“Friendship is like home.” This beautiful sentence is borrowed from the well-known writer Kurt Tucholsky. And he describes very impressively the importance of friends in our lives. Good friends can save us from the deepest valleys and together we can climb the highest mountains. It is all the more tragic that the number of our friendships decreases with age. Statistically, after the age of 23, we lose a friend every ten years without gaining a new one.
As if that wasn’t depressing enough, loneliness has been steadily increasing for years. Current figures from the European Union show that around 50 million people in Europe do not even meet up with friends or family members within a year. Corresponding data from the federal government show that 17 percent of Germans always or often feel lonely.
This means that a little more than 14 million people live more or less socially isolated and thus also endanger their health. Because prolonged loneliness can promote the development of depression, cancer and heart disease, among other things. In Great Britain and Japan there is already a separate ministry for loneliness, which works against isolation.
In fact, the greatest cure for loneliness is obvious: real, deep social connections. Stupidly, exactly such friendships – as already mentioned – are becoming increasingly rare, especially in adulthood. Anyone who has not managed to integrate their friends in the sandpit into their everyday life between work and family life is then quickly faced with the question: How do I make new friends as an adult? We have a few ideas for you.
Find out what you are actually looking for. Maybe you are longing for someone to exchange ideas with or you would like a sparring partner for your hobby. If you know what you are hoping for from a new friendship, you will quickly notice when someone can fulfill exactly these needs. In addition, you also know where you should keep your eyes open for likeable people. For example, if you’re looking for a fitness buddy, you may have been training with potential new friends for a while. Between theory and practice there is often only the first step.
Show genuine interest in the other person. Asking questions and being curious is the be-all and end-all when getting to know new people. Especially at the beginning it is important to be open to other perspectives and ways of life. The new acquaintance has a bizarre hobby or is interested in a topic that you don’t know much about? Excellent! Then you can learn something new and perhaps develop a new interest.
Create a trusting basis. You may be familiar with the saying, “We reap what we sow.” It’s a bit like that when it comes to building friendships. If we want someone to open up and feel comfortable around us, then we should do the same. A University of Pennsylvania study shows that whether you’re the one giving or needing help, vulnerability can immensely strengthen a friendship.
Use the possibilities of the internet. One of the biggest problems adults face when making new friends is lack of time. Often the free time is not enough to reconcile partner, children, hobbies and the active search for friends in real life. Fortunately, there are now some digital meeting places for exactly this purpose. Even the dating app “Bumble” has set up a BFF area where users are now looking for their new best friend instead of their great love.
Look up old friends in the phone book. In the stressful everyday life, a lot gets lost, unfortunately sometimes contact with friends too. So why not just write to your friend from college or get in touch with your former soccer buddy and ask how the kids are doing? According to a study by the University of Pittsburgh, this is more popular than you might think. According to this, the gesture is increasingly appreciated by the recipient, the more surprising it is. The general rule for finding friends applies here: Courage pays off.
Patience too, by the way. After all, friendship doesn’t develop overnight. According to Jeffrey A. Hall, professor of communications at the University of Kansas, it takes around 50 hours together for an acquaintance to become a friendship. For a very intimate and deep friendship you need about 200 hours. So friendship is a long-term project that couldn’t be more rewarding.
If you’re wondering what actually makes us really happy, you can’t ignore friends. The two happiness researchers Ed Diener and Martin Seligman have found that the quality of our interpersonal relationships has a significant impact on our happiness in life. So there is hardly anything that can influence our well-being as positively as healthy social relationships. Incidentally, this can even be measured: when we spend time with people who are important to us, our body releases a kind of cocktail of happy hormones. This cocktail can reduce stress and anxiety and even lower pain.
So friendship can work wonders. From a purely psychological point of view, it is even enough if we have one good friend in our life. That’s right, the 500 Facebook friends don’t have to come by for the body to produce endorphins. On the contrary: in friendship, quality counts, not quantity. There is no point in saving as many contacts as possible in the phone book or being tagged in as many party photos as possible from acquaintances with whom you have no real connection.
Much more valuable are the people you would call at night or think of when something good happens to you. These are people who really enrich our lives: real friends. Statistically, each of us has about three of them in our lifetime. Three. Not even a handful. That’s a question you should also ask when looking for new friendships: Do I really have nobody in my life who is important to me? If the answer is yes, then dare to really let new people into your life. But if you can think of a couple of loved ones, then maybe dedicate a little more time to them and see what happens with the relationship.
Sources: German Bundestag, analysis, Journal of Happiness Studies, European Union, study, University of Pennsylvania, study
