a playbook for how to make friends as an adult

plus, the [embarrassing] story I told Gary Janetti IRL on Friday night

hi, lovers!

for starters, congratulations to all the Eagles fans in our midst. I was super bummed the Bills didn’t make it to the Super Bowl, but I watched the entire game anyway. aside from A.J. Brown Reading 'Inner Excellence' on the Bench After His Super Bowl TD, not much caught my eye. well, besides Dunkin’s commercial featuring Bill Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend with whom he shares a 48-year age gap.

can someone who works in advertising please explain to me why we would be glorifying this relationship with prime-time coverage?? very, very bizarre for a brand I perceive aims to be built on approachability for the average American consumer. I’m decidedly NOT a fan.

Super Bowl aside, yayyyy for this week being Valentine’s! I love any excuse to wear my proverbial rose-colored glasses, don pink, and, of course, eat cake for dinner. speaking of…if you saw me earlier this week at Magnolia ordering my go-to slice of chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream dusted in heart-shaped sprinkles, no, you didn’t…

(you certainly did)

[2.9.25] cupcake-sized bits and bobs

• my post-grad realization about adult friendship

• paid subscriber exclusive: a playbook for how to make friends as an adult

• paid subscriber exclusive: the [embarrassing] story I told Gary Janetti IRL on Friday night

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last night, as I sat at a galentine’s celebration in Williamsburg hosted by my (new!) friend,

Hannah Orenstein

, I found myself marveling at just how I’d gotten here. the ‘here’ being a room full of creative and inspiring women who, even a year ago, I would have been incredibly intimidated to meet. yet I RSVPed anyway, fully knowing that aside from the host, everyone in the room would be someone I had yet to meet.

so, on a snowy Saturday night, I trekked in four-inch platforms from Manhattan to Brooklyn to throw myself into meeting a new-to-me group of women, certain that as hard as it would be to walk in with confidence (I find scenarios where I’m meeting potential new friends as even more intimidating than first dates!), I’d leave feeling fulfilled from having put myself out there. and for some context on where my social battery was in case you missed my Instagram Stories, this was coming off back-to-back events the night prior, plus a baby shower earlier that afternoon. I share this all because it’s context that’s relevant as I reach my final points below: to make—much less to keep—adult friends requires an enormous amount of energy expended. but the thing is, that energy comes back to you in droves.

earlier in the afternoon, I took the train up to Westchester to celebrate my dearest college friend, Elysse, who gave birth (just nine days ago!!!!) a whole NINE weeks early to her second child. twelve years prior, our friendship came into my life in the most intense and serendipitous way during a semester spent studying abroad together. we’d never met before we wound up in La Rochelle, France, despite going to the same college, but we quickly became absolutely inseparable for five straight months before coming back to campus, where we were neighbors the following year.

but the thing is, with the exception of Lizzie, I really didn’t find ‘my people’ in college. I wasn’t in a sorority and didn’t walk away from graduation with a tribe that would transcend me navigating my twenties. the friendships that felt so fun in my early college years in the dorms faded from both lack of proximity now that we lived in different cities and our paths/priorities diverging.

by the time I wound up in New York at twenty-four, I didn’t have a crew to assemble in a group text for birthdays, concerts, and girls’ nights out. I remember spending a lot of my free time alone, deeply craving community. I was just settling (stumbling?) into city life, and it was HARD. all I wanted was a group of girlfriends to go through it with, but instead, I had disparate pockets of friends stemming from various parts of my life—work, running, my hometown—yet none of them knew each other. everything felt so fragmented, and I wasn’t sure how to move forward with forging a true friend group.

the loneliness I felt during those early years of city life still makes my heart feel tender. I remember walking down 3rd Avenue (oh, my Murray Hill days!!!!), seeing groups of girls out to brunch, and so desperately wanting to be at those tables. I was resentful that I’d arrived in the city without a pre-packaged group of college girls who I could rally to hang. I longed for a crew not just to go out with but to share the familiar comforts of rotting on the couch in sweats with bagels in hand after a post-mortem, the way we used to have ‘the morning after’ sessions in college. I wanted the chaos and dysfunction of the friendships I saw on the screen, like those of TV shows like Girls, despite how toxic Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna (Sosh!) were…I think I wanted something that may not have been real to begin with.

but what I didn’t yet realize was that the rules of making and keeping adult friends were different than they were in college. it was going to take a lot more effort—and patience—to find my people.

I recently listened to Mel Robbins’ The Let Them Theory and was particularly moved by the chapter dedicated to adult friendship. in it, she touches on how, for the first twenty or so years of our lives, friendships are cultivated through the sheer momentum of doing so many activities alongside our peers: we play sports, we go to class, and maybe we even go to summer camp together. and that’s all before we get shipped off to university, where we fall seamlessly into friend groups that are quite literally thrust upon us if not from living in cramped quarters, then from the necessity to survive what can feel like a social experiment.

but where the book really gets good is when it begins to examine how to tackle making meaningful friendships as an adult. much of Mel’s advice mirrors my lived experience dating back to when I was floundering to foster community beyond my professional circle. after stumbling my way through those years, I’ve softly landed at what now feels like the most fulfilled friendship era of my life at 31 years old. so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned these past seven years living in the city and assembling a wide group of women around me who deeply enrich my life in every way imaginable.

"Some of the most favorite people that you will meet in your lifetime are people you haven't met yet" —Mel Robbins

my playbook for how to make friends as an adult

• put yourself in interesting rooms. sign up for email newsletters run by the local businesses in your area to learn about events happening at your library, the community arts center, and museums. then actually GO to them when there’s a panel discussion, talkback, or book signing! muster the courage to attend solo, and in the process, you’ll be surrounded by like-minded people who are so much more open to meeting a new friend than you would ever believe.