On Adult Friendships

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendships and about how my relationship with them has shifted as I’ve gotten older.

I’m someone who has moved around my whole life. Growing up in a military family meant a new city every two years. By the time I was navigating these transitions on my own, I had already learned how to start from scratch more times than most people do in a lifetime. North Carolina, then DC, then the Bay Area. Each move meant rebuilding: a new city, new faces, and figuring out who your people were going to be this time.

Because of that, I thought I was an expert at making friends. I knew how to be intentional. But what really clarified things for me wasn’t a geographic move. It was postpartum.

My postpartum experience was incredibly hard. And during that thick fog, the landscape of my life shifted. Some friendships I thought were solid just quietly vanished. Nothing dramatic.. they just faded. Meanwhile, people I was still getting to know, people I hadn’t expected much from, showed up in ways I genuinely didn’t anticipate. It completely redefined who I thought of as “my people.”

Everyone says making friends gets harder as an adult, and of course it does. Life fills up with careers, families, the general exhaustion of just keeping things running. There’s less of that unstructured time where friendships used to happen naturally.

But as I started coming out of my postpartum fog, I realized something..I couldn’t just wait for a community to magically appear on my doorstep. I had to use that old muscle I built as a kid moving to new cities. I had to initiate.

So, I stopped making it complicated.

I reached out to the friend going through IVF. The one in the thick of a toddler phase. The new moms I could tell were struggling and just needed someone who understood. And I lowered the bar for what a “hangout” had to look like. Tuesday afternoon, lunch somewhere in the middle. “I’m already going to Trader Joe’s..want me to grab you something?” “Come sit in the car with me while I run this errand.”

Small things. Low effort, genuine.. But consistent. Because trust me consistency matters!

What I realized is that a village isn’t something you find.. it’s something you build. And you build it by becoming the person who shows up, which naturally weeded out the people who wouldn’t show up back.

When we feel lonely as adults, it’s easy to retreat and assume everyone is too busy for us. But the truth is, nobody is too busy for a thirty-minute lunch or a voice note sent while folding laundry. We’re all just tired and waiting for someone else to make the first move.

If you’ve been feeling like adult friendships are just too hard lately, I want to gently challenge you to lower the stakes. Don’t plan a massive dinner. Just send the text you’ve been meaning to send for three weeks. Check in on the friend who has been quiet. Drop off a porch coffee.

We don’t have to accept a smaller, lonelier life just because we’re grown up. We just have to be a little more on purpose.

Just send that text —someone is probably waiting to hear from you.