Making friends as an adult: A success story

About two years ago, I started swimming with the local Masters swim club. (Masters swimming just means we're out of high school, and has nothing to do with skill level). That meant that three mornings per week I was in the pool for an hour with the same people every day. On the off days, I would get up at the same time and go lift weights.

After a few months of swimming with this group, I mentioned that I'd been lifting weights and asked if anybody else wanted to come. Somewhat to my surprise, 4 of the swimmers started showing up the other two days to lift weights. Soon that grew, and now we have between 5-8 of us on the non-swim mornings.

The nice thing about weight lifting is that you've got time to chat between sets (not so much during a swim workout). So now I have a group of people I hang out with almost every morning, and it's awesome.

About a year ago I decided I wanted to go on a scuba trip for my birthday, and since my wife hates scuba diving, being hot, and being alone in a foreign country, I decided to invite my new friends to come. A few of them were able to make it work, and we just came back from an awesome week together in Belize.

I'm not saying I have any magical secrets to friendship as an adult. I got lucky in a lot of ways—the swim group is cool people that I enjoy hanging out with, they had time and wanted to hang out more, and they had time to do it that matched my time. And really more than anything I'm grateful that things worked out for me this time.

We are in a loneliness epidemic. I have my theories as to why, but that's a topic for another day. Regardless of the reasons for loneliness, this life isn't meant to be done alone, and a loss of community takes a mental and physical toll. I learned some things about myself and about making friends in the process of finding this group.

Tips for success

• Change your assumptions. My default was to assume that people are busy with their own lives and don't want to hang out. I think people want to make friends more than they do, but not everybody wants to be the inviter.
• Be the inviter. If people want to hang out more than they do, why don't they? Because inviting people is risky and involves planning, and those things don't come naturally to many. People want to be invited, though, and if you want it to happen, you might need to go out of your comfort zone and do the inviting.
• Making friends is about time. When you're in school, you spend several hours per day with friends. When I got out of school and had a wife and small children, my daily time with friends dropped to approximately zero. Once my kids could mostly get themselves ready for school and I didn't have to be home to help them every morning, I was able to make time for working out. Then I turned that workout time into social time by joining a swim team and inviting people to lift with me.
• It might not work the first time. I've had lots of friends of varying degrees of closeness throughout my life. I've also tried and failed to make friends—finding a group of people to spend time with, then finding out over weeks or months that we just don't have that much in common. It stinks when that happens, but it's a bit like dating—just because you break up with a girlfriend doesn't mean you failed.
• Get lucky. I was very lucky that the coach of the swim team reached out one day while I was swimming by myself to invite me to join the team. I was lucky that my teammates were cool people that I got along with. I was lucky that they had time to be friends with me, too.
• Make opportunities. Luck is a big part of it, but "luck is when preparation meets opportunity." You have to get out of the house, and make time to be social, too. More opportunities means more chances for luck to work out in your favor.