I’ve finally discovered the secret to making adult friendships
Saturday, 4 January 2014 was my 30th birthday bash. The whole evening was a bit surreal. Not because I was having a party in a bar kitted out like a sweet shop, which you accessed through wardrobe doors as though entering a hedonistic Narnia. Not because I got to name cocktails after myself (‘Cohen Down a Treat’). Not even because after too many of said cocktails, I fell down the stairs and gave myself carpet-burn blisters up my right arm. No, the bizarre thing was that, looking round the room, many of those stuffing flying saucers into their mouths were people I wouldn’t have invited to any of my previous birthdays. They were new friends; women I’d only known for a short while, but whom I already couldn’t imagine celebrating without.
Two years earlier, my birthday had been very different. That afternoon, my phone started beeping with messages from friends flaking on my pub drinks in the evening. They were only meant to be low key. No big deal, I’d said. Which in hindsight was possibly why people felt it was no big deal. Someone had decided to stay at their parents’ house post-Christmas. Someone else wasn’t feeling well. One friend backed out because her dog had diarrhoea.
I chucked my phone at my boyfriend Tim in a strop and declared that I was calling the whole thing off. Forget it, I spat.
By the evening, I’d managed to grow up and pull myself together. But it did make me think about who my friends were and who was prepared to put a dog with the runs before me.
You see, those small let-downs were the latest in a line of painful female friendship experiences that started all the way back at school – as they do for so many of us. We are raised on a diet of BFFs (best friends forever) and encouraged to believe that our friendships will be perfect; the stuff of platonic fairy tales. It’s why, when our expectations are inevitably not met, we feel hurt and can start to lose trust in female friendship. I certainly did, after several best-friend break-ups in my formative years – from being frozen out by girls in my class to ending up in a toxic dynamic with my university housemates.
It can make you vigilant, convinced you could be cast aside by your friends again at any moment. That feeling that can occur at any stage in life but is amplified in our late 20s, when we start to find certain friends flaky, where once they’d been fun, spontaneous or popular. As we begin to value intimate nights in as much as going out, and life becomes more complex, it suddenly matters who is prepared to show up for you – and who isn’t. And it can mean that – perhaps for the first time in your adult life – you have the urge to make new friends.
The good news is that, as I’ve learned for myself, it’s never too late. I asked several women, across the generations and including two in their 90s, when they had last made a new friend. Every single one had done so in recent memory. Yet they all claimed not to make new friends easily.
A 2016 Finnish study found that we reach our peak number of friends at 25, the age at which we’re most ‘socially promiscuous’ – meaning that we make more social contacts and are more open to putting ourselves in situations where that’s possible. After that, the numbers begin decreasing, particularly for women. It does make you wonder whether making new friends later in life is even worth it. Why bother?
Well, there are any number of reasons you might need to make new friends: moving to a new town, a break-up, getting a new job. Often it’s a simple matter of priorities: as your existing friends couple up, settle down, have children or move away, your friendship balance changes. It doesn’t mean you’re no longer friends, just that you might need some new people to hang out with.
The key, says friendship coach Shasta Nelson, is ‘starting with saying friendships matter to me and I can build them’. That statement sounds so deliberate, but you do have to be intentional about it sometimes. By making a new friend – which according to a 2018 study at the University of Kansas takes 50 hours of effort to even go from an acquaintance to a casual friend and 90 hours to become a meaningful friend – you are actively selecting someone to be in your life.
Just as experience teaches you what you want, or definitely do not want, in a relationship, so you learn friendship lessons along the way. I lost count of the number of women who described the blossoming of their newest friendship in the same terms as you might the start of a relationship, with butterflies and a rush of intensity. A honeymoon period, during which you make an effort, get past the awkward small-talk stage, share confidences, wear perfume. Woo one another, basically. It’s exciting and daunting, like a teenage crush: the idea that this is someone who could potentially be in your life forever, if you manage to peel back enough layers and like what you find in each other.
One of the gifts a new friendship can bring is the ability to see yourself through a different lens. Where older friends might have a set idea of who you are, with newer friends the additional layers you’ve gathered through life’s constant churn can become the core of who you are in that friendship. And it’s always a thrill to find someone who doesn’t know that you fell down the stairs at your own birthday party.
My mum, Jane, made a new friend in her 60s during a lecture at Tate Britain. ‘We sat next to each other and began talking, and we have scarcely stopped since,’ she says. ‘Our lives seem to run on parallel lines: we both have daughters, and we are the same age with similar backgrounds. We can say absolutely anything to each other. I have rarely come across a more caring female friend – we are always saying how blessed we are to have found each other. She doesn’t live close by but we speak on the telephone two or three times a week and meet up regularly. I love her to bits. Ours is the most important friendship of my life.’
There are, according to Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford and the author of Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships, seven pillars of friendship; the boxes we tick as we make friends and which demonstrate how much we have in common. The more we tick, the closer we become – but we won’t tick more than a couple with some people, and that’s OK.
Having the same language or dialect
Growing up in the same place
Having the same educational/career experiences
Having the same hobbies/interests
Having the same worldview in terms of morals/religion/politics
Having the same sense of humour
Having the same musical tastes
When you read that list, it doesn’t seem so daunting. And they probably apply to a few people you already know but wouldn’t necessarily count as friends; whether you work with them, go to a boxing class with them, or live next door.
I’d actually add another point to the list: having the ability to be honest, the sort of naked truth-telling that doesn’t come easily to me.
That same study by the University of Kansas in 2018 found that small talk is friendship kryptonite. Making yourself vulnerable and revealing details about your life will strengthen a friendship bond in a way that just having a superficial catch-up won’t. To become firm friends with someone, you need to focus on ‘self-disclosure’ – or being honest, as the rest of us call it.
I have never been one to pour my heart out even to people I would consider close friends. It all goes back to something a friend had said when she broke up with me aged 16: ‘We never tell each other anything.’ At the time, I had no idea what she meant. She knew that pizza was my favourite lunch. She knew about my favourite shop in which to buy yin-yang earrings. What more was there to tell? Honestly, I still felt that way in my 20s, even though I did now have quite a bit of stuff worth sharing by then. I just wasn’t sure I could voice it after two decades of self-preservation or without the help of a five-hour drinking session.
Perhaps the most famous experiment designed to show the power of vulnerability in emotional intimacy is the 36 questions. You might remember it from a New York Times article a few years ago, in which writer Mandy Len Catron tried it and fell in love.
The experiment, created by Arthur and Elaine Aron in 1997, originally involved 52 sets of heterosexual male and female strangers. Two of the participants entered a lab, before sitting opposite one another and answering a series of increasingly intimate questions (‘What would be your “perfect” day?’; ‘What do you value most in a friendship?’; ‘What is your most terrible memory?’). At the end, they stared into each other’s eyes for four long minutes. Six months later, one pair married.
But the experiment was never designed to help people fall in love; it was to test emotional intimacy between strangers – a study in how self-disclosure can accelerate closeness. And it did so, with many of the participants saying they felt unusually attached to one another after just 45 minutes, and exchanging contact details. As well as the male-female pairings, 19 sets of heterosexual female strangers also took part.
‘The clear finding is that women-women pairs got just as close as cross-sex pairs,’ Arthur Aron emails me.
Basically, if you make yourself increasingly vulnerable with a potential new female friend, and they reciprocate? Bingo. To 28-year-old me this would have sounded like the most nerve-racking thing imaginable. When you’ve been betrayed or had secrets used against you by supposed friends in the past, it can be tricky to navigate how much to open up in the future.
‘I’ve noticed a lot of women are over-sharers, I would say they are too vulnerable too fast, and it often comes from a place of having felt lonely, and they just need to be witnessed,’ agrees Shasta Nelson. ‘Or they have felt rejected in the past so they come burdened with a fear that they will eventually be rejected again. But then many women make the mistake of under-sharing and feeling more closed. And that happens a lot, because women have felt hurt, or they don’t trust easily.’
It’s a risk. You have to trust the other person not to misinterpret, judge, or repeat whatever you choose to share with them. You have to lower your defences and learn to show the parts of yourself you might have hidden away when friendships went wrong. It can be hard to relinquish control over your personal information. The self-preservation instinct is strong. But it can be worthwhile.
Probably the easiest way to make new friends as an adult is to pinch your friends’ friends. After all, someone you like has already done the hard work by vetting them. I met Iona through a work friend. Even though my friendship with the workmate who had introduced us didn’t last, my one with Iona did. The moment I knew we were going to be proper pals came when I left my first newspaper job. For some unknown reason, I decided that I was going to have two leaving parties. For entirely logical reasons, my colleagues all came to the first one but cried off the second; in fact, the only person who showed up was Iona. I was mortified, but she didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. We ordered multiple bottles of wine and settled in for the night.
I thought back to my university housemates; to my school BFFs. They would have made me feel like a prat for throwing myself a leaving ‘party’ for two. But Iona didn’t care, so I didn’t care. It helped me to be vulnerable – and let’s face it, the most embarrassing thing that night had already happened. I didn’t make Iona feel as though her company wasn’t enough, because it was.
Just as it was a decade later, when we found ourselves at an impromptu dinner party attended by several famous types. To my slight relief, there wasn’t space at the long kitchen table for us all, so instead of awkwardly trying to nudge people along, Iona and I sat on a sofa, plates of beef shin pappardelle on our knees, and gorged ourselves on pasta, red wine and laughter. One woman sidled up to me afterwards and said, ‘You two looked like you were having the best evening out of all of us.’ She was probably right.
At around the same time, I met Rachel. I say ‘met’ – we had worked in the same office for almost five years, but had never really spoken. I’d occasionally see her wafting past looking stylish, and wonder whether she was as nice as she seemed. Word clearly having got around about how popular I had been made to look at my second leaving do, Rachel walked over to my desk one day and suggested we have a drink before I departed. I figured if it was painfully awkward, I never had to see her again. I realise now that I was experiencing friendship imposter syndrome – the feeling that you don’t measure up, or are a total fraud. It’s most commonly used when talking about work and is a subject I became interested in after having a major case of it myself.
When it comes to making new friendships, the symptoms are all there. We put it down to fluke that this person seems to like us and convince ourselves that we’ll be ‘found out’ any minute, that we’re not good enough – or likeable enough. It’s why I genuinely couldn’t see what a friendly, popular person like Rachel would want with me.
How glad I am that she asked me for that drink, and that I didn’t let my own self-doubt get in the way of nervously accepting. We got on really well. I was in the middle of a massive upheaval – ending my relationship, planning to move back in with my parents and changing jobs – and I gave myself permission to talk about all three. I didn’t pour my heart out; I started small, with honest answers to her questions; the sorts of things you might tell an existing friend. If you treat someone like a friend, maybe they’ll become one.
Rachel introduced me to two other women from our office, Cecilia and Louise. The three of them were close, but never acted like a clique. Quite the opposite, in fact: they opened the door for me to join them. I really couldn’t understand why at the time; actually, I’m not sure I get it now. Only that they enjoyed making new friends – that was a revelation to me. Maybe I could learn to enjoy it, too. Perhaps if I tried my best to throw out everything I thought I knew, and every bad experience that had left me feeling suspicious of female friendship, I would start to see things differently.
So I tried. I encouraged myself to share secrets and disappointments in a way I’d felt too defensive to do before. I talked about them, rather than bottling things up in case they were seen as a weakness. The result? It felt good and it worked. Over time, those three women became some of my dearest friends. I lived with Rachel. I am godmother to Cecilia’s beautiful daughter. Louise flew back from her home in Spain for my wedding. We’ve often talked about moving into a commune when we’re old, sending one another links to suitable minor stately homes.
My new-found ability to talk more openly didn’t mean that I was suddenly spilling my guts to strangers every five seconds, but it slowly and solidly helped me forge new friendships, as well as strengthening the ones I already had. I found that I was able to go deeper with older friends, opening up to them in ways I had previously resisted. And it had another surprising side-effect, bringing me closer to some women I’d always considered other people’s friends, not mine. Now, I realised how much shared history of our own we had and what I needed to do to help those friendships solidify.
It was as if I’d set off a chain reaction in my own life. Little fires of female friendship began to spark everywhere. Kiko, a stylish and smart woman I’d always admired from afar – the sort who can wear clashing patterns, hi-top trainers, huge earrings and look incredible rather than, as I would, like someone the 1980s threw up on – started to become more than the friend of a friend as we spent more time together.
‘I honestly can’t believe you weren’t at our wedding,’ Kiko said, a year or so after she’d got married and a few months after our friendship had solidified. It’s something she and her husband mention self-consciously from time to time, but actually it makes me feel strangely reassured. Yes, I’d have loved to be there, but I like being reminded that I’ve made a dear new friend when I didn’t expect it. Two, actually.
Doing things two by two is an attractive prospect for couples. It can help you see your partner in a different light; interacting, sharing intimacies, laughing and generally being fanciable in a way they probably aren’t at home, in their tracksuit bottoms and vacuuming cat hair off the sofa.
A 2014 study by the University of Massachusetts found that couple friendships can even reignite a passionate spark in your own relationship. And couples are happier when they have close friendships with other couples, which is obviously why I encourage Tim to go out cycling with Rachel’s husband while she and I have long lunches and get our nails done. See? Good for everyone. With new friends, creating a foursome can be even nicer, as you get to know them and their relationship almost in tandem. It can take some of the intensity out of being vulnerable and help you to share things with your own partner by your side for back-up – and, of course, to lovingly kick you under the table if you’re oversharing.
Looking around my 30th birthday party, I couldn’t believe what a difference two years could make. I felt like someone who had the beginnings of a friendship portfolio: female friends with whom I felt, if not totally sure of myself yet, then getting there.
I started to understand what it was that I hadn’t been giving in friendships: myself. I had presented a version of Claire that I thought would be desirable as a friend. A person who was always ‘OK, thanks’ and struggled to be vulnerable. A people-pleaser, who made herself small so others could feel big. Who, in putting up a barrier, was never properly seen, heard or understood.
Until that point, I had always felt as though the few female friends I did have were pals with me because they knew my flaws and inexplicably liked me anyway. I still think that’s true for most female friendships. But what I hadn’t understood was that they weren’t focusing on what was wrong with me, or judging me in the way my inner critic constantly judged myself. They wanted more of me, not less. So that’s what I slowly found the confidence to give them.
It might not seem revelatory that being more open and honest is actually pretty key to making new friends, and bringing old ones closer, but it was to me. And even if you’re armed with that knowledge, which I think I had been deep down for years without appreciating it, it’s not always easy to put into practice. But friends, believe me, it’s worth it.
Extracted from BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship by Claire Cohen (Bantam, £16.99), out on 23 June. To order for £14.99 plus P&P, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk.
