Resources

Worth your time on this question

Everything worth your time on the question: How do adults make friends again?

Four things on this subject: one TAIU exercise and three things to read. It opens with How Many Friends Does One Person Need? by Robin Dunbar. Dunbar's layered circles explain why the number of people you can genuinely keep up with is small, and why guilt about the rest is misplaced.

This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.

Rebuilding a circle: talk it through

TRY · 10 MIN

Rebuild My Circle

TAIU

Three plausible possibilities, not a social strategy.

Turns wanting more people into three specific, small, plausible moves.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

Robin Dunbar

Dunbar's layered circles explain why the number of people you can genuinely keep up with is small, and why guilt about the rest is misplaced.

How Many Hours Does It Take to Make a Friend?

Jeffrey Hall

Hall put numbers on friendship: roughly fifty hours to a casual friend, considerably more to a close one. It explains why adult friendship feels hard rather than impossible.

The Strength of Weak Ties

Mark Granovetter

Granovetter's paper is the reason acquaintances matter more than they feel like they should. Useful when a life looks thin but is actually broad and shallow.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.