Why making friends as an adult is so hard

One of the truest friendships of my adult life is with a person who, on paper, has nothing to do with me.

Different backgrounds, different paths, different worlds. If someone had introduced us at a networking event, we would probably have exchanged two polite sentences and a business card, never to see each other again. No algorithm would have matched us.

And yet. What brought us together isn’t what we do: it’s what we go through. The daily grind, the struggles, the challenges of being human — the ones that don’t show up in any profile. Children, parents growing old, work that keeps changing, the days you don’t recognise yourself. On those things, we were identical.

So here’s the thesis of this piece, stated upfront: as adults, friendship no longer grows out of similarity. It grows out of shared life — and real life cuts across every background. The problem is that we’ve built existences where shared life has almost disappeared.

The numbers behind something we all feel

The phenomenon even has a name: Americans call it the friendship recession. According to the American Perspectives Survey by the Survey Center on American Life the share of people who say they have no close friends at all has quadrupled since the 1990s: from 3% to 12%. And those who said they had more than ten dropped from 33% to 13%. The data is American, but anyone living in a European city knows the direction is the same.

This is not a lifestyle-section detail. Friendships are one of the most solid predictors of health and happiness research has ever found. We are losing a vital infrastructure — and we barely notice, because it disappears slowly.

As kids, a courtyard was enough

Think back to how friendships were born when you were small. You didn’t choose: there was a courtyard, a classroom, a beach. A shared context — daily, free. Repetition did the rest: you saw each other every day without deciding to, and inside that repetition everything happened — the fights, the alliances, the secrets.

As adults, we dismantled the contexts and replaced them with calendars. Friendship became something to organise: find a date, sync the diaries, cancel, reschedule. “We really must get together” — the most-said, least-kept sentence of adult life. Not out of bad faith: because we eliminated shared everyday life, and without everyday life friendship becomes a project. And projects, when life squeezes, get postponed.

Boxes don’t make friends

There’s a second mechanism, subtler. As adults we spend time with people by function: colleagues, the parents of our children’s classmates, professional contacts. People selected by similarity of roles — same companies, same circles, same declared interests.

And here’s the paradox: similarity of paths produces acquaintances, not friends. With people who resemble you professionally, you share the what; friendship is born on the how — how you go through things, how you carry your struggles, who you are when nobody’s looking at your title. That’s why my improbable friend became essential: between us, there was no box doing the filtering. There was only life, and life made us equals.

When the context is a function, the bond falls with the function: you change companies and the “work friends” evaporate; primary school ends and the classmates’ parents vanish. They weren’t fake. They were bonds resting on a role — and roles pass.

What it takes, then

I don’t have a formula — on these things I distrust anyone who has one, and anyone who tells you how to make more friends, how to succeed with women, with men, and so on. But three things I’ve seen work, in my life and in the lives of the people I observe.

Presence beats intensity. A ten-minute coffee every week can matter more than an epic dinner every six months. Adult friendship needs presence, not rare spectacular events. It’s the grown-ups’ courtyard.

Real life shown, not hidden or softened. The true friendships of adult life are almost always born in the uncomfortable moments — a move, an illness, a rough patch — because that’s where the mask drops. Whoever saw you struggling and was there, is a friend. The rest are people in the background, passing through, who for whatever reason don’t want to, can’t, or simply aren’t investing in the relationship.

Backgrounds don’t matter. Quite the opposite: transversal friendships — different ages, different worlds, different lives — are often the most solid, because that’s where real exchange happens. They say opposites attract, and in a way it holds for friendship too. Maybe it has to do with feeling at ease outside the contexts where, one way or another, some form of competition always creeps in? The beauty of friendship is being yourself without constantly having to measure, compare, prove.

There’s one last thing, and it’s about places. We are building an ever more efficient world — cities ever bigger and organised for everything except actually meeting: running apps, home-swapping apps, dating apps are booming — even meeting people, by now, needs an app. The physical places where you could simply be, with no specific purpose, have disappeared, and relationships have grown stiffer, boxed in by roles, places, functions. It’s a subject very close to my heart — as an entrepreneur too. I’ll come back to it.

Meanwhile, the question I leave you with is the one I sometimes ask myself: when was the last time you made a new friend — not a contact, a friend? And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, maybe you’re not the problem. It’s that nobody builds us courtyards anymore. But a courtyard, as an adult, is something you can still choose to build.