FIND YOUR TRIBE

We often struggle to make friends as adults. A new book offers advice on how to make lasting connections

MAKING friends when you’re an adult doesn’t happen in the same way as when you were a kid.

It’s more complicated and takes more effort, and even though technology connects us online, research seems to indicate that socially we’re more disconnected than ever before.

Yet friendship is vital in our lives, says psychologist Marisa Franco, who’s written a new book called Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends.

She’s a big believer in the healing power of friendship and her book explores how our psychological makeup affects how we connect with others.

This extract from her book looks at why it’s harder to make friends as an adult today and some tips on what you can do about it.

Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult? It can be hard enough in high school and college. But for many, it gets exponentially more difficult after that.

Sometimes it feels as if once you’ve missed some tiny window for friend-making, you’re at a loss. Where do you even meet people? It can feel especially hard living in a new city where everyone already seems to be hanging out with their established groups. How do you break in?

Before we blame ourselves for lacking friends, it’s worth mentioning just how hard it is to make friends – a problem compounded in our modern age. Before the 1800s, people lived among their families, farming and, more generally, living a more settled and locally based life. They had a community of extended family and friends and were involved in village life.