Sorry to disappoint any Married at First Sight fans (firstly, you know who you are, and secondly, shame on you) but this will not be a re-cap of last season. Instead, in this post MAFS stands for…

Making Adult Friends SUCKS! 

And it does, it’s hard. Moving to a new city in my thirties, it became apparent very quickly that as we age it seems we also lose the confidence and the skill of making new friends.

According to a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships it takes approximately 60 hours of time spent together for a relationship to transition from acquaintances to casual friendship. It then takes anywhere from 120-160 hours to become close friends and over 200 hours of hanging out to become best friends!

After wasting too may precious friend-making hours panicking over this statistic, I decided that while I may not make lifelong friends immediately (clearly) that doesn’t mean I should be lonely in the meantime.

So I tried Meet Up. It’s an app based system designed to facilitate group activities. Be it cycling, trivia nights or book clubs, the whole premise of Meet Up is to connect people who are looking to expand their social circles or find like-minded others to do activities with. Regular concerns when trying something new such as “I couldn’t imagine going on my own” or “I won’t know anyone” become irrelevant in this scenario as Meet Up is designed ESPECIALLY for this. If everyone rocked up to a Meet Up with 10 of their best mates, the whole system falls apart. So while it took a little bit of courage (or I chose a bar crawl activity so in my case it took liquid courage) Meet Up seems like a good place to start on the friend making journey.

I’ve enjoyed the activities I’ve done and the people I’ve met so far and I’ve heard some great success stories of growing friendships. While unfortunately for me I still have about 195 hours of Meet Ups to attend before I make my ‘best friend’ (not that I’m counting!) I am confident that by putting myself out there, trying new things and most of all just being open to possibilities I am at least taking a step in the right direction.

And if all else fails, I know I can always come home to a crossword and a cat!

Hall, J.A. 2018, ‘How many hours does it take to make a friend?’, The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 1278-96, viewed 11 August 2019, <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0265407518761225>