How to make friends at forty: why it is harder and what helps

It is Friday, half past six in the evening, and for the first time in a long while you have a free night. You open your phone and scroll through the names. Colleagues you get on well with but have never seen outside work. A school friend you message once a year on his birthday. The parents of your child’s classmates, in a group chat about slippers and packed lunches. Your partner’s friends. There is nobody you could simply text “Fancy a drink?” without feeling you would first have to justify the message.

You put the phone down and the evening passes in front of a series. Nothing terrible has happened. What stays is a question that feels almost embarrassing to ask at forty: when did I last actually make a new friend? And right behind it a second, less kind one: what is wrong with me that I no longer know how?

In this post I would like to show that most likely nothing is wrong with you. Friendship in adulthood is not harder to form because adults are less interesting or more closed, but because the circumstances that once did the work almost by themselves have disappeared. The good news is that those circumstances can, at least partly, be rebuilt. The less good news is that it goes more slowly than you would like — and there is a surprisingly precise estimate of how slowly.

How many hours it takes for an acquaintance to become a friend

In 2019 the American communication researcher Jeffrey Hall published a study whose title is also its question: how many hours does it take to make a friend? He asked adults who had recently moved to a new place, and first-year university students, how much time they had spent with new people and how close they felt to them. His estimate: it takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, roughly 90 hours before you call someone a friend, and more than 200 hours to reach a close friendship.

These figures are not a recipe. They are estimates from two samples in the United States, and for any particular pair of people the road may be shorter or longer. But they say something most adults sense and rarely calculate. For a student, two hundred hours is a few weeks: lectures, lunches, evenings, weekends. For someone with a job, a family or parents who need help, two hundred hours with one person can be a project lasting several years. If you see a new acquaintance once a month for two hours, you will need a good two years to reach the first fifty.

Hall noticed something else: not all time is worth the same. Hours people spend together because they have to — at work or in class — were less strongly linked to closeness than hours two people spent by choice: hanging out, joking, catching up on what had happened that week. A colleague you have shared an office with for eight years is therefore not necessarily a friend. They can become one, though, if part of that time moves beyond work topics.

Why it happened by itself at twenty

If you think about how your oldest friendships began, you probably cannot remember any decision. Nobody said, “Let’s be friends.” You sat at the same desk, lived in the same halls, trained at the same club. Three conditions were met without anyone taking care of them: you were physically close, you met regularly and without arranging it, and you had enough unplanned time for a conversation to run on.

Social psychologists described how strongly proximity shapes who we befriend as early as the middle of the last century. A well-known study in a student housing complex showed that friendships formed more often between people whose front doors were closer together. It was not about a special match of personalities, but about how often two people met on the stairs.

In adulthood these three conditions fall away one after another. A meta-analysis by Cornelia Wrzus and colleagues, which brought together research on social networks across the lifespan, shows that our circle grows until young adulthood and then gradually narrows; it is mainly the circle of friends and acquaintances that shrinks, while the family network stays roughly the same size. A move, a new job, a partnership, children, a divorce — each of these transitions reshuffles the network. I have written about what moving does to the ties you leave behind in Moving for work: what it does to the relationships you leave behind, and about how friendships drift apart when your life takes a different path from your old crowd’s in When you move up faster than your friends.

Something else changes at forty. It is not only your diary that is full, but everyone’s around you. At twenty, almost everybody you met had a vacancy in their life. Now you are meeting people who have a partner, children, ageing parents, a job with deadlines and friends they already see too little of. When someone answers your invitation with “this month is difficult”, as a rule it really does mean only that.

So at forty you are not worse at friendship. You are missing the staircase, the shared desk and the long afternoons. The difference matters, because the first explanation is felt as shame, while the second is a matter of organisation. And organisation can be changed.

Loneliness, solitude and social isolation are not the same

Before we turn to what helps, it is worth separating three words we often mix up. What you are actually looking for depends on it.

• Social isolation is something you can count: few contacts, few people, infrequent meetings. It describes a situation, not a feeling.
• Loneliness is a feeling. Researchers describe it as the unpleasant experience that arises when there is a gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you would like. You can be lonely in a full house with a full diary.
• Solitude is time you spend alone. It can be chosen, nourishing and necessary.

Why does this matter for friendships? Because the routes differ. Someone who is isolated needs more opportunities for contact. Someone who is lonely among many acquaintances does not need more people, but more depth with a few they already have. And someone who loves their solitude does not need to fix anything just because they read somewhere how many close friends they ought to have. I explain the difference in more detail in Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything.

The useful question is therefore not “Do I have enough friends?” but “Is something missing — and what exactly?” One person is missing someone they could ring at eleven at night. Another, company for the hills. A third, somebody who knew them before they became a father, a manager or a carer. These are three different needs, and one person rarely covers them all. Not even a partner: when your partner is the only person you share everything with, that is a heavy load for one relationship.

Repeated contact: why one good evening is not enough

When adults look for friends, we often bet on single events. You go to a workshop, a school reunion, a neighbours’ barbecue. You have a good conversation, swap numbers, say “we must have coffee” — and then nothing happens. Not because anyone was insincere. One evening is three hours, fifty is still a long way off, and every further contact requires somebody to suggest, coordinate and confirm.

Settings with repetition built in work far better. A choir with a rehearsal every Tuesday. A hiking club. A weekly game in the local school gym. A course that lasts all year rather than one weekend. A volunteer fire brigade, a book club at the library, a running group that meets at the same time whatever the weather. In Slovenia, club and society life is lively even in small places, and most groups are glad of a new member.

A frame like this does three things for you. First, the hours add up without any arranging. Second, you always have something to talk about, because you are doing something together. And third, the risk of rejection is small: nobody invited you personally, so nobody can turn you down personally. For people who find making contact tiring, or who live with social anxiety, this is often the most bearable form.

One more thing is worth saying plainly: in adulthood, somebody has to be the one who suggests. If you wait for the other person, and the other person waits for you, you will go on greeting each other politely in the changing room for another three years. The role of initiator is thankless, because it quickly starts to feel as though you are the one who “needs it more”. But somebody has to take it, and there is no reason it should not be you.

Do not underestimate so-called weak ties either. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn showed that on days when people have more brief contacts with acquaintances — a classmate from a course, a neighbour, someone from the same exercise group — they feel better and report a greater sense of belonging. An acquaintance is not a failed friend. It is a kind of relationship in its own right, and also the only pool from which friends can emerge at all.

Vulnerability: the step hours alone do not take

Hours are necessary, but they are not enough. You can play basketball with someone every Thursday for ten years and know only where he works and which team he supports. For time together to become friendship, something else has to happen at some point: one of you says something that is not entirely safe.

Research on self-disclosure has confirmed this for decades. In a meta-analysis, Nancy Collins and Lynn Miller found three things: we tend to like people who tell us something personal; we disclose more to those we like; and — least obvious of all — we come to like the person we have confided in. In a well-known experiment, Arthur Aron and colleagues sat pairs of strangers down for three quarters of an hour. Some chatted about everyday matters; others asked each other questions that became more personal step by step. The second group felt closer after the conversation.

The key word is gradually. Vulnerability in friendship does not mean explaining your divorce to someone from the running group the second time you meet. It means answering a little more truthfully than politeness requires. To “How are you?” you do not say “Fine, busy at work” but “Honestly, pretty tired, things are hard going at home just now.” Then you wait and see what the other person does. If they take a step towards you, you can say a little more next time. If they change the subject, you have lost nothing.

Men often have the harder task here, because they learned friendship through shared activities rather than face-to-face conversation; I write about this in Men’s friendships: why there are fewer of them with the years, and what keeps them going.

They like you more than you think

One of the most stubborn obstacles for adults is the belief that other people are not looking for anyone new. “Everyone already has their crowd.” “I don’t want to impose.” The psychologist Erica Boothby and her colleagues tested this. After conversations between strangers, participants rated how much they had liked the other person and how much they thought the other person had liked them. People systematically underestimated how much they had been liked. The researchers called it the liking gap; among students who shared living quarters, it persisted for several months.

In everyday life this means that after a pleasant conversation both people go home thinking “I enjoyed that, they probably less so”, and so neither writes first. This is how a conversation might sound between two people who have been meeting at the climbing wall for six months (the dialogue is composed; it is not a real person):

“I won’t be here next week, I’m moving my mum into a care home.”
“Oof. That’s no small thing. How are you?”
“I don’t know. Everyone says it’s the right decision, and I’m sleeping badly.”
“I went through that with my dad last year. If you like, we could go for a drink after climbing and I’ll tell you what I’d do differently.”
“… Yes. Actually, that would really help.”

Nothing dramatic. One person told the truth instead of a courtesy; the other answered with a truth and a concrete suggestion. Six months of shared hours prepared the ground, and one sentence made the difference between an acquaintance from the wall and someone you ring.

Old friendships are a shortcut

When we talk about new friends, we easily overlook the people with whom we clocked up two hundred hours long ago. A classmate, a flatmate, a former colleague you got on brilliantly with until one of you changed jobs. Often these friendships did not end; they fell asleep — without a quarrel, simply because of life. When it ended with a wound, the story is different; I write about that in When a friendship ends: a loss without a ritual.

Waking a dormant friendship is generally easier than building a new one, because the trust and the shared history already exist. The obstacle is almost always the same: you feel awkward because so much time has passed. The liking gap probably operates here too. A message saying “I walked past our old canteen today and thought of you. How are you?” needs no apology for five years of silence. Plenty of people are glad of a message like that, because they have been waiting for it for the same reason as you.

With an old friendship only one caution applies: the person on the other side is no longer who they were at twenty-five, and neither are you. Sometimes it turns out that what bound you was mainly the time you shared, and that today you do not have much to say to each other. That too is useful information, and it takes nothing away from what was.

Exercise: one week, five small steps

You do not need the courage for grand gestures for this exercise. You need a sheet of paper and a willingness to do a few small things differently for a week.

1. Draw what you already have. Write names on the sheet in three circles: people you would ring in a crisis; people you enjoy spending time with; acquaintances you like. The map of your support network can help. Look at where the gap is — it tells you what you are looking for.
2. Choose one acquaintance and one dormant friendship. Not five. Two people are enough to begin with.
3. Send a message with a concrete suggestion. Not “we must meet up sometime” but “I’m walking up Šmarna gora on Saturday morning, would you like to come?” A concrete suggestion is easier to accept and easier to decline without hard feelings.
4. Choose one recurring activity and commit to three months, not one visit. The first few visits are almost always awkward; that is not a sign you do not belong.
5. In one conversation this week, answer one step more truthfully than you otherwise would. Then watch what the other person does — and if they do not respond, draw no conclusions about yourself.

After three months, do not ask “Do I have a new friend?”, because by Hall’s hours the answer is almost certainly “not yet”. Ask instead: “Is there anyone I know better than I did three months ago?” That is the right measure.

Where this does not apply

Everything above assumes that the main obstacle is a lack of opportunity. Sometimes it is not.

First, fewer friends is not necessarily a problem. In her socioemotional selectivity theory, Laura Carstensen describes how, as the years pass and we experience time as more limited, we ourselves narrow our circle to the relationships that mean most to us. A smaller circle at forty may be a choice, not a deficit. If you feel well with two or three people and your own solitude, this post is not asking anything of you.

Second, hours are not equally available to everyone. Someone who works shifts, raises children alone or cares for a parent cannot simply “choose a recurring activity”. Advice like that then sounds like mockery. It is more realistic to build on contacts that are already part of the day — other parents at the playground, a colleague on the same shift, a neighbour — and to accept that it will go more slowly.

Third, for some people the obstacle is not outside but in their experience. If you learned early on that closeness is dangerous, or that you are wanted only when you are useful, every step towards another person will set off an alarm that no timetable can silence. And if loneliness comes with lasting low mood, sleeplessness or thoughts that it would be better if you were not here, this is no longer a question of friendships. Talk to your GP; in Slovenia, the mental distress helpline Klic v duševni stiski is available at night on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), and the Samarijan confidential helpline around the clock on 116 123.

And fourth: not every attempt will work out. Some people genuinely have no room, and some matches simply do not happen. Out of several acquaintances, the odd friend emerges, not one from each. That says nothing about your worth.

When talking to a therapist makes sense

Therapy is not a substitute for friends and must not become one. It can help, though, when you notice a pattern repeating: relationships always stall at the same point, you are always the one who gives, or you pull back just before things could become close. In relational family therapy we are interested in where such a pattern comes from — what you learned about closeness in the family you grew up in, and how that guides your steps today without your noticing. If you would like to explore this more systematically, a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, is designed for exactly that.

I am a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision; sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. If it seems to you that what stands in the way of friendship is not your diary but something older, you are welcome to write to me.

What to remember

• Friendships are not harder to form at forty because of you, but because proximity, regular unarranged meetings and unplanned time are gone.
• By Hall’s estimate it takes roughly 50 hours together to reach a casual friendship and more than 200 for a close one. Expect months and years, not weeks.
• Loneliness, solitude and social isolation are three different things. First work out what you are actually missing.
• A recurring activity collects the hours for you; closeness, however, comes only from gradual vulnerability, one step at a time.
• People generally like you more than you think. Somebody has to write first — and dormant friendships are often the shortest route.