How do you make friends? It’s a simple question with a terrifying edge to it, the unspoken assumption being that if you start to tease your technique apart, you might realise that you don’t actually have one. What if every friend you’ve ever made was just luck, happenstance, right-place-right-time, engineered by other, more naturally sociable people into whose orbits you somehow blundered? What if overthinking it ruins your ability to actually do it, like public speaking or tightrope walking? What if friends – or your friends, anyway – are a non-renewable resource?
These are questions that have elbowed their way into my brain every so often for the past couple of decades because, like many men, I’m not a natural at making friends. In my teens, I mostly stuck with the chums I’d bonded with while painting tiny figurines at school; at university, the new ones came from juggling and jiujitsu clubs. In my 20s, additions to my social circle came mostly from external pressure: one of my existing pals would squeeze me together with other acquaintances over a long enough timeline for awkward conversations to fossilise into friendships. And so it went.
