How to Make Friends as an Adult With One Weekly Habit and Eight Weeks of Showing Up

In 2020, Americans spent about 20 minutes a day with friends in person, down from about 60 minutes in 2003. Those figures come from the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and social connection. They go a long way toward explaining why making friends after school can feel like a skill you’ve lost.

You probably didn’t lose anything.

Classrooms, dorms and first jobs put you in the same rooms with the same people for hours every week, and you never had to plan any of it. Most grown-up schedules, built around commutes, kids and errands, stopped doing that years ago.

Count last week’s hours

Vivek Murthy, then the surgeon general, released the advisory in May 2023. It found that about half of U.S. adults say they’ve felt lonely. The drop in time with friends was steepest for people aged 15 to 24, who lost close to 70% of it.

Twenty minutes a day works out to 2 hours and 20 minutes a week. Before you start the steps below, add up the time you spent with friends in person last week, leaving out family and coworkers, and see which side of that average you land on.

A friend takes about 50 hours

Jeffrey Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas, estimated in 2018 that it takes about 50 hours together to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend.

The 40 minutes a day that Americans lost between 2003 and 2020 adds up to about 243 hours a year.

That’s nearly five times Hall’s figure. The steps below start with a weekly group, which puts you near the same people every week. Steps 4 and 5 add time with one of them outside the group, where the extra hours come from.

1. Pick one weekly thing

Repetition does a lot of the early work. In a 2008 study in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Leipzig randomly assigned seats to 54 first-year students at their very first class session. A year later, the students who had happened to sit next to each other rated their friendships as closer, with even a shared row making a difference.

Look for something that meets every week, in the same place, with mostly the same people. A one-time mixer won’t do this for you, since you may never see the same faces twice.

Choose by what you can afford and how much energy you have left after work. A group you’ll still attend in November beats one that sounds impressive in September.

Some weekly options, by cost and energy:

You’ve finished this step once you can name the day, the time and the address.

2. Commit to eight weeks

The first few weeks are the awkward part.

You don’t know anyone, you aren’t sure where to stand, and quitting after week two feels reasonable. Decide before you start that you’ll go eight times. Eight 90-minute sessions add up to 12 hours with the same group, about a quarter of Hall’s 50. By then you’re a regular, and people expect to see you.

The early weeks are the ones to guard. Put all eight dates on your calendar now, and count the flat evenings along with the good ones.

3. Ask what people are working on

A name gets you a nod in the hallway.

Knowing what someone is in the middle of gets you a second conversation, since it hands you something to ask about next week.

You’d have plenty of company at a shift like that one. AmeriCorps and the Census Bureau counted 75.7 million people aged 16 and older who volunteered through an organization between September 2022 and September 2023, about 28.3% of that age group.

After each session, type one line per person into your phone, with their name and the thing they mentioned, like the kitchen remodel, the kid learning to drive or the half-marathon in April. Read the list on your way in next week and ask about one of them.

4. Suggest one small after-plan

On its own, a 90-minute weekly group gets you 25.5 hours with the same people by week 17 and 49.5 by week 33, close to Hall’s 50 only after most of a year. One 90-minute after-plan a week with one person from the group roughly doubles that pace, to 24 hours by week 8 and 51 by week 17.

Keep the ask small and attached to what you already share. Ask about coffee after the shift, the long way back to the parking lot, or tacos next door before choir. One person and one plan with a day attached is enough.

A no usually means a busy week. Ask again in a couple of weeks, or ask someone else.

5. Follow up within a week

If the coffee went well, say so within a few days and set up the next one. A short text is fine for this.

Tie it to the weekly thing, for example coffee again after next Saturday’s shift, which makes yes the easy answer.

Then keep going. By week 33 the after-plan line in the chart reaches 99 hours with one person, twice what the group alone gives you. School used to cover most of those hours for you, and now you’re the one putting them on the calendar.

If loneliness feels heavy

These steps are for the ordinary, fixable kind of lonely. If loneliness feels heavy or hopeless, or you’ve felt low for weeks, talk to your doctor.

If you’re in crisis or thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The number has worked nationwide since July 2022, and it’s free and open around the clock.

Before you head back in

Look at your week and find one evening or weekend morning you could give to the same room every week. Then check your library’s calendar, your nearest food bank and your rec center’s class list for something that meets then.

Pick one weekly thing in one place, sign up, and put the first date on your calendar today.