Think back to your tenth birthday. Such a milestone marker was no doubt celebrated with an array of your closest friends and a delightful cacophony of siblings and cousins and classmates and Hafsa from gymnastics, and Caroline from dance class, and Malik from next door – an endless list of besties and acquaintances. No discretion required.

Your 18^th and 21^st birthday celebrations may have been similar, perhaps with slightly fewer numbers and (regrettably) no party bags, but still necessitating the buying of a new dress, an impressive cake, and the whole squad in attendance.

Then come our thirties and forties, and as the years progress, friend groups – real-life friends, not followers or online acquaintances – along with our ability to form and maintain new friendships begin to shrink and become more difficult to form.

“A woman’s 30s,” author and science journalist Lydia Denworth notes in her book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond, “is the decade where friendship goes to die.”

“From a psychological standpoint, there are several key reasons adult friendship formation is more challenging than it was during childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood, which include time scarcity, greater self-awareness and selectivity, and emotional fatigue,” says psychologist Hiba Salem from Sage Clinics. “Adults face competing demands – careers, caregiving roles, financial responsibilities – which lead to reduced cognitive and emotional availability for socialising. Friendship becomes one more item on an already full plate, rather than something that happens organically.” 

“With maturity, people develop more defined identities, values and boundaries,” Salem adds. “While this can lead to more meaningful relationships, it also makes us choosier about whom we invest in – thus shrinking the pool of potential friends.”

Ask the internet why making friends as an adult is so hard, and, from Facebook forums to Reddit threads, the collective online community agrees opportunities are hampered by busy work and social lives, and the fact that our increasingly online lives can take precedence over in-person interactions. When we’re younger, our worlds are smaller, and outside influences are fewer. We’re more open to new people and experiences, and less discerning and judgmental in our friendships, having not yet developed fully formed values or set-in-stone opinions. We have fewer expectations, and the insidious creep of learned behaviour – boys play with cars, girls play with dolls – hasn’t quite taken hold. 

As we get older, we become less elastic in our thinking and less forgiving in our willingness to adapt and make allowances, leading to the feeling – when we reach our 40s or 50s – that our lives have pretty much taken on the last shape they will ever form. 

Additional barriers to forming meaningful friendships in adulthood, such as remote work and a generational change in attitudes towards traditional built-in social opportunities, have also had an effect. Then there’s the emotional considerations of social anxiety, the fear of rejection, and opening yourself up to trust and vulnerability, which feel trickier to navigate in adulthood.

“While adulthood often brings increased self-confidence, the fear of rejection remains a significant psychological barrier to friendship, with increased social risk, greater internalised risk around loneliness, and increased self-monitoring,” Salem explains. “Children and adolescents are often surrounded by peers and quickly bounce back from social missteps. Adults, however, may feel like they have ‘more to lose’, including their social identity, dignity or emotional safety.”

Alexandria Gouveia has experienced first-hand an adult friendship do-over – not once, but twice. In 2020, after 13 years in the UAE, the 42-year-old moved to the Netherlands with her husband, Andrew, to be closer to their families. Switching out Dubai Mall strolls for canal-side walks and kibbeh for stroopwafel also meant swapping a full, friend-filled social life for life in a city in which they knew practically no one.

“I’ve found it incredibly difficult,” Gouveia says of forming friendships in Amsterdam. “Admittedly, I’ve always struggled in terms of making friends. I was a bit of a loner as a kid, and as an introvert-extrovert, I find it difficult initiating talking to people or reaching out to them. Even if I like someone, I have to really push myself to make the effort and just go out and speak to people.”

Sharing that she felt the same when she first arrived in the UAE in 2007, then aged 25, Gouveia credits her jobs in Dubai’s media industry with helping her make friends with “like-minded people with common interests”. But now in Amsterdam, a different role in a different industry has impacted her ability to spend enough time with people to form long-lasting relationships.

“I work for a global consulting firm, which isn’t the same as being in the media industry, where making friends is easier because you all have similar interests,” she shares. “Here, people are at different stages in their lives now, and I’m one of the older ones in the company.”

The Friendship Report, a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019, found the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21. This is a formative stage during which we not only bond with others over shared new experiences in love, life, and career, but also start to become more discerning about who we let into our lives. Additional research, like 2009’s Causal beliefs, social participation, and loneliness among older adults: A longitudinal study, found that those who believe friendship happens based on luck were more likely to be lonely in the long term than those who believe friendship takes effort, a mindset that meant they socialised more.

Shared hobbies have long been one way to connect and meet new people. As much as the internet has disrupted traditional routes to meeting people, it has conversely opened up myriad avenues for anyone, no matter their niche, to find like-minded people across an almost infinite array of communities. 

But translating shared love for a hobby into meaningful friendships isn’t necessarily an instant route to NBF-ship. 

“I don’t really play any sport that well, so any group sports I tried to do to make friends didn’t really work out,” admits Gouveia. “It’s definitely about finding your community. I looked for stuff online and I did Krav Maga classes hoping to make friends – but it turned out that people didn’t really want to talk after the class, let alone go for a coffee.”

Relationship status can also influence your ability to form friendships as an adult, due to the different situations to which both circumstances expose you.

“Because my husband and I get on so well, it was okay at the beginning – because we had each other to hang out with, but I also think that can be a blessing and a curse,” shares Gouveia. “Being so close to Andrew, and because I can be shy, it makes it harder to go out, which meant that maybe we didn’t make as much effort as we should have done.”

This, Salem explains, is known as ‘dyadic withdrawal’. “It’s a concept from social psychology referring to the phenomenon where individuals in romantic relationships reduce their social interaction outside the couple. Their emotional and logistical needs are often met within the partnership, making external friendships seem less urgent,” she says. 

“Single individuals may have more time and flexibility to pursue new connections. They may be more motivated to seek emotional support outside of a romantic relationship, leading them to prioritise friendships.”

Having children can a big facilitator to meeting new people and forming friendships based on a shared commonality. Daily interactions with other parents at the school gate or on the class WhatsApp chat, as well as invitations to birthday parties and school events can grow into something deeper, while the friendships children form with their peers can lead to friendships between parents.

“My kids have been the common denominator in nearly every friendship I made abroad,” says Beth Satterly, 44, a Dubai-based mother-of-three and Senior Project Manager at E-learning company Capytech. “Identifying schools, activities and friendship groups for your kids is not optional when you move. Finding these is always the first job when you arrive in a different country and making friends is an enjoyable side effect of this.”

“I’ve found children generally gravitate towards friends with the same values and ideas as you and your family,” she adds. “So, when you meet their parents, more often than not, they are your kind of people. It then becomes an evolving relationship, where you find yourself meeting up without the kids and discussing things other than your children... And a friendship is born.” 

Having moved with her husband and family between six different countries since 2013, including the Philippines, the UK, Indonesia and the UAE, Satterly also credits sports as the way she developed friendships outside of the school gates. 

“I always joined sports teams wherever we went, so you automatically tend to find people with similar mindsets and interests,” she shares. “It takes a special kind of person to enjoy standing on a freezing rugby pitch at 9am on a Saturday morning. I honestly think some of the friendships you pick up later in life, when you really know yourself and feel confident in who you are, are some of the most significant relationships you’ll ever have.”