You Probably Already Know Someone Who Knows Your Next Best Friend
birds of a feather flock together; sometimes they get vegan ice cream together too
I love the story of how my friends AJ and Allie met.
AJ had just moved into my ten-person co-op house, and Allie lived down the street. Halloween was approaching, and they ended up in a line of costumed people waiting for vegan ice cream.
One of those people had a really, really in-poor-taste costume.
Allie, who has never been particularly interested in silently letting nonsense slide, told the guy off while waiting for her matcha white chocolate chip coconut-based ice cream. AJ immediately backed her up.
Two babies, two marriages, a couple of businesses, several houses, and many years later, they're still extremely close friends. Apparently, objecting to the same terrible Halloween costume is a pretty good place to start.
But there was something else they had in common before they ever got in that line: me.
I would love to take credit for cleverly arranging this friendship, but I absolutely did not. Both of them had independently become close to me, though, which meant it wasn't such a wild coincidence that they liked each other. Some of the things I loved about each of them were things they could appreciate in each other, too.
Including, as it turned out, a willingness to interrupt the purchase of non-dairy frozen desserts to tell someone off.
Your friends probably know some people you'd really like
There's a social-science term for our tendency to form relationships with people who are similar to us: homophily. Those similarities can include things like age, background, and occupation, but also humor, values, interests, and what kinds of behavior we find completely intolerable.
Think about someone you really like. Whatever drew you to them might also have something to do with who else they spend time with. Your very curious friend may know other people who ask good questions; the friend who appreciates your weird sense of humor may have some other wonderfully weird people to introduce you to.
Of course, you won't love every person your friends love. We've all met a beloved friend's inexplicable other friend and thought, “Huh. Fascinating.”
Still, knowing that someone you like enjoys this person's company gives you a reason to be curious. You already have at least one person in common who you both think is great. That's something to work with.
And yet, it's easy to treat “my friend's friend” as a permanent category. You'll have a great conversation at someone's birthday, be delighted to see each other at their next party, and then wait another six months for your mutual friend to organize something.
At some point, you are allowed to hang out without the person who introduced you. They don't have to keep having birthdays for you to see each other.
You might not be starting from scratch
A lot of people who come to a Skip the Small Talk are figuring out how to build a social life after something changed. They've moved, their friends have moved, or a relationship ended and took a surprising amount of their social life with it. Sometimes nothing especially dramatic happened; seeing people just got harder until they realized they weren't doing much of it anymore.
When you want more friends, it's understandable to look for somewhere completely new to meet them. Joining a community or walking into an event where you know nobody can absolutely help. Talking to strangers is kind of our whole deal.
But it's also worth thinking about the people you already sort of know. There's the funny coworker your friend brought to dinner, or the person you always end up talking to at group hangs. Maybe somebody has been telling you for years that you'd love their cousin, and neither of you has ever done anything with that information.
These people can be easy to overlook exactly because they've become familiar. You've already decided who they are in relation to you: someone's coworker, someone's cousin, the person you see at parties. It might not occur to you to find out what spending an afternoon together would be like.
And they can bring people and experiences into your life that your closest friends can't. A close friend group tends to have a lot of overlap-- everyone knows everyone, and everyone has heard about the breakup from 2019. Someone you know less well has a whole social life you haven't met yet.
You don't need to think of every acquaintance as a potential best friend. It's just worth noticing when you already enjoy someone's company and the main thing keeping you from spending more time together is that neither of you has asked.Weak ties are where a lot of life happens
One reason friends-of-friends can be so valuable is that they often occupy a useful middle ground between strangers and close friends.
You have some context for who they are, but you don’t know everything about them yet.
They can introduce you to different people, different activities, different jobs, different neighborhoods, different restaurants, different communities, different ways of thinking.
Your closest friends are deeply important, but close friend groups can also become fairly overlapping worlds. Everybody knows everybody. By now, everyone has heard the same stories. Chances are, the whole group knows who dated whom in 2019.
People on the edges of your social network can open doors into entirely different networks.
And sometimes all it takes to turn a weak connection into an actual friendship is spending enough time together for both of you to realize, Oh wait. I really like this person.
That sounds obvious, but a surprising number of potentially great friendships never get past acquaintancehood because nobody takes the tiny social risk of moving things forward.
How to get past “see you at the next thing!”
Follow up with the person you keep enjoying. If you always end up talking to the same person at your friend's dinners, take that as useful information. There's no requirement to keep gathering evidence for another year before you invite them to coffee.
You can say, “I always love talking to you at these things. Want to hang out sometime next week?” Or, if they've mentioned something you'd also like to do, suggest doing it together.
This can feel more vulnerable than letting the mutual friend keep arranging everything. Asking means admitting you'd like to see them, and then waiting to find out whether they want that too. But a good conversation gives you a reasonable basis for asking, even if it doesn't guarantee a yes.
Let your friends know you’d like introductions. “Do you know anyone you think I'd get along with?” is a totally reasonable question to ask a friend. It can also feel like you're announcing that you have failed to acquire the socially acceptable number of friends and now require assistance.
You haven't. People move, schedules change, and wanting more company is a pretty ordinary thing to want.
Your friends may already have someone in mind, especially if they've said, “Oh, you'd love my friend...” and then gone back to whatever you were talking about. Next time, you can ask to actually meet that person. A casual invitation to join the two of you for something gives everyone a way to follow through.
Having a mutual friend can make the introduction feel easier, too. Instead of knowing nothing about each other, you get to start with, “Jamie thought we'd get along. I'd be curious to find out why.”
Help your own friends meet each other. You probably also know people who would like each other and just haven't ended up in the same vegan ice cream line yet.
Try inviting friends from different parts of your life to the same gathering, or tell someone why you think they'd enjoy a particular friend of yours. “You both have very strong opinions about this” can be plenty of reason to introduce people.
If you're offering a one-on-one introduction, check that both people are interested first. Then give them something to go on: “Priya, this is the friend I told you about who's also trying to visit every bookstore in the city.” That's easier to respond to than being deposited into a group chat with a stranger and instructed to become friends.
A thing I find reassuring about all this
When you're lonely, it's easy to look at people with busy social lives and wonder what they have that you don't. Even if you already have friends, you can start treating the fact that you want more connection as evidence that you're somehow bad at it.
But the people you like who already choose to spend time with you are worth remembering here. You find them funny, interesting, or thoughtful, and they also get something out of knowing you. It can be surprisingly easy to leave that second part out when you're assessing your own social appeal.
This is part of why I keep coming back to the psychology of friendship and the possibilities in talking to people we don't know well. There are things we can try without first becoming a completely different, impossibly charming person.
AJ and Allie still had to get to know each other after that ice cream line. Having me in common didn't do that part for them. But I love that two people I already thought were great got to discover that about each other, and then kept choosing to spend time together for years.
What I like about this is that even one person you love can be a starting point for meeting more people you'd love. Your social life can feel small while still being connected to all these people you haven't gotten to know yet. And some of them might be just as glad as you are to have someone new to get ice cream with.