Good news: You don't have to work so hard to make friends
Ellen Hendriksen
How to Be Good to Yourself When You’re Hard on Yourself
Good news: You don't have to work so hard to make friendsFour circumstances that do the heavy lifting for you
📢📢📢 ANNOUNCEMENT! A change is coming, but everything will stay the same! (Um, Ellen? That’s not how that works…) But it is! I’m turning on Substack’s paid subscriptions feature because the platform favors publications that use it, but everything will stay FREE! 🎉🎉🎉 No tiers, no locked posts, no “subscribers only” versions. Nothing disappears behind a wall. Think of it as a “buy me a coffee” or a tip jar. ☕️ All the content, none of the gates! Just a community that helps chip in. Either way, ultimately, your readership is what matters most to me! 📢📢📢 💬💬💬 With that, here is this week’s COMMUNITY CHAT topic: What's a “place” in your life that generated a friendship you treasure? 💬💬💬 And now, on to the newsletter! Hello dear readers! How do we make friends? Conventional wisdom says we have to share an interest. Wanna go birding? Wanna play DND? Wanna keep our toddlers from eating mulch at the playground together? Shared interests can absolutely work as a foundation of friendship. But this often means logistical labor: having to initiate, plan, and follow-through each time you get together to share the aforementioned interest. An early-stage potential friendship can wither due to an overlooked text, a busy schedule, a last-minute cancellation, and so many other perilous points.
Four scenarios can help. All of them accelerate the friendship process by removing the logistical labor. (Big asterisk: I don’t offer the following four scenarios as timesaving “hacks”—the point of building a friendship is savoring time together, not saving it.) But given all that, let’s reflect on four specific situations that organically act as friendship accelerators. Repetition.A classic study from 1950 debunked that era’s prevailing notion that friends were drawn together by some kind of mystical, Freudian vibing of the childhood unconscious. Instead, people in the study were friends because they lived close together and therefore crossed paths often. Repetition was the magic ingredient. It seems too simple, but repeated interaction—seeing each other again and again and again—lays the foundation of many friendships. That means any place that features some unstructured time over repeated interactions with familiar faces lays fertile ground from which friendships can sprout: book clubs, choral groups, school pickup (provided people get out of their cars), saying good morning at every cubicle at work, even reading on your front porch with a cup of coffee on Saturday mornings and letting the neighborhood roll by and say hi.
Immersion.This past weekend, my kids went on a 3-night trip with their school’s hiking club. There were 30 kids total. Some of them knew each other from sports teams or shared classes, but overall, it was an exercise in social cross-pollination. Over the four days, they hiked together, cooked together, bunked together, and problem-solved everything from food storage (“Why did we bring two liters of honey?”) to weather challenges (snow in June!) They emerged from the trip a more cohesive overall group, of course, but also with new or closer subgroups. Social life accelerates when you’re making brownies for thirty people or playing Spades while sheltering during a freak summer hailstorm. None of these interactions would have happened in the context of a regular school year, despite the repetition of seeing each other in classes or activities. For those of us who are no longer in high school, immersive situations can be harder to come by without paying big bucks for, say, a yoga retreat or a language immersion weekend, but they exist: religious retreats, community theater productions, a choir that goes on tour, volunteer work weekends. Any situation where you work and eat together with unstructured downtime built in (Spades, anyone?) will do the trick.
High obligation.Everyone is tired these days. We’re all trying to lighten our load. But sometimes “no pressure!” leaves us with no plans. High obligation means gatherings where attendance is expected, not optional. It’s the opposite of drop-in. If you have to send a text explaining why you’re not going to be there, it’s a high obligation activity. Examples include string quartet practice, a garage band, a standing 5K training run with one buddy, or a four-person book club. Why does this work? Obligation bakes in the repetition that even well-meaning adults otherwise struggle to maintain.
Get adopted by a connector.This friendship accelerator is a different flavor: it’s not an activity, per se—it’s more of a circumstance. Malcolm Gladwell coined the concept of “Connectors” in his 2000 book, The Tipping Point. Gladwell meant “connection” more in the sense of propagating trends, but it also applies in the social sense. People who are connectors are natural social hubs—people who seem to know everyone. Oftentimes they’re extroverts, but not always. For example, there’s a woman named Marissa at my gym who is both an extrovert and a connector. She chats with everyone and, crucially, introduces everyone to each other. It’s just how she operates. Several years ago, Marissa started a six-woman gym group chat that accelerated my friendships with the individual women in the group. If not for her, these friends would have remained acquaintances (who have their own value, don’t get me wrong!) We can’t engineer getting swept into the path of a connector, but when it falls in your lap, it’s gold. Take it and run with it.
To wrap up, remember when the pandemic was dubbed a relationship accelerator for couples? Circumstances compressed the time in which couples fell in love or fell apart. No one wants an equivalent deadly global accelerator for friendship, but thankfully the four alternatives we just covered exist. Indeed, more labor isn’t always the key to solidifying friendships; sometimes a set of circumstances can do the heavy lifting for you. Be good to others and yourself!
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© 2026 Ellen Hendriksen
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