Fostering Community As An Adult
When you’re in elementary school, making a friend was sometimes as easy as sharing a juice box, loving the same cartoon, or both being able to do an imitation of a pterodactyl. In middle school and high school, joining clubs, playing sports, or just the specific classes you were in encouraged easy friendships. If you attend college there are even greater opportunities for extracurricular socializing, with a lot of things built just for that purpose. But for a lot of people, these well defined social structures fall away at graduation, and entering adulthood involves a host of other things that break up established friendships: moving, full time work, relationships, children, and lots of other things.
A Pew Research Center survey from October 2023 showed that “61% of U.S. adults say having close friends is extremely or very important for people to live a fulfilling life,” but “a narrow majority of adults (53%) say they have between one and four close friends.” These statistics are even more interesting when looking at how age affects our number of close friends. When asked if they have five or more close friends, only 34% of those aged 30 to 49 and 32% of those younger than 30 answered in the affirmative.
So most agree that having close friends is a big part of having a fulfilling life, providing support and the opportunity to talk and process everything from parenting, to mental health and all of life’s highs and lows. So the question becomes: how do we grow and keep our communities as adults? Living without close friendships, even if you’re in a relationship, can make us feel like there is no one we have anything in common with or no one that would even want to be our friend. But that’s not true! In my experience, friendship is a self-made infinite resource.
My point is: if you can’t find community - make it. Love nature? Start a hiking group! Do you love playing board games? See if your local game stores have any nights where people gather to play. Do you read voraciously? Post a flyer in your local coffee shop for your new bookclub. If it sounds scary, don’t worry: it is definitely scary. Putting yourself out there is always scary, being vulnerable is scary, but that’s where relationships flourish!
In an effort to grow our own community, my husband and I decided that one Saturday a month we would open our home as a cafe, not just to our close friends but acquaintances too. I made a private Instagram account where I posted the menus for the cafe and directions to our home. We invited people we had met a few times but didn’t have the opportunity to have real good talks with yet. Every week varies, sometimes 40 people show up and sometimes it’s more like 25, but every week is good. Not only do we get the opportunity to get to know our friends and acquaintances better, but we also have created a space for others to do the same thing.
Was it scary to invite people we weren’t close with into our home? Yes! But getting to know our acquaintances was a way to create new friendships while simultaneously getting to hang out with out close friends. Everyone needs friends, so odds are that the scary part of initiating these ways to grow your community will pay off!