Question #23
“Why are adult friendships so hard?”
Dear P,
Adult friendships are hard because the stakes feel much higher. It takes more effort to spend time with people as an adult as you try to balance other relationships, work, and your own well-being. The responsibility of adulthood is so much more than having to pay bills, it’s also having to maintain all parts of your existence, and that is hard. Doing all of that takes time away from building and maintain friendships, especially since both you and your friends are juggling all of these things, and often in opposing directions.
The stakes are also higher because you have more emotional stuff. As an adult you have all the past hurts and betrayals of other relationships, which makes it much harder to take the risk of developing new relationships, or even maintaining old ones. We’re often slower to trust people as we get older, and how can you be friends with someone that you don’t trust? We can also become less open to making new connections because we want to protect ourselves from being hurt…again. This is a normal thing to do, but it also makes making and maintaining friendships pretty challenging.
Additionally, adult friendships are so hard because our lives diverge so wildly in adulthood. Chances are, someone who works in exactly your professional area isn’t your age, or is part of a different company or team with different schedules and workflows, or has different commitments to their loved ones. Or someone who is your age with similar commitments doesn’t live very close to you, or has different chunks of time free to spend with friends. It’s logistically difficult to be friends as an adult, and a lot of the time, it becomes overwhelming to try.
The good news is, hard doesn’t mean impossible! Part of this is adjusting our expectations of our friends, such as being okay with seeing them in-person less often, or spending different kinds of time together. Chances are, both you and your friend are similarly pulled in multiple directions, and neither of you has time for the kinds of friendships that you did as a child or a teenager. Your adult friendships can also be a chance to develop positive relationships with friendship that maybe you haven’t had yet.
If you’d like to read more about navigating adult friendships, I have a specific Q&A about it here, and a reading list on friendship here.
