I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We’ve lost our friend group and social circles. And we’re all alone again.
Maybe you graduated from high school, college or university. Maybe you moved to another city too far away. Maybe your friend group fell apart. Maybe you outgrew your friends because they were interested in stupid humor, drinking or games that you’re not interested in anymore.
Or maybe, you never really had a social group to call your friends in the first place.
Regardless, it sucks all the same. You’ve got no friends around you now.
So, is it too late to get friends now? Are you pretty much done if you lost your earlier chances?
In my opinion, it’s only too late after you’ve died.
We tend to accept this negative thought that it’s too late or that it’s impossible, because we don’t know how to get new friends.
We go out and meet people. But despite that, no friendships happen.
Let’s dig deeper why.
Why we lack skills to build friendships
When we are young, where do we get most of our friends?
Mostly from two sources. First is school whether it’s compulsory education, college or university. Two, hobbies which you were probably pushed to by your parents.
Both of these have tons of forced social exercises to get to know others better. Either in form of actual ice breaker exercises or just ambient hanging together.
Thus we basically end up accidentally building social groups and friendships.
But when those end, we lose our places to make friends. We lose the supporting framework that we relied on to make friends.
When social circles “just happened” to us, we didn’t need the skills to deliberately build them.
Using an analogy, building friendships are like riding a bike. When we’re younger, our bike often have stabiliser wheels. They help you ride the bike faster, because you can just focus on pedaling yourself forward.
What happens to kids when they try to ride a bike after removing the stabilisers? They fall. Many times. They help you go forward, but they don’t teach skills like balance needed to ride a bike without the stabilisers.
Similarly, school and hobbies, which were essentially pushed on us, act as the stabiliser wheels. And after those aren’t pushed on us, we’re lost on how to make new friends.
When social circles “just happened” to us, we didn’t need the skills to deliberately build them.
Thus we never learned skills like how to chat up a stranger, find what common interests you share with the stranger, and build a friendship based on those interests. Especially when building friendships in adult life is on hard mode due to everyone being too busy with work or lacking energy in their free time.
As a cherry on top, the change from supportive framework in youth to adult life isn’t gradual that you could get used to.
No, it’s like hitting a wall. Or being thrown to the deep end of the pool and being expected to swim after getting used to the kiddie pool.
Thus you’re left wondering did you miss out on making friends. Because in the new environment, you don’t know how to. All because it requires different skills to what you were using before.
I argue that if you knew how, you’d also feel it is possible. You might have different priorities where to allocate your energy. But it wouldn’t feel as impossible.
Thus it also wouldn’t feel like it’s too late.
Takeaways
- You can find friends until the day you die. While you can talk to another human being, you can make friends. Feeling that it’s too late might come from not knowing how to make friends.
- When we’re young, social circles tend to just happen to us from school or hobbies. Those environments act as stabiliser wheels to support building social circles as a byproduct of just participating.
- When when we’re dropped off the ledge into adulthood, we don’t know how to build friendships anymore because different skills are needed to build friendships in the adulthood.
