Why You Struggle to Make Friends as an Adult

All right, Cadre, let's talk about making friends as an adult. Cause that's hard. Hi. My name is Rachel Havocost. I'm a mental health advocate and writer, and my mission online is to help people feel less alone. I got divorced during the pandemic, and I had to start over from scratch, and it was really difficult to make friends as an adult because there weren't those any extracurricular activities or classroom settings, and I found myself really struggling to make friends. I was also in a deep period of identity formation and figuring out who I was post divorce, so there was also some shifts in my values and the kinds of people I wanted to surround myself with.

And I noticed that it was really, really difficult. Honestly, it still is sometimes. So if you struggle to make friends as an adult, I really don't want you to beat yourself up because it's very. It's very difficult. I wrote an entire article based in research and based on my own experiences of ways to make friends as an adult. And I want to share with you here in sound bite form. In this video, I'm going to share with you why you might struggle to make friends as an adult. And in the following videos, I'll share some tips for how to actually make friends as an adult.

One of the biggest reasons that we struggle to make friends as an adult is fear of rejection. This is a very common experience, and it's a very human experience. We have an innate survival desire to belong, and so when we don't experience belonging, so when we experience rejection, when we experience exclusion, we get a very survival response, which is, oh, my gosh, I'm not included. Therefore, I'm on my own, and that might be harder for me to survive. First of all, don't beat yourself up if you experience this when you get rejected, it's a very human thing.

And knowing that this is a lot of the reason we might struggle to reach out to people can help us understand that a, rejection is a part of life, and b, how do I learn and practice to. To cope with rejection and navigate it so that I don't have this fear blocking me from even putting myself out there in the first place? The second reason a lot of us struggle to make friends as an adult is that we have this idea that every friend has to be a best friend when that's actually not true. Research shows that having acquaintances or a friendly person that you say hello to at the coffee shop or the gym every day can be just as grounding as having a phone call with a loved one.

But trying to remind ourselves that we can have different people in our lives for different things, and then not everyone has to be everything for us. The third reason we might struggle to make friends as an adult, and I struggle with this a lot, is hyper independence or not trusting other people, someone that tries to do everything by yourself. If you don't ask for help, if you don't accept help, or perhaps when people try and interact with you, you think they have alternate motives or want something from you, or like the relationship might be transactional, that might be a good indication that that's getting in the way of you actually building connections.

So those are three reasons that we might struggle to make friends as an adult. In the next few videos, I'm going to share ways that you can start to make friendships as adults and understand that they're not all going to be exactly the same and that that's okay.