The lessons about friendship I have in my 30s I wish I had in my 20s.
What a ridiculously cliche title, but genuinely true.
Wherever you fall on the introversion/extroversion spectrum, it remains stubbornly true we have some innate need to have friends.
While it’s never easy–when you are in school, you are in the conditions optimal for building friendship. Humans your age are everywhere, you’re with the same people for 8 hours a day, you can gather in groups around things you like, join clubs, etc. High school and college seem to be especially intense seasons where you’re differentiating from your family and your friends are everything to you.
So when you hit post-graduation and the structures that helped you build friends fall away and you’re young with more free time than ever, the ache of friendship hits hard. And often, the answers for friendship aren’t all that different from when you were younger.
“Join Meetup! Just put yourself out there. Join a club. Just talk to somebody. Try dating — find your forever friend.” Sometimes, the affirming, but unhelpful, “Yep, it’s hard out there.” And the worst one that I heard was, “Have kids — you’ll be friends with the moms of your kids’ friends.” Look, have kids if you want, but not because you want friends.
So looking back over my last 10 or so years of building friendship in young adult life I made a few observations that actually got me friends that nobody told me about.
Sometimes a friendship you’re chasing that isn’t working out isn’t about you or them — it’s just life.
We all have that person, even after we’ve graduated college. There’s someone that you just think is so cool and while you might never say you’re desperate to be friends with them, deep down you are. And when the adage “To make a friend, be a friend” doesn’t seem to hold up despite how hard you’re trying, you’re wondering what the heck is wrong with you.
It could be that they don’t like you, but I’ve also realized it could be a number of things.
- Maybe they have enough friendships, and while they might like you, there’s just not relational room for more–after all, no one has an infinite capacity for friendships.
- Maybe their schedule doesn’t have enough room– they have family to see, a job to work, downtime to take, chores, errands to run, etc. They like you, but there’s just not time.
- Maybe it’s not a good time — there have been people who I was chasing, gave up, and then some circumstances in their life changed and then our friendship actually had a chance to build.
I’m not saying to give up, but if you’ve been chasing awhile and it’s not working out, it doesn’t say anything about who you are that this friendship isn’t happening (right now).
Take a few minutes to think about if/who you’re chasing and whether it’s time to stop the chase.
In reverse — there might be someone who is trying to be friends with you that you’ve been missing out on.
I don’t know what caused me to realize this, but I was talking with a gal at work and suddenly realized that she had been trying to be friends with me. She had off handedly mentioned hanging out a few times beyond the lunch table at work but neither of us had stuck it out to really land a date and time.
I liked her well enough, but she wasn’t one of the ones that I’d been chasing, and so I hadn’t even seen her efforts. She’s really lovely and I’m glad something shook me out of what I’d been missing.
Take a few minutes to ask yourself if there’s anyone you might be missing in your life that you are missing out on.
Your friends don’t have to be in a circle together.
When you think of the ideal friendship in your life, what does it look like? Does it look like the ensemble sitcoms like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, etc. Isn’t it the dream to have that solid core of friends? But I think we can trick ourselves into thinking we don’t have friends if it doesn’t have that formation.
It turns out, you can have a core set friends around you who aren’t in the same circle. I’ve got a few in my handbell choir, a few at work, a few at church, and occasionally for my birthday I have everyone over, but for the most part they don’t know each other. I realized that when I was whining to my husband about not having friends, I was really whining that I didn’t have an ensemble sitcom.
Take a few minutes to think if your desire to have a certain formation of friends is limiting how you define the friendships in your life.
Your friends don’t have to be your age.
This was probably the hardest one for me to realize. My husband and I at 22 had just moved 13 hours away from family and a great set of friends, and were struggling to find community in Texas. A couple in their late 40s at work regularly sat with me at lunch and at some point invited us over for dinner and games.
We had a great time. We did it a few more times. When we had some tough moments, they were they ones we called to talk (in addition to our parents). While we lived there, I probably would have never said they were our best friends, but looking back, they were.
I have had lunch weekly for the last 2 years with a woman in her 50s. She helps me understand my parents, gives me a window into life’s challenges at her age and shares with me wisdom she’s gained over the years. And she’s just also a lot of fun and reminds me to drink water.
But when I was 22 and crying about friendships, I was only looking around those who were my age and couldn’t have imagined that someone in their 40s that wasn’t family would be my best friend.
It’s not just people who are older than me. Now that I’m in my 30s I have more than a few friends who are 10+ years younger than me and I’m trying to remember the example of my older friends who reached out to be my friend. Perhaps they also were remembering that it was hard to make friends in your 20s.
Take a few minutes to think about the people in your life — is there someone you wouldn’t have considered a friend because of how different they are from you, but they actually are?
Life keeps changing, and so will your friendships.
While we may have a few people here and there who are friends for the decades, most of our friendships will be fluid. They’ll move away. You’ll move away. They’ll change jobs. You’ll change jobs. Someone new shows up at work. You’ll try a new hobby and meet someone. Someone may stop showing up to a class. There’s any number of ways that people move into and out of our lives that have nothing to do with you.
It can feel like the end when someone moves out of your life, but it’s just as true that new people can move in. When I whined to my husband about my friendships, I couldn’t even consider the possibility that there would eventually be new people in my life to be my friends.
Take a few moments to reflect on how your friendships have been fluid all your life and how you can make peace with the fact that it will always be true.
I really wish I had known all this sooner.
I spent a lot of time feeling hurt, lonely, and whining to my husband about my friendships, while simultaneously missing out on friendships because my friends now aren’t who I thought they would be, are different from me in any number of ways, and don’t take the formation I was envisioning.
You likely opened this because you’re feeling the ache too. Remember that any of these shifts in mindset will not only help you find a friend, but also means that that friend has found a friend–you.
Ashley Crutcher is the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.
