Don’t Let Your Friendships Get Stale

Learn to really listen to your friends.

Friendships are some of the easiest relationships to neglect. Part of what makes friendships wonderful is also what makes them fleeting: they are voluntary. But that doesn’t make them any less significant. So you may need to be purposeful about maintaining the friendships you already have, and about creating new friendships.

One of the most common questions I hear is: How many friends do I need?

Unfortunately, we can’t answer this question for you! People are just too different. You may feel at your best with two close friends, or you may feel at your best with a whole host of friends that you share different activities with and invite over for large gatherings.

Depending on which stage of life you’re in and whether you are more of an introvert or an extravert, you may find yourself needing different things.

You might start looking toward causes and activities that you care about and developing new friends and communities around those. To discover what is best and most fulfilling for you will take some self-reflection. But here are some things to think about regarding the friends in your life.

Friendships can suffer from some of the same things that family relationships suffer from: chronic conflict, boredom, absence of curiosity, failure to pay attention. Learn to really listen to your friends.

Listening does as much for the listener as for the person being listened to. Truly absorbing the experience of another person encourages both the listener and the speaker to “unfold,” to emerge from our shells, and our lives are often richer for it.

We all have sensitive spots in our lives that make navigating the most intimate conversations more difficult, but the rewards are worth the effort. Being listened to makes us feel understood, cared for, and seen.

You may find that simply being there for a friend and listening creates an environment in which you yourself are seen and heard . . . but you have to be brave enough to give your friends something to listen to.

It’s also often the case in friendships that one person is more likely to listen, and the other more likely to talk. Figure out which one you are; there might be opportunities to balance things out. The strongest friendships flow both ways.

Consider the rifts in your life. Friendships can cause us hurt that we harbor for a long time. But rifts between friends don’t have to be permanent. Sometimes all it takes is a simple apology, or an olive branch—a kind text message, an offer to buy lunch, a quick birthday call—to repair a wound from the past. Sometimes we might righteously protect that sense of injury more tenaciously than we ever protected the friendship itself. Letting grudges go can free us from that burden.

Finally, think about your social routines. We often fall into routines that get stale with the friends we see most frequently. We talk about the same types of things, the same troubles, over and over. Is there more you would like from a particular friend? Is there more you can give? Perhaps there is more you want to know about that friend or their past. Or something new that the two of you could explore together.

Old social habits are hard to change, and we all have certain psychological barriers, like shyness or aversion to groups, that make changing our social circumstances difficult. But the effort it takes to transform your life is worth it. I encourage you to start by taking that first step with just one person.

Adapted from Waldinger & Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Click here to buy “The Good Life” from Amazon.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Visit my website for resources and updates.