Why making friends becomes harder as we grow older

By  Daisy Okoti

Research & Impact Editor

Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

• A chance conversation with a stranger on a Nairobi electric bus offered a reminder about the simplicity of making friends. 
• Unlike children, adults often overthink friendship, assessing risks and waiting for the perfect opportunity to connect. 

On Friday, I had what I thought would be a regular ride home from work, in one of those plush electric buses in Nairobi that make you feel like the chosen one. The seats are clean and new, the legroom generous, and the aisles are designed in a way that suggests the people who made these buses expected actual human beings to use them.

There is also something about being in an electric bus. Everyone looks and sounds polished. Every time I use one, I feel like there was an inspection at the door and only clean, non-sweaty people were allowed in.

I settled on a seat next to a young woman who was on the phone. As usual, I connected my earphones to catch up on all the reels and video messages from my friends. But my seatmate tapped me to ask if I knew a certain bus station.

I told her I would show her because I was also alighting there. She thanked me and we continued talking about the bus and how quickly it was filling up. I disconnected my earphones, and paused my videos to fully concentrate on the conversation.

When the bus conductor was moving around collecting fare, he announced that anyone with an extra bag should inform him. She asked me why that was; I told her it was because people with big bags are charged extra. She whispered that she had a bag on the aisle but would not say it because she did not see the point of being charged extra. We giggled together and effectively, that became our first secret. We continued chatting and only got interrupted by phone calls from her hosts who needed to know how far she was on the trip.

She pulled out a perfume from her bag. She told me she had just bought it before catching the bus. She also told me about the perfume brands she uses and why. I found out that the last one she bought had extremely different packaging and she was worried that she had bought a fake one. By this time, we were talking like lifelong friends.

She opened the new perfume and we both had a moment when we thought the bottle was empty because the perfume bottle was so clear and so full, it was difficult to make out the content inside. She sprayed some of it on the back of my palm and asked for my opinion of the scent. When I said I liked it, she said I could take a picture and try it out.

I had moments when I worried that I was listening to too many details from someone I had just met. But our conversation was flowing and I decided not to overthink it. What struck me later was how easily the friendship could have happened if we had been children.

By the time the vehicle stopped at our destination and we disembarked, I felt genuinely sad that we were parting ways already. It was the kind of sad goodbye you feel when a close friend whose company you really enjoy goes away. Had the trip been anything more than an hour, we would probably have become friends and exchanged numbers.

That interaction left me thinking about the things we complicate as adults such as making friends. There is a theory that the older we get the harder it is to make friends. But is that true, or do we just make things unnecessarily complicated? Think back to your closest friends – whether it is a best friend or a lifelong friend. How did you become friends? I am not sure there was any grand gesture from either party.

It is difficult for me to trace the beginning of any of my close friendships because of how ordinary they all seemed at first. For some, it was a movie we both liked, others it was having food containers that had the same colours. For yet another, it was merely sitting next to each other, like it happened with the young woman I sat next to in a matatu on my way home.

My conclusion is that as children, friendship was something we allowed to happen. As adults, we seem to think it must be deliberately engineered. We assess people, calculate risk, worry about rejection and wait for the “right” setting. Perhaps we should simply start talking to people again.