How to Keep Friends and Combat Entropy

The key to building and strengthening friendships as an adult

Everyone complains about how it’s impossible to make friends as an adult, and that the friendships they do have seem to drift apart over the years. This is especially common when friends from school move away from each other after graduating, but it even happens with friendships in the same city. People have a nostalgic view of school as this isolated “before time” where they were magically able to make friends and have a thriving social life. What they don’t realize is that school is the social tutorial island, and one must take those lessons and apply them to adulthood.

The reason people make friends easily at school or work is that these environments force you to spend time with the same people consistently over months or years. Repeated exposure and shared experience are excellent methods for building relationships, especially with a common enemy. A trusted piece of advice when building a social circle or moving to a new city is to say yes to everything you’re invited to. If there are no events to say yes to, consider hosting events yourself. Anything you can do to be socializing frequently will up your chances of growing fond of the people you spend time around.

Another way people form relationships is through depth rather than prolonged exposure. A single intense conversation or moment can spawn a relationship, a phenomenon we refer to as having chemistry. One might think it's a spontaneous and rare event to hit it off with someone in this way, but it has been proven that this intimacy can be developed with just about anyone through intentional interactions. One example is the 36 questions to fall in love discussed in an NYT article, where psychologists curated a list of things two people can ask each other if they wish to grow this connection at an incredible pace. The reason these questions work is that they help the conversation navigate toward personal details methodically, mimicking the topics a couple may end up discussing over a much longer timeframe as they make their lives together.

Time is a core building block for relationships, but it can be a limiting factor in how we approach them as well. People treat old relationships and new relationships too distinctly, afraid to ask new friends intimate questions, all while forgetting to keep their preexisting friendships fresh with curiosity. A common fallacy is to view relationships as binary: either you're friends or you're not, with no in between. This thinking neglects the fact that relationships require upkeep. Just as friendships can evolve over time, they can wane without proper attention. To maintain connection you must continually put in effort, whether the relationship is romantic or platonic.

Whenever I’m in the same city or even state as a friend, I’ll make an effort to reach out and catch up. Once, during one of Notre Dame’s national championship games, I happened to be in the town where one of my closest friends lives. Knowing he’s a huge fan of the team, when they lost that night, I went over to his place spontaneously and knocked on the door to offer my condolences. When he opened it, perplexed, I gave him a hug and said, “you’ll get ‘em next year.” I was on my way before he could even process my visit. He still tells this story all the time, years later.

That same friend visited me in Austin once, and I had a group of people over to meet him. He later told me that in regard to maintaining existing connections, I was the most intentional person he had ever met, and that he was surprised at how many friendships I had made there in a short time. Meeting up with friends in person is the best option for bonding, but if that isn’t possible, I’ll plan a video call with them, or find a night to play video games with them. I’ll grab lunch or coffee with people when I get the chance, and I try to get a group of us to go to at least one football game each year. I’ve visited other friends out of the blue on holidays, even driving 8 hours to get there, knowing it would be meaningful to them that I didn't want them to spend that time alone.

One reliable way to keep in touch with people is to be the one who plans trips or hosts events, as you remove the bulk of the friction if the event's details are already in place. Regular gatherings are best, so I usually host a game or movie night every Friday at my apartment. I’ll go through phases where I miss some weeks, or even months, but I have been pretty consistent over the last three years at making it happen. The nice thing about hosting frequently is that your friends will often bring new people with them, or someone new will hear about the event and show up. Almost every week I meet a new person at one of my gatherings.

Sadly, most people won’t take initiative, but this doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate you, or don’t want to spend time with you. Entropy affects us all, and doing nothing is the default state. It’s important to note that connections, new or old, stagnate. Don’t take them for granted. Taking charge of your relationships will lead to a thriving and fulfilling social life. Don’t worry about having the perfect event, or ensuring everyone can make the trip, just make it happen as early and often as possible. If you don’t do it, no one will.