#NoNewFriends: Why It's Harder To Make Friends As You Get Older

First comes love.

Then comes marriage.

Then comes baby in the baby carriage.

That’s not all; that’s not all.

You won’t be making many new friends after this -- at all!

Okay, the last line is slightly different that the original version I learned from my kid-neighbor as a seven year-old, but you get the point. As we get older, you’ve probably noticed that your “squad” is shrinking (and truth be told, you’re probably too old to have ever referred to your friends as your squad). Gone are the days of dozens of acquaintances waiting in the wings for Friday night happy hour invites. Here to stay? The inner circle. The simplified theory for this phenomenon goes: turn twenty-five, get job, settle down, have baby, make no new friends.

The theory isn’t totally inaccurate, but it’s more nuanced. In short, life stage, more than age, dictates how many friends a person makes and maintains during a given period of their existence.

Youth: Friends Galore

Across the board, people make and maintain more friends in their youth. For young people under age twenty-five, they tend to have a regular crew they spend physical time with. These friendships are close: friends aren’t just friends; they’re best friends. These friendships are replenished frequently: young people gain and lose friends rapidly. Most interestingly, these friendships are a necessity: young people need friendship for survival as children and young people. As put by Melanie Pinola, a writer for Lifehacker, “From the time we're in kindergarten to when we graduate college, friendship-making is such an important part of our social and personal development, it's almost not even optional. We need to make friends to find out who we are, where we fit in with our peers, how to navigate social situations, and which people will help us with the rough parts of growing into a person (things like dealing with class bullies or confusing relationships).”

For young people, friendship isn’t just for fun. Without a breadth of life experience, they need friends to learn, survive, and navigate life’s novel obstacles. It makes sense that young people spend an inordinate amount of time developing and maintaining so many friendships in their youth.

As a high schooler, while I always had a core group of friends that didn’t change, I also maintained at least one “new” close friend every year outside of that group. The same pattern developed in college. Friendships that felt intense, sister-like, and unbreakable often lasted less than a year -- for all kinds of reasons, complicated and not-so-complicated. In my youth, these friendships were hot-and-heavy, on a regular rotation, and started as quickly as they ended. Not only was I learning how to be a friend, but also how to navigate common, but new, life experiences alongside by friends, such as decision-making centering around: sex, alcohol, romantic relationships, religion, and politics.

Childbearing to Middle Age: #NoNewFriends

For folks under age twenty-five, the research is clear: friends are plentiful, easy to come by, and available. For people at childbearing age through middle age, the research becomes a bit more muddled, in part because statistics often represent averages, rather than drilled-down subgroups of people. But, here’s what we know:

Overall, people tend to interact with fewer people as they move toward midlife, but they grow closer to the friends they already have. That being said, this finding mostly applies to people who marry and/or have children. Single people, who make up half of adults, don’t necessarily follow this pattern.

Many adults, as they move farther and farther away from youth and the collegiate existence, find that life, work, children, and other time constrictions get in the way of friendship. Internal alarm clocks go off (i.e. a thirtieth birthday), and people turn inward, focusing on the here and now, like spouses, family, and current friends, rather than on finding new friends.

According to Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, as people’s external conditions change (usually, with age), it becomes harder and harder to meet the three conditions that sociologists consider crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other. Which is why, according to Adams, so many people meet their lifelong friends in college.

Proximity, for example, is hard for work friends. People move around, get promoted, and take jobs elsewhere. Competition in the workplace causes people to mask their vulnerabilities. “Coupling” and children further complicate the development of close friendships, because it’s like matching-making for multiple people. Everyone has different needs and preferences, which can be hard to accommodate. Finally, having experienced failed relationships and toxic friendships, older adults are often more apprehensive when it comes to friend-making.

These days, as a married, childless, twenty-nine year-old woman, I fall somewhere in the middle. While there’s less time for friend-making today than there was at twenty-two, I’m still able to devote a larger portion of my week to friends. I almost always manage a happy hour or Saturday each week with friends. That being said, as work, creative, volunteer, and family obligations increase, I find it more difficult to find time for nurturing friendships. That being said, I still have more time for friend-making than most of my girlfriends with children. Compared to my single friends, however, it’s significantly less. My single friends sans kids spend a larger portion of their time at happy hours, interacting in group chats, planning trips, attending parties, and joining sporting leagues.

The biggest takeaway for people who are looking to develop new friendships after the collegiate years: it depends on your life situation. Friendship takes time, vulnerability, and physical closeness -- like any relationship.

Middle age and beyond: A Friend Resurgence

Unlike the childbearing years, during middle age, many adults experience a resurgence in friendship. Middle age provides a slew of novel life situations that are particularly palatable for friendship. By middle age, children have grown up and left the home, or, at least become more independent. Many people in middle age also find themselves freshly single. Beyond middle age, retirees have more time on their hands.

All these circumstances collectively create fertile ground for renewed friend-making in middle age and retirement. Once again, life stage, more than age, dictates whether life’s ducks are in a row, so to speak, to allow time for the development of friendships.

Women, As Friends

Of particular note in all these findings is how women develop friendships, specifically. Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, and Kunal Bhattacharya, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, found that women gravitate toward the behavioral pattern of having a “best friend.” This relationship, according to Dunbar, is “similar to a romantic partner, and women work hard at these relationships.” Women, throughout life, tend to create an “inner circle,” even during the periods of the rapid loss of friends, like after childbirth.

For women, this phenomenon makes sense for an important, evolutionary reason: childcare. From the research perspective, this is called the “grandmother effect.” Mothers, mothers-in-law, close friends and family come into play a large role throughout women’s lives, in part, for childrearing purposes. Even when women begin to shrink their circles in the childbearing years, they maintain the closest, most trusted relationships for numerous reasons, a major one being childcare.

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Whatever life stage you’re in -- high school, college, childbearing, married, middle age, retired, single -- remember that not all aspects of friend-making are completely within your control. Perhaps you’re feeling like it’s harder to make friends as you get older. Maybe you’re feeling like hardly anything has changed. Maybe you’re experiencing a resurgence of new and exciting friendships in your life. Life is a series of ebbs and flows in friendship. For many, the periods of friendship loss can be isolating. Just remember: not everything is within your control; life circumstances affect each person’s ability to develop and nurture friendships.

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Brittany Kilpatrick is an attorney and co-founder of Bonded Magazine. She likes carbs, reading, pondering the intricacies of Donald Trump's spray tan, Beyoncé, Thesaurus.com, musicals, fully replacing her daily water intake with La Croix, and her dog, Tucker.

You can find her on Facebook or Instagram: @brittany.kilpatrick or on Bonded social media: @bondedmag.