Making friends: creating community as adults

How do you make friends and cultivate community as an adult? You may have noticed an uptick in studies and reporting about loneliness, social isolation, a widespread breakdown of community. Or maybe you’ve been feeling it yourself. Here are a few books that look past romantic relationships to argue for the importance of friendships in our lives, and which give examples for how to create or maintain friendships.

You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult by Lane Moore
Moore takes a deep dive into different types of friendships, from work acquaintances to new friends to long-term besties, and explores how we can build and sustain real, rewarding friendships. How do we set boundaries? What if a friend breaks up with us? How do we maintain friendships through marriage and parenthood? Why is it so hard when it looks so easy on TV?

Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming
What if the key to building friendships is just … hanging out? Liming explores shared unstructured social time as a linchpin to forming social bonds, and examines how so much of our current societal structures (long work hours; the pandemic; productivity culture; etc) conspire against this method of creating connection.

Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others by Amy Thielen
Ok so let’s say you’ve got some friends or acquaintances, but are looking for some more structure for your socializing. Thielen’s book is here with suggestions to help you throw more frequent, less stressful, more fun dinner parties. 125 recipes combine into 20 suggested menus for a variety of get-togethers.

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
Perhaps, against all odds, you are able to foster and maintain long-term friendship. Sow and Friendman are here to share what has worked for them in maintaining their decades-long, often long distance friendship, and also to make a case for investing in friendships the same way that we do in family and romantic relationships.

~ posted by Andrea G.