How do Americans usually make friends as adults? Is it really as hard as people say?
August 3, 2025
How do Americans usually make friends as adults? Is it really as hard as people say?
38 comments
It’s probably hard if you have no hobbies
Hobbies and casual drinking. If you dont drink and if you dont have a lot of hobbies, then you will reaaaaaally struggle. I make a ton of friends casually socializing at anime/video game conventions. My wife is also vietnamese, and as a white dude, I have suddenly been thrust into a massive community and am constantly meeting people and making friends.
I’ll be at a birthday party of a friend or something and there’s gonna be some dude named Bo or Vu or Kevin and we will get to drinking and they’ll know one of my wife’s cousins or they’ll know some dude I work with who is also viet or some guy I went to high school with back in the day, and suddenly were best friends and buying each other shots.
And my wife will be like, “Oh yeah, i went to high school with that dude,” and I’ll be like, “Why didn’t you introduce us sooner? he is really damn chill, and now i think we’re boys.” But she’s always like,”You just make friends with everybody.” But i am like no, its this fucking community.
You can literally meet people at any social gathering, and they know people you know, and they’ll be super friendly. We have a circle of friends that just came together a couple of years ago its mostly Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese people, and i attribute it to their drinking cultures and family cultures. They’re just so damned outgoing.
And we all somehow know all of the same people from back in the day. It’s really fun.
Adults meet via kid activities, hobbies, work, religious activities, volunteer work, neighborhood proximity, dog park, political action, family introductions, day drinking in direct sunlight.
Compared to where?
All of the friends I have made as an adult were made through mutual interest in hobbies.
Then, just be available and be the kind of friend you would want others to be. Have something to offer and be upbeat.
“Hey, (guy I met playing pickup games at the YMCA), I’ve always wanted to go kayaking down XYZ river, I think I’m going to plan a trip next week/month. Would you be interested in going with me and maybe a couple other friends?”
It definitely can be. Pretty much all the new friends I’ve made in adulthood came through work or people who were friends with my childhood friends
Snooping this thread for advice.
We don’t
I don’t think it’s hard. I think this is something that young adults think and experience because there is a stark difference between adolescence and young adulthood. Where you are in forced proximity with large groups of people via school, and therefore have a ton of “friends” (mostly acquaintances). Then when you’re out in the real world, your number of contacts by forced proximity shrinks, acquaintances from school fade away, and suddenly your world feels smaller. But once you realize you just need to be intentional about adult friendships, it’s not hard.
Similar to making friends as a kid, it’s not hard as long as you f face some basic social skills + get out of the house and interact with people IRL
Work, Church, political events and clubs, sports or hobby clubs/classes, talking to people on the bus or park.
I usually make friends while out at the bar, or maybe while hiking, fishing, hell I’ve made a friend while out on a dirt bike trail before. Basically any social hobby.
Are they close friends? No, but I can give them a holler to go out for a beer or maybe hit the local shooting range and I know we’ll have a good time.
I think it depends where you are and what you like to do.
I’ve never had a problem making friends but I’ve iced in places where people are fairly sociable and I tend to get into things that involve other people.
If you actually go out and do things it’s almost hard not to make friends.
Some of my closest friends I met at work. If you date or marry someone you can be introduced to a large number of potential friends. And of course there’s always potential friends at bars (just be careful), the gym, and group sports. I’ve made some friends via social media and if they lived closer we’d probably hang out all the time.
Through work, primarily.
As an adult in the US, the easiest way to make friends is through some type of shared interest. Hobbies, and social events/classes associated with those hobbies.
Or drinking. I don’t drink much, so hobbies it is.
Adults make friends based on shared interests. So; if you are interested in things that have public meetups of any kind and you participate in them, you’ll probably make friends.
Sometimes it’s very hard to find the community near you that shares your interests. Sometimes you find yourself in a place where even shared interests aren’t enough due to ideological differences (if you play music but are more liberal and live in a conservative space you may not enjoy playing music with the community around you). Sometimes your interests aren’t pubic enough to have regular gatherings.
So it can be incredibly challenging. And it can be as easy as going out to community gatherings. Really depends on you and where you live.
What the fuck is this “friend” thing you speak of?
I’ll let you know if can figure it out.
I only have one close friend and that’s my husband.
My husband only has one close friend and that’s me.
I suppose it would be nice to have other friends but that means actually doing stuff with them and that doesn’t sound fun.
I don’t have any hobbies that take me outside and when I am outside I don’t talk to another soul.
I think I’m a hermit at heart and so is my husband.
Someone mentioned talking to people on the bus or at the park. Uhh… no thank you. Those are strangers. I’m not going to randomly talk to a stranger. lol
We’re both introverts if you didn’t catch on earlier.
Kindness,humor, finding things in common also sharing new thoughts and ideas-and of course perseverance.
My friends are my coworkers. I moved to this area after I got married. People are very clicky here and seem to hang out with their friends from high school.
They either have common interests or have known each other for years via commonalities such as work, school, or church.
Most adults (not just Americans) make close friends with random people without common interests.
Church
I have friends through my hobbies. I’ve still got my friends from when I was a kid too. And there is also my cousins, I get in good with almost all of them. If you don’t have friends it might be a you thing.
Do something you like and meet the people doing that.
Outside of family or friends of friends it’s mostly people I work with. That being said I have two kids and a wife so I have basically zero free time.
“Do you have a light?”
“We have 9, are you tryna run full court right now?”
I’m not sure what this has to do with being American.
He says it is hard? How hard do they say it is? Who are they?
I feel like it’s a lot harder since COVID. That event stunted a lot of people socially and made it easier to retreat to their own world and home and devices.
Getting older and people having kids is another, more traditional factor that makes making friends harder. People are so worn out by work and family commitments, not much time and energy is left for anything outside of that.
I think having constant entertainment – streaming, devices, etc., hurts too. It used to be you hated being at home because it was boring, and you just had to go anywhere – the mall, the bar down the street, the park. People and people-oriented things was the primary human entertainment before the internet.
And I don’t think people, on the whole, are as friendly with their co-workers as they used to be. That’s not everyone’s experience. There are friendly work places where friendships grow. But I feel there’s less of that than in the past – especially with so many people working from home.
But, this all ebbs and flows and evolves. I believe things will swing in the other direction eventually. The younger generation will find new and different ways to connect.
Very hard because we have almost no 3rd spaces and many people just want to stay to themselves.
Golf single- you’ll be thrown in with a group of other strangers for 18 holes. Chance are that at least two of you don’t know anyone.
Join the Elks, Masons, Knights of Columbus etc. You might meet some good people and help the community.
Volunteer to coach a kid’s sport or umpire. You won’t make friends umpiring but you’ll be busy and interact with humans. Might morph into something friend adjacent.
I’ve met my adult friends through work and my hobby
For me, mostly through my kids. Especially when they were really young. My wife got involved in some Moms’ clubs and we met other new parents who were going through the same challenges of parenthood. Also, their preschools had a lot of family activities and we’d just see the same people over and over again and became friends with a lot of them.
I’ve also met some friends through work who have similar interests and stayed friends with them after we’ve moved on to other places.
Work and church
Ive made so many friends through local hobby clubs. I feel like it’s a lot easier to bond with people if you have common interests. Meeting people at bars and concerts doesn’t lead to lasting connections in my experience.
It’s difficult in that if you aren’t lucky enough to be friends with your coworkers, you have to be really intentional about hanging around with other adults to make and keep friends. And for a lot of people making friends when they were kids just happened because of how we structure school and social life for kids.
When you’re a kid, you’re in school eight hours a day plus there’s usually extra curricular activities. The roster of people you’re hanging out with changes multiple times throughout the day. There’s many chances to bond with a lot of different people and share interests and work on projects together. Same with college to some extent but not everyone goes to college.
But as an adult, you don’t have those opportunities. Most work places have you seeing the same handful of people every day. And unless you have a workplace that tries to build socializing into the culture (which is actively resisted by some) there’s not much chance to do a lot of socializing at work.
So you have to be really intentional about building a social life for yourself. This comes naturally to some people, but can be very difficult for others. Especially if you’re very introverted or have always been a go with the flow type who just made friends with whoever was around (that last bit is me to a T).
Ultimately, it comes down to doing an activity that requires regular face-to-face social interaction, usually around a shared activity or goal. Adults usually make friends through a hobby like team sports, volunteer work, or creative endeavors.
Whenever people ask for advice on how to make friends as an adult, I always tell them that if they want to speed run getting a social circle, they should go into community theater. 2 to 8 hours a week of face-to-face work on a project with probably 8 to 100 people… at least 6 to 8 weeks of rehearsal plus tech week and one to two week of shows? This is going to have you around the same people for 50 to 100 hours easy inside of about three months. You will make at least one friend, but probably more.
38 comments
It’s probably hard if you have no hobbies
Hobbies and casual drinking. If you dont drink and if you dont have a lot of hobbies, then you will reaaaaaally struggle. I make a ton of friends casually socializing at anime/video game conventions. My wife is also vietnamese, and as a white dude, I have suddenly been thrust into a massive community and am constantly meeting people and making friends.
I’ll be at a birthday party of a friend or something and there’s gonna be some dude named Bo or Vu or Kevin and we will get to drinking and they’ll know one of my wife’s cousins or they’ll know some dude I work with who is also viet or some guy I went to high school with back in the day, and suddenly were best friends and buying each other shots.
And my wife will be like, “Oh yeah, i went to high school with that dude,” and I’ll be like, “Why didn’t you introduce us sooner? he is really damn chill, and now i think we’re boys.” But she’s always like,”You just make friends with everybody.” But i am like no, its this fucking community.
You can literally meet people at any social gathering, and they know people you know, and they’ll be super friendly. We have a circle of friends that just came together a couple of years ago its mostly Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese people, and i attribute it to their drinking cultures and family cultures. They’re just so damned outgoing.
And we all somehow know all of the same people from back in the day. It’s really fun.
Adults meet via kid activities, hobbies, work, religious activities, volunteer work, neighborhood proximity, dog park, political action, family introductions, day drinking in direct sunlight.
Compared to where?
All of the friends I have made as an adult were made through mutual interest in hobbies.
Then, just be available and be the kind of friend you would want others to be. Have something to offer and be upbeat.
“Hey, (guy I met playing pickup games at the YMCA), I’ve always wanted to go kayaking down XYZ river, I think I’m going to plan a trip next week/month. Would you be interested in going with me and maybe a couple other friends?”
It definitely can be. Pretty much all the new friends I’ve made in adulthood came through work or people who were friends with my childhood friends
Snooping this thread for advice.
We don’t
I don’t think it’s hard. I think this is something that young adults think and experience because there is a stark difference between adolescence and young adulthood. Where you are in forced proximity with large groups of people via school, and therefore have a ton of “friends” (mostly acquaintances). Then when you’re out in the real world, your number of contacts by forced proximity shrinks, acquaintances from school fade away, and suddenly your world feels smaller. But once you realize you just need to be intentional about adult friendships, it’s not hard.
Similar to making friends as a kid, it’s not hard as long as you f face some basic social skills + get out of the house and interact with people IRL
Work, Church, political events and clubs, sports or hobby clubs/classes, talking to people on the bus or park.
I usually make friends while out at the bar, or maybe while hiking, fishing, hell I’ve made a friend while out on a dirt bike trail before. Basically any social hobby.
Are they close friends? No, but I can give them a holler to go out for a beer or maybe hit the local shooting range and I know we’ll have a good time.
I think it depends where you are and what you like to do.
I’ve never had a problem making friends but I’ve iced in places where people are fairly sociable and I tend to get into things that involve other people.
If you actually go out and do things it’s almost hard not to make friends.
Some of my closest friends I met at work. If you date or marry someone you can be introduced to a large number of potential friends. And of course there’s always potential friends at bars (just be careful), the gym, and group sports. I’ve made some friends via social media and if they lived closer we’d probably hang out all the time.
Through work, primarily.
As an adult in the US, the easiest way to make friends is through some type of shared interest. Hobbies, and social events/classes associated with those hobbies.
Or drinking. I don’t drink much, so hobbies it is.
Adults make friends based on shared interests. So; if you are interested in things that have public meetups of any kind and you participate in them, you’ll probably make friends.
Sometimes it’s very hard to find the community near you that shares your interests. Sometimes you find yourself in a place where even shared interests aren’t enough due to ideological differences (if you play music but are more liberal and live in a conservative space you may not enjoy playing music with the community around you). Sometimes your interests aren’t pubic enough to have regular gatherings.
So it can be incredibly challenging. And it can be as easy as going out to community gatherings. Really depends on you and where you live.
What the fuck is this “friend” thing you speak of?
I’ll let you know if can figure it out.
I only have one close friend and that’s my husband.
My husband only has one close friend and that’s me.
I suppose it would be nice to have other friends but that means actually doing stuff with them and that doesn’t sound fun.
I don’t have any hobbies that take me outside and when I am outside I don’t talk to another soul.
I think I’m a hermit at heart and so is my husband.
Someone mentioned talking to people on the bus or at the park. Uhh… no thank you. Those are strangers. I’m not going to randomly talk to a stranger. lol
We’re both introverts if you didn’t catch on earlier.
Kindness,humor, finding things in common also sharing new thoughts and ideas-and of course perseverance.
My friends are my coworkers. I moved to this area after I got married. People are very clicky here and seem to hang out with their friends from high school.
They either have common interests or have known each other for years via commonalities such as work, school, or church.
Most adults (not just Americans) make close friends with random people without common interests.
Church
I have friends through my hobbies. I’ve still got my friends from when I was a kid too. And there is also my cousins, I get in good with almost all of them. If you don’t have friends it might be a you thing.
Do something you like and meet the people doing that.
Outside of family or friends of friends it’s mostly people I work with. That being said I have two kids and a wife so I have basically zero free time.
“Do you have a light?”
“We have 9, are you tryna run full court right now?”
I’m not sure what this has to do with being American.
He says it is hard? How hard do they say it is? Who are they?
I feel like it’s a lot harder since COVID. That event stunted a lot of people socially and made it easier to retreat to their own world and home and devices.
Getting older and people having kids is another, more traditional factor that makes making friends harder. People are so worn out by work and family commitments, not much time and energy is left for anything outside of that.
I think having constant entertainment – streaming, devices, etc., hurts too. It used to be you hated being at home because it was boring, and you just had to go anywhere – the mall, the bar down the street, the park. People and people-oriented things was the primary human entertainment before the internet.
And I don’t think people, on the whole, are as friendly with their co-workers as they used to be. That’s not everyone’s experience. There are friendly work places where friendships grow. But I feel there’s less of that than in the past – especially with so many people working from home.
But, this all ebbs and flows and evolves. I believe things will swing in the other direction eventually. The younger generation will find new and different ways to connect.
Very hard because we have almost no 3rd spaces and many people just want to stay to themselves.
Golf single- you’ll be thrown in with a group of other strangers for 18 holes. Chance are that at least two of you don’t know anyone.
Join the Elks, Masons, Knights of Columbus etc. You might meet some good people and help the community.
Volunteer to coach a kid’s sport or umpire. You won’t make friends umpiring but you’ll be busy and interact with humans. Might morph into something friend adjacent.
I’ve met my adult friends through work and my hobby
For me, mostly through my kids. Especially when they were really young. My wife got involved in some Moms’ clubs and we met other new parents who were going through the same challenges of parenthood. Also, their preschools had a lot of family activities and we’d just see the same people over and over again and became friends with a lot of them.
I’ve also met some friends through work who have similar interests and stayed friends with them after we’ve moved on to other places.
Work and church
Ive made so many friends through local hobby clubs. I feel like it’s a lot easier to bond with people if you have common interests. Meeting people at bars and concerts doesn’t lead to lasting connections in my experience.
It’s difficult in that if you aren’t lucky enough to be friends with your coworkers, you have to be really intentional about hanging around with other adults to make and keep friends. And for a lot of people making friends when they were kids just happened because of how we structure school and social life for kids.
When you’re a kid, you’re in school eight hours a day plus there’s usually extra curricular activities. The roster of people you’re hanging out with changes multiple times throughout the day. There’s many chances to bond with a lot of different people and share interests and work on projects together. Same with college to some extent but not everyone goes to college.
But as an adult, you don’t have those opportunities. Most work places have you seeing the same handful of people every day. And unless you have a workplace that tries to build socializing into the culture (which is actively resisted by some) there’s not much chance to do a lot of socializing at work.
So you have to be really intentional about building a social life for yourself. This comes naturally to some people, but can be very difficult for others. Especially if you’re very introverted or have always been a go with the flow type who just made friends with whoever was around (that last bit is me to a T).
Ultimately, it comes down to doing an activity that requires regular face-to-face social interaction, usually around a shared activity or goal. Adults usually make friends through a hobby like team sports, volunteer work, or creative endeavors.
Whenever people ask for advice on how to make friends as an adult, I always tell them that if they want to speed run getting a social circle, they should go into community theater. 2 to 8 hours a week of face-to-face work on a project with probably 8 to 100 people… at least 6 to 8 weeks of rehearsal plus tech week and one to two week of shows? This is going to have you around the same people for 50 to 100 hours easy inside of about three months. You will make at least one friend, but probably more.