How I Did The Impossible: I Made Real Friends After 30
A lonely time
In 2012 I was lonely. Having moved to San Francisco in 2008, I had struggled for years to find a community where I felt at home. I wanted friendships that felt like the old ones from my two and a half decades in the UK. I felt that everyone my age in SF had made their close, lifelong friendships, and that I had missed my chance to do so in my new home. I liked the place, preferring it on balance to living in the UK, but I saw living there as a trade-off: better place, shallower connections. Either I could stick around and accept that deep friendships would always be behind a tantalizing diaphanous curtain - visible everywhere but inaccessible to me; or I could go back to the horizontal rain, the mushy peas, and the cold comfort of warm pubs.
Photo by Marina Shatskih
Fast-forwarding to last week, I was going through some old files and I found a list from mid 2012. It was a list of people I knew in San Francisco. I can’t remember exactly why I created it, but I do remember clearly that I was feeling a serious lack of close friendships. This was a few weeks before my birthday, so perhaps I was reflecting on how to mark the occasion, wondering if I could scrape together some kind of gathering that didn’t feel too sad.
The list, which I called ‘My 88 closest friends in San Francisco’, has 85 names on there. I’m not sure if I later deleted 3, or if there was just a soupçon of wishful thinking in my titling. I looked through the list this week and categorized each person according to how close I am to them now, in 2020. I’ll share the results below but first some context might be helpful.
My life at the time wasn’t so bad: I had people to hang out with, mostly one-on-one or two-on-two with my girlfriend at the time. I want to be clear that all these were great people in their own ways - they just weren’t my tribe. I was pretty sad about the situation, feeling that nothing was likely to change and that if I stuck around in California I would be consigned to a life devoid of close friendships. That was a despairingly resigned feeling.
Yet, lest the sad violin music in the background reach a crescendo, I’ll tell you that I was not devoid of hope. My story was shaping up to take a positive turn, although not quite yet.
Next, I read an article in the New York Times, entitled “Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?”. I believe this article ranks as one of the most irresponsible pieces of journalism ever committed by this otherwise venerable newspaper. The thesis is that the conditions for making genuine, close friendships almost never exist after college. Apparently, the best I could hope for from new friendships was looser, more transactional ones without meaningful depth (a tennis friend, a lunch friend, a hiking friend). Not surprisingly, I sank further into a dispirited funk.
A New Hope
What happened next changed my life more than I could have dared to dream. The part of me that remained optimistic was still taking action, meeting new people, following up, and (apparently) making lists. Little by little, I began to make new friends with whom I felt an ease of friendship that I hadn’t felt in years. One new friend in particular was a major connector of people, and my burgeoning friendship with him was the spark that led to many others. I began to crack open the window of the world of the Bay Area I now know and love - a world with hundreds of intersecting circles of communities, each with their own nodes, gathering places, and values. Spurred on by my newfound confidence that I was not doomed, I met lots of people across numerous communities, and became genuinely good friends with a few.
Now I feel overjoyed with how authentic and nourishing my friendships are. Not only that, but also I feel part of a community, in which many of my friends are friends with each other, which feels so much better than isolated islands of friendship.
The journey from those initial sparks took a lot of work and has been hard at times. I have put in a very large investment of effort and emotional energy, at a cost to other projects in my life. The effort has paid off a thousandfold, and I’d hardly change a thing.
How did I do it? I became intentional about building and maintaining friendships. Looking back, I see that I did this in two phases: the Needy Phase and the Discerning Phase, punctuated in between by The Cull.
Photo by Engin Akyurt
In the Needy Phase, whenever I met a new person and felt a possibility of real friendship based on the initial interaction, I would make sure to get their contact details and follow up. Real follow-up, not just one text, but an invitation to grab coffee or a drink some time. A lot of awesome people already have a lot of friends, so sometimes I had to put my ego aside and text two or three times before the meeting ensued. If it went well, I was usually still the one putting the energy into building the friendship by staying in touch and following up with another invitation. Many of these connections died on the vine, but some blossomed. I made another spreadsheet of the people I was meeting, so I could be organized about following up.
The Needy Phase lasted almost 5 years until the spring of 2017. Of course I didn’t call it that at the time, I was mostly delighted with my new feelings of friendship and community, and several incredible friendships were kindled in the fires of my relative desperation. But there were also feelings of resentment arising from the sense that I was putting almost all the effort into some of my friendships. I began to get frustrated that people whom I had hosted for dinner multiple times had never invited me to a thing. Perhaps they thought “It’s fine, he enjoys hosting.” It is true - I do - but I also like to feel that my friends care about me. What I realized (with the help of my wife Roxy) was that in my desire to make friends and build community, I had lost my discernment. I had quite a few ‘friends’ with whom I enjoyed spending time, but who didn’t invest in their friendships with me. I had supported them during tough times but then they weren’t there for me, or didn’t express gratitude (in my view if someone spends a few hours to cook you a thoughtfully-created dinner, the least you can do is take a few seconds to text them the next day to say thank you). I learned that these people, while interesting and fun in the moment, were not true friends, so I proceeded with The Cull.
The Cull was simple. I stopped reaching out to people, and waited to see who cared enough to make contact with me. Those who didn’t showed by their actions that the input of energy needed to maintain the friendship was not worth their time. This was an organic process, not a rigid one, in which the information I gathered was just one factor in my deciding who my real friends were. One advantage of my situation was that I enjoyed spending time with all these people, so I did no ‘friend break-ups’ and I didn’t ignore or ghost anyone. If people got in touch with me, that was great news as it showed they cared.
The Cull was the gateway to the Discerning Phase. The key to this was to clarify what I look for in friendships so I could know which ones I wanted to put energy into. After considering people I admire and reflecting on why, I settled on five qualities I look for in friends.
Authenticity. People who show up as their true selves, who are willing to dive into deeply personal topics, and who embrace vulnerability. They share their failures, their traumas, and the uglier parts of themselves. They trust that their whole, true self will be received with compassion and grace.
Curiosity. People who seek to learn more about the world, whose primary orientation is to ask rather than answer, who believe that there is always something to learn from another’s perspective.
Kindness. People who are caring, who go out of their way to help or elevate others.
Fun. People who don’t take life - or themselves - too seriously, who are silly and playful and with whom I laugh.
Participation. People who embrace life; who make an effort to practice friendship in the active, not the passive. People who act like we’re on the same team.
I do not claim to embody these 100% myself but these are the main qualities I seek out in others. They are the qualities I want to experience in others, and they are the ones I want to emulate too. We become like those with whom we spend the most time, so by gravitating towards people with these qualities I hope to inch closer to being the human I want to be. I wanted to keep this simple so I could remember it easily from day to day, so I prioritized and picked my top five. I would be interested in your comments - what do you look for in friendship?
The List
Back to my list from 2012. Of the 85 people on there, 72 I haven’t seen in at least 5 years. 10 I think of now as acquaintances. A grand total of 3 I now consider as close friends. Recall that I titled this document ‘My 88 closest friends in San Francisco’.
2020 status of my 2012 friends list
Since I now feel lucky to enjoy a wonderful set of friendships in the Bay Area and beyond, I’m here to tell you that it is possible to forge deep, authentic friendships after 30. I am deeply grateful for the journey of friendship and community that I have traveled over the last decade. My time in the relative wilderness prepared me to develop intentional friendship as a life skill, and now my cup of friendship and community is overflowing with wonderful people I have chosen, and who have chosen me. To those readers who are my friends, thank you for being willing to make new friends as an adult. You enrich my life beyond measure.
To summarize what this journey taught me about friendship.
Understand what you’re looking for in friendships.
It takes work and putting your ego aside. You sometimes have to push the ball up the hill for a while before it starts rolling down the other side.
Putting your ego aside is different from giving away your self-respect. If the ball is stuck in the mud, go find another one.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Time and energy spent investing intentionally in friendships is beyond worth it.
Humans are social creatures, and the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives. They say something positive arises from any difficulty. I’m delighted to say that the New York Times could not have been more wrong, and the quality of my life is immeasurably higher now that it was back in 2012 when I made that list.
I’ll close with this. I know I have a lot of privilege. Not everybody has as much time as I do to devote to friendships. But I hope that anybody can learn something from this counter-point to the depressing narrative that it’s impossible to make deep friendships after 30.