How do I create meaningful friendships?

“I want to have friends.” Many of my young clients struggle with making meaningful friendships. I don’t believe this is exclusively a young person challenge but a human challenge. Sometimes I believe making new friends gets even more difficult the older we get. In many ways, making friends seemed easier when I was younger. I believe some of the reasons may be due to having social structures built into my schedule (e.g., school, team sports, etc.) that put me in close proximity with people in similar seasons of life. This is the most evident when college kids experience the dorm life. When people who are similar in age and purpose happen to live next-door to each other, it almost seems like this inevitable magic occurs and friendships just happen! Then we grow up and get these things called jobs and careers. The pool of people suddenly shrinks and there are many people in different stages of life working in the same place. It feels like the chances of finding your “tribe” of people drastically decreases. For some people, their jobs have little to no human interactions like remote work. The challenge is even more evident and it is easy to feel lonely. 

For other people, they have opportunities to meet new people. The problem is more about meeting your kind of people. You may set up social gatherings and talk with them but there is some invisible barrier where the relationship seems to stay at a superficial level. What do you do then?

In my office, some of my clients asked me these difficult questions about how to overcome loneliness and have meaningful relationships. Quite frankly, I believe that is a very healthy and normal desire. People were created to be in relationships and community. In the advent of social media, there is this illusion that people are connected more than ever. People can have friends across the country and meet people internationally who they would never would have met without the internet. Yet people still feel strangely alone because social media does not necessarily create the relational depth that people are looking for.

There are two important ingredients that go into creating meaningful interactions in friendships:

1.     Being curious about the essence of a person.

Often people think about this category of interactions first when getting to know someone. Facts. “Who is this person and what are they about?” The more unconscious question may be “Who is this person and are they similar to me?” On some level, we may not really care a whole lot about the other person. Shockingly selfish but true. On some more primal level, we are wondering how this person will benefit us if we were to build a relationship. Now with that awkward mindset put on the table, an additional mindset may be to ask the question “Who is this person and what makes them special?” This is a more curious perspective where we genuinely want to know people for the sake of knowing people. Why? Because people inherently have value. Everyone brings something beautiful and unique to the table. Find out the essence of that person! People can start off by talking about normal stuff like the weather, sports, or any other topic that is readily available. Then continue to stay curious about their interests, passions, and the things that use up most of their time and energy. By shifting away from business-like, transactional “what-can-you-do-for-me?” attitude, we can actually learn to enjoy getting to know them with no strings attached. When there is ulterior agenda as the main source of the interaction, people unconsciously feel that vibe and the whole interaction feels disingenuous.

2.     Create shared experiences.

People may know every fact under the sun about someone but not truly know who they are. That is because a relationship supersedes information. Sure, you need to have some working information about a person to build upon the relationship but it is really the shared experiences that bring that information to life. Sometimes people joke that girls deepen their relationship through talking but all guys need is to play basketball. In some ways, they are both correct! There is something beautiful about creating a memory together with another person and that is forever a shared experience that is uniquely theirs! That is partially why parents set up play dates for their kids because shared experiences deepen relationships. 

Paradoxically, negative experience can sometimes deepen relationships even more strongly than positive experiences. This often occurs when soldiers going through war together. I remember going through my Army Boot Camp experience and feeling so close to these fellow soldiers in my platoon even though we just met a few weeks ago! There is this deeper understanding that we “get one another” because we both went through these hardships and “those civilians just wouldn’t get it.” 

In short, incorporating both personal information and shared experiences create opportunities for meaningful friendships. One without the other just does not work! From that standpoint, think of ways you can learn and share information while doing something together! For more entries like this, please visit me on my blog.