You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult

by Lane Moore

I have people I laugh with and see once every six months, people who text me and say we should do something soon, and we might even make plans, but then we each hope the other will cancel because we’re both tired.

No one tells you that the ages of eighteen to twenty-two are pretty much prime friendship real estate. That’s it.

throw a wrench into the intimacy I’d craved so deeply and needed like air.

If you’ve survived a Greek myth–esque series of relational disappointments, you know that trying to figure out how to make a friend when you’ve been hurt so many times, or never really felt loved or accepted in a lasting way, or never had a model of healthy friendship, can feel impossible.

Above all, your friendships should allow you to feel safe and to feel seen, and do whatever is required to make you feel that way, and if a person can’t or won’t do that for you, you are absolutely allowed to walk away.

Friendships require so much timing, luck, communication, and puzzle-piece compatibility that any two people who make it to the promised land of true friendship are almost heroic.

You deserve to have friendships in which the conversation is easy, and you feel seen.

You deserve to have friendships where there’s an equal give and take. Friends who understand you, and you have FUN, true,

If you’ve never had true, good friends before, it is so easy to take whatever scraps someone is offering. An approximation of friendship.

They opt out of doing any work, assuming the other person will do it. 2. They do all the work and resent everyone else for not doing their part.

We rarely speak of how painful it can be to try to find someone who can be there for you, no matter what your struggles are. And how right we are to be frustrated by the moments in our lives when we weren’t fully supported or seen by past or present friends.

I’ve seen some people say things like “Your friends are not your therapist.” And yes, it is important to make sure there is a reasonable expectation of emotional labor we can expect from friends depending on their comfort level—which you can only know by asking them what they can handle, what is out of their depth, and what space they can hold for you. That said, if they ask if you’re OK, they should be prepared for you to say no, and be prepared to hold space for the reason for that no.

If we started viewing friendships as relationships, we wouldn’t feel like failures when we have to work on them, when we hit bumps in the road, when we both change individually and our relationship to each other changes as well. We would see it as a progression, as something we’re both working on together, as two people who get to keep choosing each other, or not.

In romantic relationships, people tend to think that something is only a success if it lasts forever, and we have the same expectation with our friendships. If a friendship ends, we never say, “We just wanted different things.”

There is just as much of a pressure to be chill in the beginning—if it happens, it happens. But for people who tend to be more introverted, or anxious, “just going with the flow” can feel awful and therefore could stop friendships before they even start.

No one teaches us how to find power in vulnerability, how to build intimacy, how to grow as a person, or how to grieve when you’ve outgrown the people you once loved. Or when they outgrow you. And they definitely don’t teach us how to navigate the anxiety that can come up in your friendships.

Sometimes the reasons for the friendship breakup really are just that you’ve realized you’re no longer getting what you need from them, if you ever did in the first place.

When friends leave without saying goodbye, it is a specific type of hurt and grief that we don’t often speak about. The friends who left without telling you about what was wrong, even when you reached out and left the door open to talk about it because you didn’t want it to end this way. That is brutal.

been cruel without warning and then left, in search of a reason they did it, this never actually gave me the closure I wanted.

So let me save you some time. If someone leaves without a word, don’t chase them. Allow people who want to leave like that to leave, even if it breaks your heart more than you could ever explain. The hardest thing to realize is that not every friendship is meant to last forever, as much as we wish it would. So many friendships are meant to show us things, good and bad, about what we want, what we need, and who we do and don’t want to be, and who we do and don’t want to be around.

friendship breakups that can be just as painful as a romantic breakup, if not arguably much more so. You are grieving someone who became a part of your heart and your life and everything that makes you who you are. Someone who became your backup, someone who became your family.

What patterns do you tend to see in the people you’re choosing to be close to? Is there anything you notice that keeps coming up for you?