Chapter 9: Friendship After School Ends

A Birthday With No One to Call

Kwabena is thirty-six and works as a train conductor. He likes his job. He meets hundreds of people every day, checks tickets, answers questions and helps passengers with heavy bags. He chats with his colleagues during breaks. By most measures, he is a sociable man. But last month, on his birthday, he realized something that shook him.

After his shift, he went home to his flat. His mother called to wish him a happy birthday. A few colleagues had sent messages. Then the evening stretched out in front of him. He thought about who he could call to go out for a meal or a drink, and he could not think of anyone. Not really. He had acquaintances, colleagues and people he used to know. But there was nobody he felt close enough to call simply because he wanted company.

When Kwabena thought back, he could trace how this had happened. At school and at college, friendship had been easy. He saw the same people every day. They played sports, studied together and spent long evenings talking about everything. Then life scattered them. Some moved to other towns for work. Some married and had children. Kwabena's own shifts were irregular, which made it hard to keep regular plans. One by one, the friendships faded, not through any argument, but through simple distance and time.

Kwabena sat on his sofa that evening and felt a loneliness he had not admitted to himself before. He also felt embarrassed. "How can a man of thirty-six not have any friends?" he asked himself. "What is wrong with me?" He decided not to tell anyone how he felt, because he was ashamed of it.

This shame is an important part of the picture. Loneliness is one of the few painful feelings that many people hide even from those closest to them. A person who is ill or grieving usually receives sympathy. A person who is lonely often fears that admitting it will make them look unlikeable, as if loneliness were proof that nobody wants them. So they stay silent, and the silence makes the loneliness deeper. One of the first steps out of loneliness, for many people, is simply to admit it, at least to themselves.

Kwabena's situation is much more common than he realizes. Many adults find that friendships which formed easily in youth become harder to make and keep as life becomes busier and more scattered. In this chapter, we will look at friendship through Adler's eyes, as one of the three great tasks of life, and at practical ways of building friendship in adult life.

Friendship as a Life Task

In the last chapter, we saw that Adler described three tasks that every human life must meet: work, friendship and love. He saw friendship as part of the broader task of living in community with others. In his view, friendship was not a luxury or a pleasant extra. It was one of the main ways in which human beings practise cooperation, learn to care about others and find their place in the human community.

Adler believed that the ability to make friends begins in childhood. In What Life Should Mean to You, he wrote about how children learn to cooperate first in the family and then at school, among other children. He saw school friendships as a kind of training for later life, where children learn to share, to take turns, to resolve disagreements and to care about someone outside their own family. Children who find this difficult, he thought, often need encouragement to develop their interest in others.

At the heart of friendship, in Adler's view, is social interest: a real interest in other people and their well-being. Adler once quoted a phrase he liked as a good description of social interest. It spoke of seeing with the eyes of another person, hearing with their ears and feeling with their heart. A good friend does exactly this. They try to understand what life looks like from the other person's side. They notice when the other person is happy or sad. They care about what happens to them.

This idea has an important practical consequence. If friendship is built on interest in others, then the way to make friends is not mainly to become more impressive, more interesting or more popular. It is to become more interested. People who are curious about others, who listen well, who remember what others have told them and who offer help when it is needed tend to form friendships more easily than people who are focused on how they come across.

This connects directly with the theme of this book. A person who seeks approval in friendship asks, "Do they like me? Am I interesting enough? Will they want to see me again?" These questions are understandable, but they put the person's attention on themselves. A person who practises social interest asks, "How is this person? What matters to them? How could I be a good friend to them?" These questions turn attention outward, and they are much more likely to lead to real friendship.

Why Adult Friendship Is Harder

If friendship is so important, why does it become harder in adult life? Part of the reason is simple circumstance. At school, we see the same people every day, often for years, in a shared setting with shared activities. Friendship grows almost by itself from this repeated contact. In adult life, this kind of contact becomes rarer. We work, we move, we form our own families and our time becomes filled with responsibilities.

Many people who think about friendship have observed that adult friendships often grow in a similar way to childhood friendships: through repeated, regular contact over time, especially in a shared activity. A weekly class, a sports team, a choir, a volunteer group or a regular gathering of neighbours can provide this. It is often not one great conversation that creates a friendship, but many small meetings, gradually building trust and familiarity.

Another reason adult friendship is harder is fear. As adults, we may feel embarrassed about wanting new friends, as Kwabena did. We may worry that others already have enough friends and do not want more. We may fear rejection, or fear seeming needy. In Adler's terms, we may become discouraged about the friendship task and start to avoid it, telling ourselves that we are too busy, too shy or too old.

A third reason is that adult friendships often require more intention. At school, friendship happened naturally. As adults, we often have to take the first step: suggest a meeting, send a message, invite someone for a meal. Many people wait for others to take this step, and the others are often waiting too. The result is that potential friendships never begin, not because nobody wants them, but because everyone is waiting.

A fourth reason is that adult life often sorts people into narrow groups. We spend our days with colleagues who do the same work, neighbours of a similar age or parents of children the same age as ours. Friendships across ages, backgrounds and stages of life become rarer. Yet some of the richest friendships are exactly these: a young person and an older neighbour, two parents from very different backgrounds, colleagues from different departments. Being open to friendship with people who are not like us widens the circle of possible friends a great deal.

Understanding these reasons can be a relief. If you find adult friendship difficult, it is not because there is something wrong with you. It is because the circumstances of adult life make friendship harder, and because many people feel the same fears. The good news is that friendship is a task, and tasks can be practised. With courage and a little intention, most people can build new friendships at any age.

Renata in a New Town

Renata is thirty and moved to a new town eight months ago for a job at a small engineering company. She knows almost nobody there. Her colleagues are friendly but mostly older, with families and established lives. In the evenings, she often eats alone and calls her old friends far away. She has started to feel that she made a mistake by moving.

Renata's old friends are kind, but they cannot fill her evenings. She realized that she needed to build a new life where she was, and that this would take effort. She made a decision: for three months, she would try one new regular activity, and she would go every week, even when she did not feel like it.

She chose a community choir that met on Wednesday evenings. The first few weeks were awkward. She did not know anyone, and the other members seemed to have known each other for years. But she kept going. She arrived a few minutes early each week and helped set out the chairs. She asked the woman next to her in the alto section about the music. She stayed for the tea afterwards, even when she felt shy.

By the sixth week, people were greeting her by name. By the tenth, the woman from the alto section, whose name was Ilse, invited her to a small gathering at her home. Renata met several other choir members there, and one of them, a woman about her age, suggested they go for a walk together that weekend. By the end of three months, Renata had two people she could call simply to spend time together, and a group she belonged to every Wednesday.

Renata says the key was not any special skill. It was regular showing up, and a willingness to be useful and interested. "I helped with the chairs," she says, "because I did not know what else to do. But that gave people a way to talk to me. And I asked questions about them, because I genuinely wanted to know. I stopped worrying about whether they liked me and started paying attention to them." This is social interest in practice: friendship built through contribution and curiosity.

Renata also learned something about her old friends. She had worried that building a new life would mean losing them. Instead, she found that she enjoyed their calls more once she was no longer depending on them to fill every lonely evening. She had more to tell them, and she could listen to their news without feeling a pang of envy for the life she had left. Making new friends did not replace the old ones. It gave every friendship a lighter, healthier place in her life.

Sipho and the Friend Who Drifted

Sipho is forty-five. His closest friend since secondary school is a man named Themba. For twenty-five years, they were like brothers. They were at each other's weddings, celebrated each other's children and supported each other through hard times. But in the last three years, they have drifted apart. Themba moved to another part of the country for work, and their phone calls have become rare. When they do speak, the conversation feels stiff.

Sipho has been hurt by this. He feels that Themba has stopped making an effort, and he has started waiting for Themba to call first, as a kind of test. When Themba does not call, Sipho feels confirmed in his hurt. When Themba does call, Sipho is cool and short with him. The friendship is fading, and Sipho is partly helping it to fade.

Sipho's wife pointed this out one evening. "You are waiting for him to prove that he still cares," she said. "Maybe he is waiting for you to do the same." Sipho thought about this. He realized that he had been keeping score: who called last, who visited last, who made the effort. This scorekeeping had turned their friendship from a relationship between equals into a quiet contest.

Sipho decided to stop keeping score. He called Themba and, instead of the usual short conversation, he said honestly, "I miss you. I feel like we have drifted, and I do not want to lose our friendship." There was a silence, and then Themba said, "I have felt the same. I thought you were angry with me for moving." They talked for two hours. Themba explained that his new job had been very stressful, and that he had felt guilty for not keeping in touch. Sipho explained that he had felt hurt and had not known how to say so.

They agreed to speak every two weeks, on Sunday evenings, whatever happened. They also planned a visit for the summer. The friendship is not the same as it was when they lived in the same town, but it is alive again. Sipho says that the most important thing he learned was that friendship cannot be tested; it can only be offered. "I was waiting for him to earn my effort," he says. "But friendship is not a reward. It is a gift you keep giving."

Elif and the Friend Behind the Screen

Elif is nineteen and studies at a technical college. She is shy in person and has found it hard to make friends at college. Over the past year, she has become close to someone she met through an online group for people interested in drawing comics. They message each other almost every day, share their drawings and talk about their lives. Elif feels that this person understands her better than anyone she knows in person.

Elif's parents are a little worried. They wonder whether an online friendship is real, and whether it is keeping Elif from making friends nearby. Elif feels defensive. To her, this friendship is very real. It has given her confidence, encouragement and someone to talk to when she feels low.

From Adler's point of view, what matters most in a friendship is not where it happens, but whether it involves real social interest: genuine care, cooperation and contribution on both sides. Elif's online friendship seems to have these qualities. The two of them encourage each other's drawing, listen to each other's problems and look forward to each other's messages. That is friendship.

At the same time, Elif's online friendship has also helped her with friendships nearby, in an unexpected way. Her online friend encouraged her to join the comic club at her college, which Elif had been too shy to attend. Because she had practised sharing her drawings and talking about them online, she felt a little braver in person. At the club, she met two students who also loved comics, and they now meet for lunch every week.

It is important to add a note of care about online friendships. Most are what they seem, but some people online are not who they say they are, and a few may try to take advantage of others, especially young people. It is wise to be careful about sharing personal information, to be cautious about meeting someone in person and, if a meeting happens, to choose a public place and tell someone you trust. If an online contact ever makes you feel uncomfortable, pressured or frightened, tell a trusted adult or seek help. Elif's online friendship is healthy. But care is always sensible.

Practical Steps: Building Friendship as an Adult

The first step is to let go of the embarrassment. Wanting friends is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that you are human. Adler saw friendship as one of the basic tasks of life, as natural and as important as work and love. Many adults feel exactly as you do, and many of them would welcome a new friend.

The second step is to find a regular shared activity. Choose something that meets weekly or regularly, where you will see the same people again and again: a class, a team, a choir, a volunteer group, a walking group or a club. Go regularly, even when you do not feel like it. Friendships often grow slowly through repeated contact, as Renata found.

The third step is to be useful and interested. In any group, look for small ways to help: setting up chairs, bringing something to share, offering a lift. And show genuine interest in the people you meet. Ask questions, listen to the answers and remember what they tell you. Next time you see them, ask about the thing they mentioned. These small acts of social interest are the foundation of friendship.

The fourth step is to take the first step. Do not wait for others to invite you. Suggest a coffee, a walk or a meal. If someone says no, do not take it as a final rejection. People are busy, and a no today is often a yes another time. If they say yes, you have begun something.

The fifth step is to tend old friendships as well as new ones. Like Sipho, you may have friendships that have drifted but could be revived. Stop keeping score. Reach out honestly, without waiting for the other person to prove that they care. A simple "I miss you" can open a door that has been closed for years.

The sixth step is to be patient. Friendship takes time. It may take months of regular contact before an acquaintance becomes a friend. Do not be discouraged if friendship does not happen quickly. Keep showing up, keep being interested and keep offering yourself. Adler was optimistic that people can develop their social interest at any age. So can you.

More Friends Is Not the Goal

It is worth saying clearly that the aim of this chapter is not to collect as many friends as possible. Some people are happy with a large circle of friends. Others are happiest with one or two close friends. Some people are naturally outgoing, and others are naturally quiet and prefer a small number of deep connections. All of these are healthy ways of meeting the friendship task.

What matters, in Adler's view, is not the number of friends, but the quality of our connection with others: whether we feel that we belong somewhere, whether we care about others and whether we have people who care about us. A quiet person with two close friends and a sense of belonging to their neighbourhood may be meeting the friendship task very well.

Friendship also changes shape over a lifetime, and that is normal. Some friendships are for a season: a colleague during a particular job, a fellow parent while the children are small, a neighbour before one of you moves away. When such a friendship fades, it does not mean it failed. It did its work in its time. Other friendships last for decades. Both kinds have value, and a full life usually includes both.

It is also worth remembering that friendship is only one of the three tasks. A person who has a close family, a fulfilling job and a few good friends does not need to feel that they are failing because they do not have a large social life. Balance across the tasks matters more than success in any one of them.

Finally, if loneliness feels very heavy, lasts a long time or comes with a sense of hopelessness, please talk with someone. A doctor or another qualified professional can help, and so can people you trust. Loneliness is a very human experience, and nobody needs to face it in silence.

A Short Exercise: The Friendship Map

This exercise helps you see the friendships you already have and plan one small step to strengthen them. It takes about twenty minutes.

Take a page and draw a small circle in the middle, with your name in it. Around it, draw a slightly larger circle, and in it write the names of people you feel close to: people you could call if you needed help, or simply wanted company. Around that, draw a third circle, and write the names of people you like and see sometimes but do not yet feel close to: colleagues, neighbours, people from a group, old friends you have lost touch with.

Look at your map. You may find that your inner circle is smaller than you would like, and that your outer circle has more names than you expected. The outer circle is full of possible friendships. Each name there is a person you already know a little.

Choose one or two names from the outer circle, and write one small step you could take toward each of them in the coming two weeks. "Ask Ilse if she would like to walk after choir." "Send Themba a message saying I miss him." "Invite my neighbour for tea." Then, if it fits your life, write one regular activity you could join, where new names might appear on your map.

After a month, draw your map again. Notice whether any names have moved inward. Kwabena did this exercise a week after his birthday. His inner circle had only his mother's name. His outer circle had eleven names, including two old college friends and a colleague named Yaw who often shared his break. Kwabena sent a message to one of the college friends and asked Yaw if he wanted to get food after their next shift. Both said yes. Six months later, he drew the map again. His inner circle had four names. He had also joined a Saturday football group for people with irregular work hours, which Yaw had told him about.

Chapter Summary

Adler saw friendship as part of one of the three great tasks of life: living in community with others. He believed that friendship rests on social interest, which he once described with a phrase about seeing with another's eyes, hearing with their ears and feeling with their heart. Adult friendship is often harder than friendship in youth, because of busy lives, distance and fear, but it can be practised and built at any age through regular contact, contribution and genuine interest in others.

Kwabena on his lonely birthday, Renata in her new town, Sipho and his drifting friend and Elif with her friend behind the screen all found that friendship grows when we stop waiting, stop keeping score and turn our attention outward. The goal is not to collect many friends, but to have a real sense of connection and belonging. If loneliness feels very heavy, it is wise to talk with someone who can help.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the third task of life: love, and how to build a partnership between equals without keeping score.