meaningful friendships, but then act like sending a message is a marriage proposal.
“Hey, I enjoyed talking to you yesterday” suddenly feels dangerously intimate.
Ridiculous, honestly.
The Fear of Being Too Much
I think one of the biggest problems in making friends in adulthood is that we become too careful.
As kids, we were direct. Brutally direct sometimes.
“Do you want to play?”
“Can I come?”
“Are we friends?”
No strategy. No personal brand. Just chaos and honesty.
Adults are more polished, which is useful in many situations, but it can make connection slower. We wait for the perfect moment, the perfect message, the perfect level of casual. God forbid someone notices we actually like them.
Marisa G. Franco writes in Platonic that “people still like us more than we think.”
I like that sentence because it feels almost annoying. If it’s true, then a lot of the distance we create is not even rejection. It’s protection.
We assume people are busy, uninterested, already full of friends, or silently judging us for using too many emojis. So we stay vague. Friendly, but not open. Present, but with one foot already outside the door.
And then nobody knows if the other person actually wants to be friends.
Beautiful system. Very efficient. No notes.
Finding Your People Gets Faster With Age
Here is the good part of getting older: you become better at recognizing your kind of people.
Not always. We still make strange choices. We still sometimes confuse “exciting” with “good for me.” We still have moments where we meet someone and think, “This person is mysterious,” and six weeks later realize they were just emotionally unavailable with nice shoes.
But in general, you start seeing patterns more quickly.
You notice who gives you energy and who drains it. You notice who asks questions back. Who listens properly. Who makes you laugh without making others smaller. Who is kind to service staff. Who can handle silence. Who celebrates your wins without secretly shrinking.
When you’re younger, friendships are often built on proximity. Same school. Same class. Same village. Same group. Same parties.
Later, quality over quantity friendships become more important. You don’t need thirty people around you if five of them make you feel like you can breathe properly.
That’s not a sad downgrade. It’s an upgrade with fewer notifications.
Your Best Friends Might Still Be Ahead of You
There is this weird pressure around friendship.
People talk about childhood best friends like they are the gold standard. The person who knew you at thirteen. The person who remembers your bad haircut, your first heartbreak, your questionable music phase (I think I’m actually still in it…).
That kind of history is beautiful. No doubt.
But it can also make people feel behind if they don’t have that. As if your friendship circle should be finished by twenty-five and everything after that is just maintenance.
I don’t believe that.
Some people meet their closest friends later. At thirty. Forty. Fifty. After moving countries. After changing careers. After a breakup. After finally becoming honest enough to stop trying to fit into rooms that never really suited them.
Adult friendships can take longer to form, but sometimes they fit better because you choose them with more awareness.
You’re no longer just collecting people who happen to be around. You’re finding like minded friends. People who match your values, your humour, your rhythm, your way of seeing life.
That can be worth the wait.
Being Yourself Is Still the Filter
“Be yourself” sounds like advice printed on a old mug you find in the back of the closet at your work place next to the one with a kitten and a sunset.
Unfortunately, it is still useful.
Because if you are constantly performing, the people who like you are liking the performance. Then you have to keep doing the whole show. Very exhausting. Bad business model.
Being yourself does not mean oversharing your entire emotional archive during the first coffee. Nobody needs season one to seven immediately.
It means allowing enough of the real version to show that the right people can recognize you.
Say what you actually think sometimes. Admit what you like. Laugh at the thing you find funny. Don’t pretend to love techno, climbing, silent retreats, or “networking dinners” if your soul leaves your body every time someone says the word networking.
The point is not to be liked by everyone.
That’s a prison with good lighting.
The point is to be findable by the people who would actually enjoy you.
Making Genuine Connections Takes Repetition
A lot of people expect friendship to feel instant.
Sometimes it does. You meet someone and five minutes later you’re talking like you accidentally found a cousin.
Nice when it happens.
Most of the time, though, making genuine connections is not like touching an electric fence (not sure this is the best metaphore, but you get it). You need repetition. You need shared situations. You need small moments where trust has time to collect.
One conversation becomes two. Two becomes a walk. A walk becomes an inside joke. The inside joke becomes a message. At some point you’re sending each other ugly photos from the supermarket and the friendship has quietly entered the building.
Nothing official happened. No ribbon cutting ceremony.
It just grew.
That’s why recurring activities work so well for making friends as an adult. Sports clubs, classes, volunteering, group trips, creative workshops, language exchanges, running groups, surf camps, whatever. The activity gives you a reason to show up again without having to make friendship the whole scary headline.
You’re just doing something.
And next to the doing, friendships happen.
Don’t Confuse Slow With Wrong
Adult friendships often start slower.
That doesn’t mean they are weaker.
Sometimes a friendship needs three months of casual contact before it becomes real. Sometimes you need to see someone in a few different situations before your brain goes, “Okay yes, this one is safe.”
That’s fine.
Not every connection has to explode into your life like a movie scene.
Some of the best people arrive very normally. No flashy entrance. No instant soul recognition. Just someone you keep enjoying a little more every time you see them.
There is a calmness in that.
Also, adults come with full lives. If someone doesn’t reply immediately, it doesn’t always mean they hate you. Maybe they are tired. Maybe their week is a mess. Maybe they opened your message while holding groceries, forgot to answer, and now feel guilty enough to avoid the whole thing for another day.
Humans are not always elegant creatures.
Give people a bit of grace. Including yourself.
You Don’t Need to Become More Interesting
A lot of friendship advice accidentally makes people feel like they need to become more impressive.
Have better stories. Travel more. Read cooler books. Become funnier. Get hobbies that sound good on LinkedIn.
I don’t think that’s the answer.
Most people are not looking for the most impressive person in the room. They’re looking for the person they feel normal around. The person where the conversation doesn’t feel like a job interview. The person who makes them laugh without trying too hard. The person who remembers something small. The person who is honest enough that you can also relax a bit.
That’s where authentic connections start.
Not from building a better character.
From lowering the mask just enough that another person can lower theirs too.
How to Make Friends in Adulthood Without Making It Weird
I don’t have a magic formula, and if I did I would probably still forget to answer messages sometimes.
But a few things seem to help.
Go where the same kind of people show up more than once. One-off events can be fun, but repeated contact does more of the heavy lifting.
Let people know when you like them. Not in a dramatic way. Just say, “I really enjoyed this,” or “Let’s do this again.” Adults need more obvious signals. We are all walking around pretending to be chill while secretly needing written confirmation.
Ask slightly better questions. Not interrogation questions. Just ones that move past job, city, weather, and how expensive everything has become.
Share something real, but don’t dump your whole backpack at once.
And when someone seems like your kind of person, don’t wait three months to act cool. Send the message. Invite them. Suggest the coffee, the walk, the surf, the dinner, whatever fits.
Worst case, nothing huge happens.
Best case, future-you is very grateful you were brave for ten seconds.
Maybe Your People Are Still Coming
If you feel like you haven’t found your people yet, I don’t think that means something is wrong with you.
It might just mean your life hasn’t put you in enough of the right rooms yet.
Or you changed, and your friendships haven’t caught up. Or your old environment knew an older version of you too well. Or you spent years trying to be likeable instead of recognizable.
That happens.
The good thing is that adult life keeps opening doors, even if they are less obvious than school corridors and university kitchens.
A new city. A new hobby. A group trip. A class. A retreat. A random dinner. A shared table. A week somewhere you don’t have to carry every old version of yourself into the room.
Your people can still come.
And when they do, they might stay longer. Not because adult friendship is easier, but because by then you know more clearly who actually fits.
A Small Kyuka Note
This is also one of the reasons I still believe so much in the surf camp life (btw the reason I stepped out of my comfort zone and made new friends after completing university).
A surf camp Fuerteventura trip puts many of the friendship ingredients in one place: shared meals, repeated contact, activities, small awkward beginnings, and enough time for people to stop being only polite. At Kyuka, we don’t try to force everyone into becoming best friends, but we do try to create the kind of space where making friends in a surf camp feels a lot more natural than standing alone at a random bar wondering what to do with your hands.
