When people find that they are having a hard time making new friends, they often blame their own awkwardness — some failure on their part. As a sociologist who studies how people connect, I’ve interviewed more than 150 people about friendship. One woman told me a typical story: She had moved to a new town after college and said that the conversations she struck up at coffee shops, work and yoga didn’t seem to go anywhere. Forging new relationships felt hopeless. “I’m not good at it,” she said.
Yet she, like most of us, could pinpoint times in her life when making friends seemed easier. Across two decades of studying friendship, I’ve found that people’s ability to make new friends doesn’t come and go at random. Instead, it reflects, in large part, the strength of what I call the “friendship market” they are in.
In a thriving friendship market, a majority of people in a particular setting are interested in “buying” or “selling” friendship. For example, middle schoolers merging into a new high school, or first-year students arriving at college. New connections abound.
But we spend much of our lives in weaker friendship markets, where people are open to conversation, but not connection. A parent shows up at a P.T.A. meeting, and even if others are friendly, they keep their distance. Or someone moves to a new city for work, and acquaintances don’t turn toward their bids for connection. Even intentionally putting yourself out there doesn’t inspire reciprocation if a friendship market has closed: Others already have fully formed friend groups.
In adulthood, open friendship markets become harder to find. But there’s a key to finding new ones: a shifting sense of self. We define ourselves through our relationships with friends. These connections help us to construct our desired selves, who we are, and who we are becoming.
The key, then, is not just to start an activity or join a club so you can meet new people. It’s to join one related to a new sense of self or an identity you’re looking to deepen. Pregnant women, for example, will look for friendships in prenatal classes — not only to find people who understand their experience but also to reaffirm their emerging identity as a mom.
Milestones make friendship markets easier to find, but markets exist for all sorts of identities, big and small. One woman I spoke to heard about a coffee club as she was starting to consider herself a coffee aficionado. Another found friendship in a pride club; although she had come out as gay years before, she felt that her queer identity was becoming a more important part of who she was. Friends connected to emerging identities bring out new sides of us. One interviewee told me that she was not religious growing up. As she started to explore Christianity, she joined a Bible study group and said she was her most “upbeat” and “cheery” self with the friends she made there.
We’ve all seen how much closer you can feel to someone when your identities change together. I worked in an office for five years with someone whom I did not know well until we were both pregnant together — both first-time moms with the same due date. We ended up taking walks, having lunches and getting to know each other as we talked through our excitement and worries about the ways our lives would change. As our identities shifted, our friendships did as well.
Even embracing less favorable identities opens up new markets. Several people I interviewed told me about a group for single parents. Remembering the challenging period after their breakups, club members went out of their way to welcome new entrants. One member noted how her new friends offered her support as she raised a child on her own. Eventually she got married, which booted her from the club, but two people she met there remained among her closest friends years later.
To be clear, being aware of “friendship markets” does not mean that those friendships are transactional. Friendships are not commodities or disposable. But they are also not always readily available. Everyone needs to make sure they are seeking them out, optimizing the possibility of connection in our busy, sometimes isolated-feeling lives.
I recommend a New Year’s resolution: Do the work to find new friendship markets in 2026, rather than waiting passively for new connections to find you. Even those with active social lives and healthy friendships benefit from new relationships that reaffirm who they are. These connections have been proven to bring us joy, fulfill our basic need to connect and help us to live healthier, longer lives.
So the next time making new friends feels challenging, remember the structural role of friendship markets rather than blaming yourself. If you take a class not just to learn a new skill but also to deepen a part of yourself, you may find your people.
Janice McCabe is an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College and the author of the books “Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends” and “Connecting in College.”
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