Where Have All My Friends Gone? Understanding the Great Scattering

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Hi there,

Because you’ve taken the time to read today’s newsletter, I know you’re interested in improving your friendships and the strength of your social connections.

Whether it’s because you’ve already grappled with loneliness yourself or you’re already keenly aware of all the research showing the ties between your social health and your longevity, you’ve come to the right place.

And for our new readers: welcome! I’m glad you’re here and ready to learn how we build new and stronger friendships as adults. Most of this is stuff we already know from being kids, but we’ve simply forgotten how to do it.

I’m happy to help remind you that it’s not so hard, but it does take attention and intention. Especially when you get to that point in life where you look up and wonder where all your friends went. We all get there. It’s just a matter of when.

Where did all my friends go?

I received a reply to last week’s Relationship Map newsletter with this very question.

It came from a reader who said he would love to unlock the insights from the Relationship Map or the State of Connections, but he was having trouble coming up with more than a handful of names to include in the exercise.

It got me thinking about Mel Robbins's research on the topic of making friends as adults.

When we’re young, everything is structured around our being with people our same age: classes, sports teams, performances, play dates, you name it. Everything is done as a group. It’s easy to make friends because we struggle to get alone time (other than homework time).

And then we go off to college and start living with them!

Remember when you had to work hard to extract yourself from group activities?

The assumption was everyone was invited without an explicit individual invitation. Acquaintance-making was effortless, and friendships blossomed and grew and shrank and grew again.

It all happened naturally until it didn’t.

And we didn’t see it coming.

And no one prepared us for it. It just happened: making friends got hard.

Robbins points out that it’s hard to make friends as an adult because once we reach our twenties, we experience our first Great Scattering, and friend-making goes from being a group effort to an individual sport.

Before we dive into what this all means, a word from our sponsor…

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The Great Scattering

Remember back when we were young, and everything was structured around doing things as a group: as a class, as a team, as a neighborhood? The outlier was the kid who didn’t do things with the group, and, if we’re being honest, we didn’t treat them very kindly.

These days, if you’re a parent, you’re enabling all this group structuring for your own children. Bonus: you’re making friends again because you’re again in a group, albeit one centered around your kids.

So, all is peachy up until we hit our twenties, and then the Great Scattering happens when making friends shifts from being a group effort to an individual effort.

The Great Scattering refers to the weeks and months right after college graduation. Our friend group, with whom we spent at least four years bonding through daily and weekly rituals of learning, playing, living, and maturing together, now disperses to many new places and tasks.

And we all scatter away from our tight-knit group who spent all that time together:

• Some go on to a new grad school for an advanced degree.

• Some start their career in a new town.

• Some stay behind to finish their degrees.

• Some follow their partner to another city and start a family.

The ride-or-die friend group becomes text-based. But even as it makes the leap to text, you can feel the momentum slowing.

As everyone gets busier and busier with their own thing, the once-daily communications turn into infrequent texts. And things just peter out.

Where did all our friends go?

It’s up to us to keep the friendships alive through extra effort.

And it’s up to us to make new friends as our friendships become old and cold through no fault of our own.

It’s part of living.

It’s part of being alive.

Because the Great Scattering is just the first of many scatterings to come in our lives.

We lose friends when they become parents and focus on their own families.

We lose friends to career demands: ours or theirs.

We lose friends to divorces: ours or theirs.

And yes, we lose friends to death (theirs).

Think about it: how many of these scatterings have you already experienced in your life?

It’s no wonder we’re running out of friends as we get older!

The Mindset Shift to Make New Friends as an Adult

Since we’ve lived through several scatterings, we know we can’t depend on friend-making happening as a group effort anymore. It’s up to us, individually, to put in the work, and we’ll be well and truly rewarded. But it takes time.

It’s never too late to start making friends again, regardless of the source of the scatterings.

Making friends takes effort, just like anything we want to achieve (weight loss, work promotion, low handicap in golf, crypto fortunes).

In addition to the effort, it also takes some patience to see the results, but isn’t this true of all things adulting?

The first step to making new friends is simple but not easy: you need to shift your mindset toward a bias of making the first move. You no longer have the group working on your behalf. It’s time for you to assemble the group, even if it’s just a group of two to start.

Friend-making is an individual sport.

Stop waiting for someone to invite you to do something interesting. Do that very thing you want to do and invite others, or find a group of strangers already doing it and invite yourself along.

A year ago, I found myself on the other side of a scattering (a breakup) and watched as our mutual friends faded away. While I purposefully avoided dating, I resisted the urge to recast my life as a singleton.

I made a list of what I enjoyed doing and started finding others to join me.

Biking: I started scheduling virtual rides with my friends around the world on Zwift so we could at least sweat together even if separated by oceans, and we renewed friendships I’d let grow cold over the years.

Hiking: I picked out a local yoga hike and signed up to join with a group I’d never met. I made two new friends out of that series of hikes and a bunch of acquaintances I’ve seen over and over and have the potential to become future friends.

Nature/gardens: While I don’t have my own plot of land, I do get to visit the community gardens nearby and have introduced myself to the gardeners I often see working their plots. (I’m secretly hoping they’ll invite me to join in… but I realize in writing this I should make the next move and invite myself.)

And in each of the above instances, I was surrounded by interesting people that were predisposed to become good acquaintances (and future friends!) because I was pursuing my own interests to start.

Want to make new friends? (if not, why are you here?)

Make a list of things you like doing, and then go do them among like-minded strangers! Stop waiting for the group to invite you because that’s not the phase of life you’re in anymore.

What’s something you have been wanting to do for a long time but have avoided because no one you know wants to do it?

Make plans this weekend to go do it anyway.

Your future friends are out there waiting for you to show up.

Know someone you think could use this advice to better grow their own circle of friends? Use the referral link below…

What’s been your experience making friends as an adult? Do you have something you think could help others? Just hit reply — your email goes straight to my inbox. 🙏