On a recent Thursday evening in downtown Washington, I took a deep breath and walked into a bar. I joined a couple dozen other women who were milling around making small talk and ordering drinks, waiting for the more formal portion of the evening to begin.
I was there to make friends.
When I first moved to D.C. at age 23, I immediately met lots of new people who were in the same boat. Many of my fellow interns were new to the city, and we were all game for adventures. These days I still have close friends, but many of us have busy jobs and young children. Some have moved away. It can be hard to even schedule a phone call to catch up.
I find myself craving the easy friendships of my early 20s. Could I find that again?
The meetup I was attending was organized by RealRoots, one of a number of start-ups aimed at making us less lonely. Even before the pandemic, Americans were spending less time with friends. By 2023, the U.S. surgeon general warned we were in a loneliness epidemic and that the health risks of isolation were akin to smoking.
The good news is there’s now less stigma in admitting you want to make friends, especially since the pandemic, RealRoots CEO and co-founder Dorothy Li told me.
“We were all lonely together for two years,” she said, and many of us have begun rebuilding social lives at the same time.
I consulted experts about how to both make new friends and reconnect with old ones. Here’s what I learned.
Be vulnerable
I went into the RealRoots event with a healthy dose of skepticism. I was told that I would be matched with a curated group of women based on my responses to a personality quiz and an interview with an artificial intelligence assistant named Lisa who detected my “social vibe.” (I was “grounded, thoughtful and warm” — thanks, Lisa!)
“I totally get it,” Li said when I told her about my doubts. “Human connection needs to be in real life.” But the planning and logistics of matching people who are similar and finding times on their calendars? That, she said, “can be done seamlessly by AI.”
The women at my meetup included a former professional ballroom dancer, a nurse who loves her work with dementia patients and an aid worker about to leave for a work trip to Sudan.
Everyone had different reasons for being there. One woman worked from home and felt isolated, especially since becoming pregnant. Another wanted to push out of her comfort zone and meet new people. A third said she had social anxiety and felt this took the pressure off.
After mingling, moderators led us through a series of questions, which started like corporate icebreakers (what are your hobbies?) but got progressively more personal (what’s something you’re good at?), finally building to the last question: What’s something you’re struggling with right now?
I searched my mind for something that wouldn’t feel too revealing. These were basically strangers, after all. But then someone talked about her fertility issues. Another was going through a difficult divorce. Another had a serious illness. I quietly reassessed. When it was my turn, I no longer felt the need to hold back. I talked about my insecurities as a mom. I felt myself starting to cry as I explained my fears about how my anxiety would affect my daughter. I was met with so much empathy.
When I told Li I felt close to all the women by the end of the night, she told me that’s the point.
“When you start talking about the things that are actually on your mind, everyone can relate,” Li said.
Vulnerability invites vulnerability. This rule also applies when trying to deepen friendships.
For journalist Billy Baker, after getting married, having kids and relocating to the suburbs, he realized that many of his high school and college friends couldn’t be part of his daily life anymore. He set out to build a community where he lived, and the first step was to reach out to people he felt a connection to, and to tell them that. It was intentional and a little scary, but worth it, he said.
“Vulnerability for me was always rewarded,” said Baker, author of the book “We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends.”
Do things you want to do anyway
When Baker was working on his book about friendship, he was trying to nail down exactly what draws us to other people. He found that a shared interest or activity worked particularly well as a first step. For instance, he would often run into a guy at the gym, so he started asking him to meet up there to work out together.
“Pickleball has changed senior friendship,” he said. “Is it pickleball they love or is it having this activity that they enjoy, and finding others who also enjoy it and then they’re off for coffee?”
Baker says if you choose something you want to do anyway, you’ll probably meet people with a shared interest, and even if you don’t you’ll still have a good time.
Put friendship on the to-do list — near the top
Baker learned that he couldn’t just assume friendships would happen to him — he needed to take initiative.
“We were never taught to prioritize friendship,” Baker said. For him, this journey began when his editor asked him to write about how many men let friendships lapse in middle age. Even though Baker had always been social, he realized he had been prioritizing his work and family and neglecting to make time for friends.
“The gift I gave myself is to put friendship on the to-do list every day alongside eating well, taking care of my family, taking out the trash, all those things,” Baker said. “It needs to be a part of our daily life if you really are going to reap the benefits.”
Baker’s solution was to take inspiration from a group of men in his town with a tradition called “Wednesday nights” — a weekly promise of getting together. Baker created his own version of it, and said it was awkward at first. But eventually, genuine connections formed.
At the end of my conversation with Baker, he gave me a challenge: Was there anyone I could think of who I wanted to be closer to?
I thought of a colleague I have been casual friends with for a few years. I always delighted in running into her in the hallways or at parties, but we had never gotten together just us. Baker encouraged me to ask her to hang out.
I felt a familiar creeping fear as I reached out to her — what if she was too busy, or didn’t feel the same friendship vibe I did? What if we did hang out and had nothing to say?
I asked her, my colleague Rachel Kurzius, to get lunch on a Sunday. We chatted for two hours that felt like 20 minutes. We bonded over talking about books and our kids and the surprising number of things we had in common, and it really feels like the start of a friendship. Similar to Baker, I was rewarded by vulnerability.
If you’re contemplating taking the first step, just do it. The odds are stacked in your favor.
“We like people who like us,” Baker said. So make the first move.
After my RealRoots meetup, I declined to join RealRoots’ six week series — like a kickball league, there was a cost, and it didn’t fit into the budget this month — but I was still grateful for the opportunity to meet people. A few days later, I ran into one of the women from the group at a workout class, and we greeted each other like old friends.
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