How to Make Friends
Make friends as an adult by joining a weekly group, showing up every week, getting past small talk, and inviting people out, with the research on how many hours it takes.
You will end up with one weekly activity on your calendar, a plan for turning the people there into friends, and a count of the hours that takes. School gave you those hours automatically as a child. As an adult you have to schedule them.
A 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life found that the share of Americans with no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021. In the same survey, 49% reported having three or fewer close friends, up from 27% in 1990.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. A 2010 meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues at Brigham Young University, covering 148 studies and 308,849 participants followed for an average of 7.5 years, found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival. Holt-Lunstad's own summary of that evidence is that lacking social connection is comparable, as a risk for earlier death, to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
Research on how friendships form points to a short list of actions, and each step below covers one of them.
Join a recurring group activity
Sociologist Rebecca G. Adams has said that friendships form on their own when people have repeated unplanned interactions and shared vulnerability. School supplies both in childhood. As an adult, you recreate them by joining an activity that meets on a regular schedule with the same group of people. Pick from team sports leagues, running clubs, climbing gyms, cooking classes, book clubs, improv classes, volunteer organizations, and language courses. The specific activity matters less than two things. It has to meet regularly, weekly if you can, and the group has to be small enough that you talk to the same people each time. A once-a-month meetup with 80 strangers gives you neither. A weekly climbing session with the same 10 people gives you both. If a session runs 2 to 3 hours, each one adds to the hours a friendship takes, which the FAQs below count.
Keep showing up consistently
Psychologist Robert Zajonc described the mere exposure effect in 1968. Repeated exposure to something increases how much we like it. A 1992 study by Richard Moreland and Scott Beach tested this with people. As psychologist Marisa Franco summarizes it, women sat in on a college lecture course 0, 5, 10, or 15 times without speaking to anyone, and classmates liked the woman who came to the most classes best. So go to the same group every week, including the weeks you feel tired or unmotivated. Attend at least six to eight sessions before you judge whether a group is working for you. At 2 to 3 hours a session, that is 12 to 24 hours of contact.
Good to know: If you miss a session, go to the next one. One absence is not a reason to stop going.
Assume people like you
Dr. Marisa Franco, a psychologist at the University of Maryland and author of Platonic, tells people who are making friends to assume they are liked, and gives the liking gap as the reason. Erica Boothby and colleagues, writing in Psychological Science in 2018, found that people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them, in the lab, among first-year dorm mates, and among strangers at a workshop. You probably think people are less interested in you than they actually are. This matters because your expectation shapes your behavior. Danu Anthony Stinson and colleagues, writing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2009, found that people who expect acceptance behave warmly, which leads other people to accept them, and people who expect rejection behave coldly, which leads to less acceptance. When you walk into a group, deliberately assume the people there will like you. The liking-gap research says your default guess runs too low, so the assumption corrects a measured bias.
Move beyond surface-level conversation
Psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues tested what moves strangers past small talk in a 1997 study. They had pairs of strangers ask each other 36 questions that gradually escalated in intimacy over 45 minutes. Those pairs reported greater closeness afterward than pairs who spent the same time on small talk. The mechanism is reciprocal self-disclosure. When you share something mildly personal, the other person tends to match that level of openness. This creates a positive feedback loop. You do not need 36 scripted questions. Push past the usual defaults. Instead of asking what someone does for work, ask what they enjoy about it. Share a real opinion about something. Mention a challenge you are dealing with. Ask about their weekend plans and follow up on what they said last time.
Take the friendship outside the group
Meeting someone in a different setting from where you first connected has a name, repotting. Ryan Hubbard, founder of the Kitestring project, came up with the term, and Dr. Franco uses it in her friendship advice. The climbing buddy you only see at the gym is an activity partner. The climbing buddy you also grab coffee with is becoming a friend. Jeffrey Hall, whose research on friendship hours is in the FAQs below, gives the same advice: "If you are interested in a friendship, switch up the context." After three or four group sessions, suggest a one-on-one hangout with someone you have connected with. Keep it low-pressure with a coffee, a walk, or a meal before or after the regular session. Name a specific time and place.
Good to know: Exchange contact info during a conversation, not at the end when people are packing up. Send a quick message within 24 hours referencing something specific you talked about. A text like "that restaurant you mentioned looked great, want to check it out next week?" is an easy, natural bridge.
Be the one who initiates
Dr. Franco's advice is not to wait for friendships to happen organically. A 5-year study of adults aged 72 and older supports it (Nancy Newall and colleagues, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2009). Those who believed that making friends depends on effort took part in more social activities, which went with less loneliness, and those who put friendship down to causes outside their control were lonelier. Be the person who texts first, suggests plans, and follows up. Send the message even when it feels awkward. Propose the coffee even when you expect a no. Organize the group dinner even when it takes effort. Early on, someone has to go first, so let it be you. As Hall puts it, "You can't make people spend time with you, but you can invite them."
Create rituals that make contact automatic
Adult friendships run into coordination friction. Every hangout requires scheduling, negotiating calendars, and choosing a place. Plans die in the group chat when nobody pins down a date. A ritual removes the planning. Set up a standing Tuesday coffee, a monthly game night on the first Friday, or a weekly walk after work. When the next hangout is already on the calendar, nobody has to organize it. Start small. Propose one recurring thing with one or two people. A 30-minute walk around the neighborhood or a regular lunch spot is enough. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed its participants since 1938, found that how satisfied people were with their relationships at age 50 predicted their physical health at 80 better than their cholesterol levels did.
Start this week. Pick one class, league, club, or volunteer shift that meets weekly, and put the first six sessions on your calendar. To make the weekly slot stick, our guide on how to build a habit shows how to tie it to a cue. Plan for the long run. Jeffrey Hall's research puts a close friendship at more than 200 hours together. At 2 to 3 hours a week, that is 15 to 23 months, and the FAQs below break it down. If a group is not working after six to eight sessions, check it against step 1. A group that is too large or meets too rarely does not give you repeated contact with the same people, so switch to a smaller weekly one. If conversations stay on small talk, go back to step 4 and share one personal thing first. If your invitations go unanswered, name a specific time and place as in step 5 and invite again, because the research in step 3 says people like you more than you think.
Questions we get asked about this
Answers from experience, not a textbook.
Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas studied this directly, in adults who had recently moved and in first-year students. He found that it takes roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. At 2 to 3 hours a week through a shared activity, you reach 50 hours in 4 to 6 months and 200 hours in 15 to 23 months. The University of Kansas summary of the study says these are hours spent hanging out, joking around, and playing video games together.
Yes. In the Survey Center on American Life's 2021 survey, 54% of Americans with close friends said they met one at their own or their spouse's workplace, more than at any other place. Hours at work count for less than hours spent hanging out, though, according to the University of Kansas summary of Hall's study. Hall's advice is the move in step 5: "If you work together, go to lunch or out for a drink."
The steps work the same way. Choose the settings that cost you the least energy, which means smaller groups, one-on-one meetups, and activities built around your interests instead of large social events. A book club, a hiking group, or a creative class fits. Aim for a few close friendships instead of a wide circle. FAQ 6 below shows how small the closest layer of anyone's network is.
The research linked in step 3 found that people consistently underestimate how much others like them after conversations. This is called the liking gap. In that research it lasted for several months among college dorm mates, and a 2021 study in the same journal found it in children from age 5. Your perception of how others feel about you is probably more negative than reality. The gap runs in both directions, so the person you are unsure about is likely underestimating how much you like them.
Use them to find people, then build the friendship in person. Bumble's friendship app and Meetup both list people and groups near you. In the Survey Center on American Life's 2021 survey, only 8% of Americans reported having made a close friend online. Pick a group or event from the app, then show up every week as in step 2.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research describes relationships in layers, each one counting the layers inside it. The closest layer averages about 5 people, the next 15, then 50, and the whole network about 150. You do not need dozens of close friends. Acquaintances count too. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn, writing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2014, found that students reported greater happiness and belonging on days when they interacted with more classmates than usual. Build a small number of close friendships and stay friendly with the rest of the group.