How do I meet more people I like?

+ please fill the friendship survey!

Rainer Fetting

Housekeeping: I have an ask for you wonderful, wonderful people: please fill out this friendship survey! It’s 40 questions, your responses will be used for the rest of the book and it will be so very appreciated. There is some chance I will contact you to interview you if something feels particularly resonant with the project :) Thank you very very very much in advance!

i. What am I looking for?

If this is a topic that interests you, know that you’re not alone: this is the number one thing people ask me about. Cute girls want to know how to meet more female friends. Guys with successful careers tell me they haven’t made any new friends since college. A great friend group, like a marriage, is both intensely desirable and elusive for many.

Like many girls watching Sex and the City as a teenager, I was so taken by the idea of the quartet. I was already convinced that gossip, or the thoughtful circulation of privileged knowledge, would be one of the great projects of my life. My guy friend recently described his view of female friendship thus: “Two girls get together and discuss the third. Then the other two get together and discuss the third.” To which I replied: “Don’t you get that that’s the whole point?” The whole point of choosing friends is to pick people you don’t mind being dissected by because you fell in love with their analysis. Friendship is about a communal understanding of morality, sharing aesthetic preferences like lovers share germs, ruminating over the challenges of your friends’ relationships like they’re your own, talking, talking, talking. Jealousy, envy, attachment, compersion, companionship, coming together and pulling apart.

I’ll say it again: friendship is about sharing norms. For example, the norm that gossip should be constructive, utopian, never vicious. As a group or even in a pair of two, you should construct norms together. But how do you find people who you like enough to construct norms with?

Here are three things that you should be looking for in new friends:

• chemistry

• values

• alignment.

Chemistry is the six hour hangout test: do you just feel viscerally alive in their presence? Are they consistently extremely interesting to talk to? Do you just love being around them?

Values are something that’s rarely articulated in friendship but I find to be deeply important. Do you guys like the same people and dislike the same people? Do you have some shared sense of what is right and what is wrong? Are you similarly optimistic or pessimistic about the world?

Alignment is about whether they’re in a space in their life when they’re receptive to new close friendships. Reciprocity is as important in friendship as it is in anything else: it’s hard to sustain an asymmetrical friendship. Sometimes people already have a fulfilling friend group, or they’re too busy with work to be fully open to new relationships. I like to think that I’m always open to new friendships, but it’s also true that I’m currently at a point in my life where I can barely keep up with all the friends I already have. That means I’m still open to meeting people, but I also don’t have the radical openness I had, say, in 2022 when I moved to New York and felt like I didn’t know anyone.

ii. Where do you find these people?

Here are some of the answers you guys gave when I asked how you’d made new friends as an adult. (More answers in the thread, really worth checking out if you haven’t.)

Organizing in my city/neighborhood, friends of friends, saying yes to every event invite

At the gym! It’s a personal training studio with only about 4 or 5 of us at a time. Very varied population but I’ve met some gems in my 70’s!

I think I’ve maybe been a bit lucky but I’ve made so many great friends through work! Especially at chaotic start-ups, you build a lot of camaraderie lol

Volunteering. Silly sports leagues. Saying hello to strangers.

Friends of friends. I highly prioritize friendships as a barometer for people I like.

At least one new lifelong friend every year. Meet 100 people a year, keep one or two.

Parties, friends (we all try to bring new people to parties and dinners occasionally), concerts, dating apps, exercise or yoga classes.

Sometimes strike convos with other bicyclists on the bart. Stopped someone I saw reading a Joe Campbell book outside neighborhood wine bar

I try to go to every party I’m invited to by work friends. If I find that I have chemistry (not in the romantic sense most of the time) with people, I make it a point to talk to them and show interest in their life, tease/make jokes, make sure your genuine interest in them shines through by highlighting shared activities/interests and actually crystallize potential plans! Follow up to “We should go fishing sometime!” with “Okay! I’m free Sunday early afternoon, how about you?” Instead of “yes we should!”

Diving into a community of something I’m passionate about (tennis) and really investing in it.

Deepening relationship, giving back to others, etc. Being an active part of the community then led me to meet some of my closest inner circle friends

40 now. Have a small set of good friends made in my 20s from work/education paths. Made some close friends in 30s through our kids. We would usually connect on some level above generic parent talk during birthday parties etc which would lead to drinks, joint family dinners at restaurants and then trips to cabins etc. Now we don’t a bunch of stuff in our community and our friends help. It feels like we’re all building something together.

1) At niche events of odd sincere interests: for example the Trust Community in Berlin which is an eclectic group of indie researchers and freelancers weakly tied together by a cybernetics library

2) Online, through writing essays, which people then reach out to discuss and talk about

3) At work conferences, specifically finding people who do adjacent (not the same) job as I do, usually which have been in the industry a long time

4) At house parties and pregames, often friends of friends

Primarily an awesome ACX meetup

Also improv classes, acting classes, open board game days. I saw this tweet a while ago about increasing your IRL surface area and the more I do that the more friends I make!

I think the moral of these answers is 1) that you have to find the location that resonates with you, whether it’s work, improv classes, tennis, yoga, or BART, and 2) you can literally meet friends anywhere if you’re open to it. I think the concept of “IRL surface area” as mentioned above is great, and echoes dating advice I give friends, which is: how is the love of your life going to find you if you literally never leave the house? Do you think they’re gonna break in? (This does not apply if you’re happily DMing people on Twitter. After all I did at age 15 once meet a boy on Omegle while in search of people to talk about Nabokov with.)

Here are some places where I have met people over the past 10 years: