How to Make More Friends

In one sentence: Learn to Speak, then Learn to Respect.

If everyone knows how to make friends by default, there would be no introvert and extrovert differences; there would not be self-help books telling you "secrets to make friends". There would not be online blogs telling you "the n steps to make friends/rekindle friendship/etc". Making friends and retaining friends is a difficult, effortful job, so let's see how one suggests it works.

What wouldn't work

Being passively waiting for people to come to you wouldn't work. From one's experience, most people prefer to look at their phones than actively reaching out. Those that does the latter are rare. Therefore, if you're passive like everyone else, it's almost impossible to make friends without urges from both parties.

Especially for a used-to-introvert like oneself, passively unwilling to change also wouldn't work; at least it would be either very slow, or not working at all. That is, staying too much inside our comfort zone means less opportunity for people to interact with us. If we want to make friends while we want to keep quiet, sorry, we're almost doomed to not make any friends.

Certainly, some of the stuffs we can keep, especially bottom line. But we certainly have to get out of our comfort zone for some of the sectors. For example, one aren't willing to talk small talk, at least most of the time: on movies, musics, the weather, political stuffs, and especially stuffs that doesn't directly relatable to whom one's talking to. For the first two (movies and music), one don't have a fad on watching them, so one can only listen to others talking (which one's fine, one could always change topic after a while if they prefer to share movies as it relates to them). While the weather, political reasons, etc just aren't applicable. The former, the weather have nothing to do with the other person; and the latter, it doesn't directly relate to the other person (you can argue against, it's okay, but one won't agree.) Plus its not important in one's sense.

And what do we need to change?

Certainly, be more active. Actively reach out to your friends, your past friends, etc. This requires lots of patience, and one really means a lot. There will be friends whom don't reply to you, or they reply one, two, or three messages before they decide not to talk to you again, perhaps they don't have the attention to or for other reasons. These rejections occur more than 90% of the time. And we are to find those that would keep conversing with us, we're successful.

Second, learn how to speak with your friends. For one, one loves to start off with deep questions; and after they're about exhausted, one would goes to speak whatever with a friend. By starting off with something difficult, we get to know more about each other. One recommends the "We Should Get Together" book by Kat Vellos; in the appendix there are a list of "Better Conversation Starters" for deep conversations. Pick the ones you're most interest about and start them. Don't use "How are you?" "How's life?" which are just boring. You could ask "What have you been doing recently that I don't know about?" "What's something you're concerned about for the past few weeks?" etc.

And by all means, conversation starters aren't disposable. As humans change time by time, what we asked last time might be expired now. We could always ask back the same questions every six months on average and get a totally different answer. For example, "what's the last book you've read and how had it helped you? Is it interesting?" asked now and six months later are most probably different, unless they didn't read a single book in the next six months.

And because the other partners most probably won't resonate with how we speak: that is, as an active member, and how almost all self-help books taught, we start conversations by asking questions. And by "non-resonating" one means the other way of how people communicate: they prefer people to speak something up, and expect the other partner to speak around the topic, resonating without them asking. You could try to use your five senses, or just ask directly to your conversation partner, whether they prefer you asking questions or speaking on a topic and they speak about them after you ask "how about you?" (explicitly if possible, implicit is too difficult to catch for people like us whom can't read what's going on and their emotions if the others aren't being explicit enough).

Then prefer to converse on emotions than logical sense. Logical sense aren't designed for conversations: they're designed for debate. And debate aren't designed for keeping a close relationship: they keep a shallow easily-breakable weak-link relationship. Why do one prefer NOT to text but to physically meet, followed by video call followed by voice call? Learn how to listen to emotions. Most probably your sense would know how emotions works, unless you're extremely psychopathic, when you demolish more barriers to communication. Text message only shows what they text, which is just not useful at all. They are designed to determine a time to voice/video call or physically meet up. For one, one need to see the other person to determine whether one have spoken something wrong.

And is that the end?

Nope, of course not. Even those paragraphs above doesn't include everything one could speak about when making friends. It took one a few years to learn; but if you're willing to go for physiology or maybe someone helping you, you could decrease it to a few years. And one is still learning how to make friends with each other.

For example, there are lots of books that speak about couples. By no means those books exist just for couples, because a relationship, platonic or not, the book will also help (perhaps except for the "healthy sex" section of the book). A couple is a really good friend, perhaps closer than most other friends. Hence, these books are really just friendship help books, not couple help books. Use what you learn from the "deemed couple-help books" on your friendship and it would improve.

For example, there's a section called "Respect" in The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship by Mark Goulston; and reading the chapter one feels that one might have not respect one's friends in the past, in some minute sectors. Exactly speaking, it reminds me of what sections one thought was respectful but actually wasn't. These are what one are shocked with:

• letting others take advantage of you

• lack of courage

• lack of ambition

• giving up too easily

• self-indulgent behavior

• childishness and immaturity

• incompetence

And these are what one ever meet from others:

• breaking promises.

• dishonesty in business or personal affairs.

• avoiding challenges or difficult issues.

• having to be right at all costs.

• blaming others when things go wrong.

• complaining without trying to solve the problem.

As usual, one can't see oneself properly. One can view some disrespect from oneself, but one can't see everything, so it depends on others to point it out to me. And for the complete list, check out page 108-109 of the book.

One just read this chapter, which is the second pillar of the six pillars; so one still have lots to learn.

Conclusion

Making new friends and rekindling friendship have to be active. Passive almost never leads to a thing; at least the time when one got passively reached out is rare compared to how much (uncountable?) people one reached out to. One wouldn't say one is experienced; one is still new, on the road to learn more. And one doubt one would know exactly how to make new friends perfectly, nor how to rekindle a friendship properly, even in the decades to come. It's a continuous learning journey, and one wish you best of luck!

Even after a long time, there would be things that doesn't meet your expectations. Easier said than done!

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References

• We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos

• The Six Secrets of a Lasting Relationship by Mark Goulston.

• One's previous experiences.