Making Friends as an Adult Is a Skill Nobody Teaches You

I moved from Naples to Rome at 26 for a job I was genuinely excited about, knowing no one in the city well enough to call in the evenings.

I was not worried about this initially - I had always made friends easily and assumed that the social world of the new city would assemble itself in the way that the social world of university had, through proximity and repeated collision and the natural gravity of shared experience.

By month four, I was going home to my apartment most evenings with no plans and no particular sense of how to change that. It was not that I was unfriendly or that the people I was meeting at work were unkind. The issue was structural.

At university, friendships had formed through a mechanism that no longer existed: the constant involuntary contact of people living and studying in the same environment, eating in the same places, attending the same events, with abundant unstructured time in which relationships could develop without anyone having to make a deliberate effort.

At 26, in a new city, none of those structural conditions existed. I was meeting people at work and at occasional social events but these encounters were not becoming friendships because making a friendship in adulthood, I was slowly discovering, requires a kind of proactive follow-through that is socially slightly awkward and that nobody had told me was simply what it took.

The awkwardness is the point: you have to ask someone you have met twice if they want to have a coffee, knowing that this is technically a social overture with no established frame and that the other person may or may not understand what you are doing.

I tried it for the first time at month five with a colleague I had enjoyed talking to, suggesting we get aperitivo after work. She said yes. We went. It was good. I did it again with someone I had met at a book event. Also good.

Over the following year I was deliberate about this in a way that felt slightly effortful but produced results that were, by year two in Rome, a genuine social life that I had built rather than inherited.

The lesson was simple and not one I had expected to need at 26: adult friendship requires initiative that the architecture of adult life does not supply automatically. It requires you to go first, to follow up, to suggest the specific thing rather than the vague intention. It is worth the effort.

But it is effort, and the sooner you accept that, the less time you spend waiting for something that is not coming to happen on its own.