The Secret To Making Best Friends As An Adult (Even If Everyone Is Busy AF)

August 5, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Secret To Making Best Friends As An Adult

Anna Goldfarb, the New York Times friendship correspondent and author of Modern Friendship, has spent nearly a decade studying why so many adults feel disoriented in their social lives. The core problem, she argues, is that the strategies people learned for making and keeping friends no longer work. "Nobody knows what they're doing," she says. We're living in a "hyperfluid society" where people move more, marry later, parent more intensively, and expect far more from friendships than previous generations did. The old approach—just liking someone and hoping affection carries the relationship—isn't enough.

Every Friendship Needs an "About"

Goldfarb's central insight is that friendships require a purpose outside of the people themselves. She developed this framework from communications researcher Jeffrey A. Hall, who found that it takes roughly 200 hours of shared activities to go from stranger to best friend. For busy adults, that's an enormous investment. The question becomes: who do you spend that time with, and why?

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **The Core Problem with Modern Friendship** - Anna Goldfarb introduces the central idea that people are disoriented because their old friendship strategies don't work in today's busy, complex world.
2 (05:32) **The "About" Framework: Why Affection Isn't Enough** - Anna explains her core discovery: every friendship needs a shared purpose or activity outside of the two people.
3 (12:28) **Negotiating and Rebuilding "About" in Existing Friendships** - Anna explains how to diagnose and fix a lackluster friendship by consciously creating a new shared interest.
4 (16:44) **The Two Types of Friendships: Memorial vs. Active** - Anna introduces the distinction between high-affection/low-contact memorial friendships and high-communication active friendships.
5 (21:00) **Modern Obstacles: Parenting, Privacy, and Technology** - Anna identifies key societal shifts that strain friendships, including increased parenting time and the decline of neighborly interdependence.
6 (23:02) **Three Actionable Tips to Be a Better Friend** - Anna offers concrete, immediately usable behaviors to improve friendship quality.
7 (25:32) **The Power of Clarity and Tiers** - Anna explains the emotional impact of identifying and communicating your friendship tiers.

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Show Notes

Resharing this popular episode you all loved. It contains this paradigm shift when it comes to how we view friendships. It is a huge unlock that completely changed how I approached building and maintaining friendships in my own life.

My expert guest is Anna Goldfarb, a journalist, author, speaker, and friendship explainer. She dives into the challenges facing friends these days, the most important qualities to making new friendships and deepening old ones, and how to find the most fulfillment in your friendships.

🎧 What you’ll learn:

• The ideal number of friends to have, according to science

• Exactly what the three Ds are and why you need all of them for a successful friendship

• The challenges that make friendship SO much more difficult now than it was for our grandparents

• Exactly what an “about” is, how to find one, and why it is so crucial to lasting friendships

• The differences between memorial and active friendships, and how to treat both

• Small, simple, and specific ways to be a better friend

• How to successfully reach out to potential new friend (and what NOT to say)

• How to identify and navigate a toxic friendship

• How to navigate political differences within friendships

• Why men are so lonely and how women can help

For more from Anna Goldfarb:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annagoldfarb

• Website:www.annagoldfarb.com

• Book, Modern Friendship: https://annagoldfarb.com/modern-friendship

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