How to Make Friends as an Adult the Same Way You Did as a Kid

Read time: 6 minutes

Hi Proactive Professional,

Who are you closest to in your professional and personal life? I'm not referring to the old boss of three years who you feel comfortable enough to text a question. Who are the people you genuinely want to keep in touch with? The ones you want to hear updates from, share big moments with, and seek genuine advice from.

Why do you want to keep in touch with them? How did you build that close relationship?

If you list out just a few of these people, you'll probably come up with those you've been friends with since childhood or college, worked with for years through good and bad times, or shared strong interests and experiences with over months or years.

But the commonality is spending a prolonged period of time near these people—sometimes directly interacting while other times living your life nearby.

This often happens at:

• Former jobs

• Clubs or activities you frequented

• Organized sports or hobbyist groups

• Attending the same school, classes, clubs, or organizations

Usually, the people you develop strongest bonds with are the ones you have a few additional overlapping interests with.

For me, that was soccer. It's where I met most of my close friends throughout the years. Not because of the time spent on the soccer field a few hours each day, but because it was the medium that allowed us to experience our different lives alongside one another.

This is called accompaniment and it's one of the most important ways we get to know someone. Think of it as getting to know others a bit better during the daily routines of everyday life.

David Brooks describes accompaniment well:

A team, school, hobbyist group, or company you work for often lays a foundation for accompaniment because it creates a space where you are just doing stuff together—not face-to-face, but side by side.

The way I experienced accompaniment most in my life was playing college soccer.

Learning the Qualities of Accompaniment Through My College Sports Experience:

On the surface, participating in college soccer meant spending two hours per day playing soccer with people I may have never otherwise met in school. We came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, and studied different majors—with vastly different interests outside of the sport.

However, it's not just those two hours a day. It's the morning workouts, locker room time before and after games, physical therapy, traveling to away games, bunking up in hotel rooms, and film sessions on competition.

Whether we liked it or not, we all had to live our very different lives side by side with the only true link being playing the same sport.

But as anyone that has been a part of a high functioning team (work, sport, hobby, club or otherwise) will tell you, something special begins to happen when you share that interest.

You start living your lives in parallel in places off the field. You begin doing non-soccer things together: eating meals, late nights of studying in the library after practice, moving in together off campus, charity work to give back, partying on the weekends, and grabbing hungover breakfast the next morning recounting the funny stories from the previous night.

Now, the real bonds begin to form. People are getting to practice early just to hang out, staying in the locker room after games we lost to rip into one another or after big wins for dance party celebrations, helping each other with jobs and internships, planning trips together, looking out for one another, and much more.

Many of them became like family.

These strong bonds formed because we unintentionally were accompanying one another—throughout different years of school, while studying different majors, while managing other personal ups and downs, etc.

Soccer made us hit on every important quality of accompaniment:

You may be reading this years out of college or without an athletic bone in your body. But the good news is, you don't actually need a college sports team to form strong bonds. There are activities, clubs, organizations, and jobs that can create accompaniment.

The important thing to take away is there is no shortcut to meaningful relationships. You can't try to rush to the end where they feel like family. But you can seek out the jobs, hobbies, and environments that you genuinely enjoy which allow for these qualities of accompaniment to surface. The relationships will still take work, but it gives you the opportunity to form them the right way with the right people.

Helpful links:

Buy How to Know a Person by David Brooks

Learn more about Cycle for Survival

Donate to Cycle for Survival to support rare cancer research

Best of luck building,

Devin