How to Make New Friends

I’ve moved around a lot in my adult life and so I’ve developed a Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) for making new friends and building community in new places.  This takes elements from the posts on Community Part 2, living in China, and how to find someone to marry.

Interestingly, forming friendships isn't all that different from finding a partner. In fact, I’d argue that building a community is even more important when settling into a new place. A common mistake I see, particularly among single men, is seeking a romantic partner to fulfill all their social needs. By cultivating a network of friendships (a community), you not only increase your chances of meeting someone but also lessen the pressure on any one individual to meet all your social needs. This creates a more diverse and resilient social safety net.

The SOP for Building Friendships

1. Join in-person communities

2. Get to know individuals you click with

3. Invite them to hang out outside of the initial context

   1. Grab dinner

   2. Go on a hike

   3. Host them for dinner

   4. Go on a trip together

4. Engage in deep conversations about meaningful topics

5. Spend quality time together.  Rinse & Repeat.

The Funnel & The Circle

Visualize this process like a marketing funnel superimposed on concentric circles representing varying degrees of intimacy. The closer someone gets to the center, the stronger your connection becomes.  

Friendship Tiers

1. Strangers – People you pass by on the street.

2. Acquaintances – Friends of friends, coworkers whose names you forget. Max 150.

3. Friends – Those you interact with regularly, whether coworkers or distant family.

4. Close Friends/Family – Your nuclear family or your tightest-knit group of friends.

5. Life Partner – The innermost circle, usually just one person.

People move fluidly between these circles, often based on proximity, time spent together, and the depth of interactions. The boundaries between these tiers are not rigid but are shaped by personal experiences and recency.

Spaced Repetition

There’s this learning technique called spaced repetition which works by exploiting the psychological spacing effect to help you learn.  The idea is that if you see a new word once for the first time, you’re likely to forget it easily, and so you front load exposure to the word and then gradually over time, you’ll see it less and less as it gets solidified in the brain.

Spaced repetition can also be applied to forming friendships.  I’m sure most people have had the experience of getting to know someone really well, and then going years without seeing them, and then when you meet them again, interacting with them is just like old times.  Humans have recency bias whereby things that happened more recently are more salient and feel more intimate than something from ages ago.

For example:

• Tuesday: Meet someone new.  Get their contact information

• Thursday: Check in to see what their plans are for the weekend

• Weekend: Spend time together

While it may take several tries before solidifying plans, the principle remains: keep up the momentum.

It’s classic sales & marketing, keep the momentum going, 1000 lies become the truth, repetitive exposure etc.  In marketing, there’s the rule of 6 that states that a customer must see a brand’s ads at least 6 times before purchasing.

The first time a man sees an advertisement, he takes no notice of it; the second time he looks at the name; the third time he looks at the price; the fourth time he reads it; the fifth time he speaks of it to his wife; the sixth time he buys.  

~The Marketing Rule of 6, Weekly Constitutionalist (Augusta, Georgia), June 1, 1859

Use the same principles when getting to know someone new.  It might take you seeing someone 6 times in yoga class before you talk to them².

A side note: If the effort is not reciprocal, then it’s okay.  Not every person will make it to the next level of friendship, and it’s best not to force connections.

Eventually, however, superficial interactions like grabbing a meal won’t be enough. To truly know someone, you need to get personal and create shared, memorable experiences.

A common ritual at Dynamite Circle conferences is to do a 2hr cocktail to meet new people, or get to know acquaintances even deeper.  It doesn’t matter if you drink or not, and you hardly have to worry about approach anxiety as mixing is facilitated by the host.  However what makes the 2hr cocktail unique is that it’s not your standard “Networking mixer” where you ask someone the classic “what do you do?” question, the host usually prepares some deep questions that get you intimate quickly.  It’s a structured way to build rapport quickly, reminiscent of the “36 questions that lead to love”, except you jump to question 15.  You skip the harmonious platitudes of the icebreaker and go straight to getting to know someone.

That, creating memorable meaningful experiences, and going through some sh*t together (including some interpersonal conflict) are the key to fostering strong friendships.  If someone is always a fair weather friend, you’ll never truly know if they’re a friend or not.

The digital nomad experience is so attractive because you get to choose your co-workers (those you hang out with at the co-working space) and so you can get this intensity of relationships reminiscent of first year university days.  It’s interesting because it can distort the normal space time continuum.  You’ll feel really close to someone, and yet may collectively have only spent a few months together, and then you’re off to somewhere new, with other people.  It’s also easy to stay in surface level mode if you aren’t willing to be vulnerable, assert what you truly think and why.

Friends & Community

It’s easy to make friends, it’s harder to build community.  Friends are individuals, while a community is a web of friendships—a support network that helps you through life’s inevitable challenges.

Friends come and go, you come and go from communities.

I’ve got several communities in Taiwan.  I have

• Taiwan Family - a group primarily, though not exclusively, consisting of members of Dynamite Circle Taipei whom we all jive with

• An outdooring group of friends.  It’s admittedly been a bit on the backburner as other priorities have taken precedence.

• Church - Although I go regularly, with the exception of one family, I haven’t invested the necessary time yet to form relationships outside of Sunday service.

Dance used to be a community I’d frequent but alas, goal accomplished and life moves on.

A Blue Zone prerequisite for living a long life is having an active social life.

Where to meet people

You go through most of life from when you’re born to when you graduate university, kind of taking forming friendships for granted.  In school, or even in summer camps, you meet people simply by proxy of going repeatedly to the same places, at the same time with the same people.

After university, you have to be proactive and take it upon yourself to meet new people.  It’s “choose your own adventure”.

You’ve also just got less time in your life with work taking up 1/3 of your daily time, sleep taking another ⅓ and so the remaining ⅓ for everything else in your life (cooking, cleaning, gym, getting masters etc), and so it’s all about your priorities.  It’s definitely easier to be complacent and sit at home binging on YouTube or Tiktok.  Nonetheless, the imperative is on you. 

Here are some examples of where to meet people

• Meetup.com - in-person interest groups.

  • Triathlon open swimming group: I participated in one in the suburbs of Boston

  • Dance

  • Outdoor hiking groups

• Free fitness groups - There are usually free (or pretty cheap) group workouts in almost all major cities around the world…if there isn’t one, start one.  Sometimes they’re hosted by a local fitness “brand ambassador”, other times simply a trainer.  Search Instagram

  • November Project

  • The Gym - I hired a trainer to keep me accountable and help me with my form.  Now I go to the gym with neighbors to keep me accountable.

  • Lululemon - In Shenzhen, they organized free Saturday yoga at their stores before they opened

  • Seattle - Had yoga at sunset in Lake Union

  • Bike shops often organize weekly group rides

• Toastmasters

• Online to Offline communities

  • Dynamite Circle - community of online entrepreneurs who have in-person events/chapters

  • Young Presidents’ Organization

  • Entrepreneurs Organization

  • Couchsurfing¹

• Church - though I don’t expect many do that

• Gun & Rod clubs

• Veterans association - not that I know any veterans.

• Host dinner parties

  • Potlucks

  • At a restaurant, each invitee must bring a +1 who’s never been before.  Things will grow quickly…like a MLM

This won’t happen overnight, and not everyone will become friends, and some friends will move away but it’s worth the effort.

In big cities, people make friends based on their interests whereas in smaller towns, you spend more time with a specific friend group but interests are less diverse.  Friendships in cities vs towns come down to convenience vs commitment. 

Something that I must concede though is how generally it’s easier to make friends abroad, and in a city with a lot of transplants than in a town where most people’s friends are from their school days.  There’s a positive small town tribalism that one would not get in their own country, and a city with a lot of transplants is generally more open to welcoming new people.  It also helps that I’m American, and as any non-American can tell you, Americans could talk to a tree.  However I wasn’t always like this, I used to be so shy that my first grade teacher thought I was mentally challenged, whereas multiple times I watched as my brother effortlessly chatted up strangers, including once hitchhiking a ride down Mt Washington.  Likewise my Dad’s golden retriever’s willingness to talk to anyone provided ample inspiration to do the same.  Being a Westernized Asian living abroad in mostly East and Southeast Asia forced upon me a need to be proactive, as no one would suspect me to be a foreigner, and so I had to make the first move.

One of my best friends in Taiwan, I met simply chatting up on the street in front of a Thai restaurant with a parrot.  He invited me to get to know him and his girlfriend over drinks, and that following weekend, we went on an intense hike.

Creating deep meaningful friendships takes time and experiences together. It’s why it’s hard to replace childhood friends, there’s so much accumulated time spent during formative years. 

Men vs women in how we develop friendships

I must make a note that men and women socialize differently, and so that should be taken into account.  Women can sit and chat at a cafe and bond.  Men have to play a sport, or do an activity together.  It’s just how our brains are wired.

 

As men age though, especially once they’re in retirement, it can be harder to find purpose without work.  Without a common purpose, old male friends can drift apart.  There isn’t that “team” that exists to accomplish something.  What was traditionally done would be to play the role of grandparents and help rear the youngest generation, with marriage and birth rates on the decline, as well as people moving away further from home, that’s been happening less and less.

Women don’t need work as much as men to feel fulfilled, they need community.

Men are much more dependent on their wives for social needs than the other way around.  Thus the ending of a relationship generally hurts men more as they have less of a social net than women.  Men also struggle to discuss deep topics together as this clip aptly explains.

 

Conclusion

It takes time to make friends and form a community, but the rewards are worth it.  You could of course pay your way into a community, but then as I’ve said before, then the commitment and community isn’t truly there.  Commit yourself to one place, and over time you won’t have FOMO about other people’s travels and simply enjoy the company of the community you’ve formed.

Bowling Alone was quite prescient in regards to the general decline in social capital in the US and I’m sure it’s only accelerated since the pandemic and smartphones.  The boom in post-WW2 social capital was likely due to the collective trauma of the Great Depression and a devastating war.  We’ve been coasting down from that peak for the past 8 decades.  However, I’m hopeful that if done right, we might be able to turn things around, one friendship at a time.

Key Steps for Building Friendships and Community:

1. Join in-person communities.

2. Get to know individuals.

3. Invite them to hang out.

4. Create meaningful experiences.

5. Have deep conversations.

6. Rinse and repeat.

Further Reading

• 2hr Cocktail Party

• Never Eat Alone

• Bowling Alone - a book about decline of social capital

• Alienated America - why some areas in the US thrive and others decline

Footnotes

1. I don’t know if couchsurfing is still around. Early days of internet naivety in which we felt we could trust people more.  Also a different stage of life for me.  Based on what I’m reading on Reddit, it seems like a shadow of its former self but it’s still going.

2. Advertisers will create jingles to live rent free in your head.  I wouldn’t suggest being that manipulative.