A family of friends

If you thought dating is tough in adulthood, finding new friends and sustaining old friendships is equally hard, if not harder! While there are apps for dating, where does one go look for friends? Don’t you sometimes wonder, how and where do I meet new friends and what should I do to sustain old friendships?

Mumbai: Have you ever thought about how easy it was to make friends in school and even in university? College and university offered so many options to meet new people, interact with friends of friends, hang out with a bunch of people who you met at the college festival or at a concert. Didn’t the process of making and sustaining friends seem so much more effortless and simpler as compared to adulthood?

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If you thought dating is tough in adulthood, finding new friends and sustaining old friendships is equally hard, if not harder! While there are apps for dating, where does one go look for friends? Don’t you sometimes wonder, how and where do I meet new friends and what should I do to sustain old friendships?

For most people, early adulthood years are associated with focusing on career and finding love. As a result, without realizing, our friendships slide into the background and very often we are guilty of not paying enough attention to them. This is something I have done too, and I’m not proud of it. For Gen-Z who enter the workforce as early as 19 and 20, this struggle starts way earlier than millennials. Work used to be a place where we made new friends, but so many young adults because of the pandemic were onboarded to their first job virtually and continue working in a hybrid manner, making the process of meeting new people harder. A lot of them mention they meet new people either via social media or gaming communities. This turns out to be a mixed bag as often one finds that people’s online persona doesn’t match with who they are in real life. As a therapist, I can tell that when you connect with someone online, whether it’s dating or friendship, a good idea is to meet them face to face soon enough into the relationship so that you have a realistic idea of who they really are and how they make you feel. These unique challenges do make things harder for Gen-Z when it comes to friendships.

As a millennial, I felt my mid 20s was the time when I put all my energy into my career as a therapist, finding love, getting married and then caregiving. Not even recognizing that friendships, were taking a backseat. But in my middle adulthood years, I have experienced that life comes with second chances and if we are lucky, this applies to friendships too. Most people realize that life just came in the way of friendships and when life gives a new opportunity to connect, re-invest, we do better and commit to be more present. While it may seem hard to comprehend, friendships are easy that way, we can find our way back sometimes if we begin to not take other’s absences or drifting away personally. Though these relationships can sustain only if each of us chooses to bring in mutuality, reciprocity, an ability to not hold grudges, an understanding that you are changing and so are they. But there’s more, connecting back with an old friend requires one person to take initiative and the other to receive it well and trust me, if you choose to embrace this, life gets a little easier. The real superpower that comes with adulthood, is respect for each other’s life choices and remembering that even with our closest friends we may never fully understand what drives their choices and that’s okay too.

Adulthood is when you realize there are close friends, then activity friends with whom you have shared interests and can just hang out, have a good time over a meal and laugh over mundane things. You need both! Without shame, you can talk about how life is hard and how you want to make peace with your parents and the fact that you are tired all the time. Then, on so many days you will think of a friend, craft a message in your head and forget to send it to them and then on a weekend whether it’s over a spontaneous call or text, tell them this and still be able to laugh at it!

(Sonali Gupta is a psychotherapist with 18 years of experience. She works around anxiety, grief, intimacy and family dynamics using a compassion-based approach. She is also the author of ‘Overcome anxiety and live without fear’.)