Three surprising barriers to making new friends as an adult

If "Making New Friends" made it on your New Year's Resolution list, you're in the right place.

One of the most common new year's resolutions is making new friends - but before a woman can effectively position herself to form new relationships in her life, she needs to understand and evaluate potential barriers to help her plan accordingly.

Cultural, environmental, and generational barriers present some of the most common obstacles to forming new relationships - but identifying these does not mean that making new friends is impossible!

We believe that being informed about the shifts and trends in each of these categories can better prepare us to navigate challenges that are systemic and outside our control.

In our new course, The Forming Friendships Accelerator, we examine each of these in detail - as well as provide you with tangible strategies to overcome them - so that you're equipped and prepared to pursue rich, fulfilling friendships.

The "Big 3" Barriers to Forming New Friendships

Cultural shifts can be a barrier to forming new friendships as an adult.

Cultural "norms" shift over time. What once may have been common and accepted may expand and evolve, creating discrepancies in our expectations of friendship.

These cultural shifts in friendship may include:

1. Increasing trends of low maintenance friendships: If there is an increased trend in one's community toward more passive friendships, it can be discouraging to someone in a season of wanting to pursue more active and intentional friendships

2. Increase of alone time that Americans spend: According to the American Time Use survey of 2021, Americans spent an average of 6 hours per week with friends in 2013. Now, that average has dropped to around 2 hours per week.

   
   

Effort and time involved in a friendship will have a drastic impact on the type, depth, and quality of that relationship. Finding friends who are aligned in their needs and desires in these areas of friendship will be key to cultivating a mutually fulfilling relationship.

Environmental shifts can be a barrier to making new friends as an adult.

Because of tech and culture shifts, our physical environment has shifted too. This even includes an increase in those owning cars and a lack of walkable cities.

An increase in highways, commute times, and traffic patterns changes the ways that we make friends. This does not make creating new connections impossible by any means, but it helps us to be informed of how to intentionally navigate friendship within this environmental landscape.

Interested in diving deeper into this concept? Books we recommend include: Happy City by Charles Montgomery, Palaces of the People by Eric Klinenberg, and Walkable Cities by Jeff Speck.

Each of these books helps us to understand how the design and layout of our cities and neighborhoods directly impact the landscape of what is possible for us in creating new connections.

Generational shifts can affect the way we make new friends.

Each generation is used to making friends in a certain way. But with the advancement of tech and certain cultural shifts, this presents challenges that are unique to different age groups.

In our new course, we look at certain trends that uniquely impact the Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, and Baby Boomer generations to see ways that their upbringings and accepted norms determine their respective approaches to friendship.

New Friends & Old Friends: The Circle of (Friendship) Life

The research shows that we replace half our friendships every 7 years. But we think it's worth taking time to evaluate your "churn" - what is the rate at which you are welcoming new relationships into your life in relation to those that are dissolving? And how might the above cultural, environmental, and generational factors be shaping and influencing your friendship landscape?

In The Forming Friendships Accelerator, we created a module that helps women to create an aerial view of their unique circumstances to better position themselves to create new friendships - because the first step in making anything possible is to look at the state of what lies ahead.

Want to go deeper with us?

The Forming Friendships Accelerator program is now open for enrollment! Join us inside as we work together to form better female friendships. If you're looking for other female friendship resources, check out our library or buy a copy of Fighting for our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships written by friendship expert Danielle Bayard Jackson.