Ssempijja Charles (Charz)

As a child, friendship was a simple transaction, often brokered by our parents in the market, waiting at the hospital, literally anywhere. While my mum chatted with another, I’d be standing next to her child. A shy glance, a shared moment of boredom, and then the question: "Mum, can I go play with them?" Friendship was a five-minute negotiation, built on the simple, foundation of being in the same place at the same time.

Later, in secondary school and university, the formula was much the same. Our friends were the people we were assigned to sit next to, the ones in our dormitory, the faces we saw every single day. Friendship was a byproduct of forced proximity, a contract signed in the shared language of classes, exams, and youthful rebellion. It was a conveyor belt, and it delivered people to your doorstep, fully formed and ready for connection.

Then, you graduate. The conveyor belt stops. And you find yourself in the quiet, unnerving wilderness of adult life, asking a question that once felt impossibly simple: Where do you even start?

The Adult Desert

Making friends as an adult feels like trying to solve an equation where all the variables are missing. The old methods don't just fail; they feel alien. Do you walk up to someone in a café and introduce yourself? The thought alone feels bizarre, almost transgressive. The social scripts that served us as children have expired, and no one gave us the new ones.

The common advice is to "try new activities." Join a book club, a hiking group, a pottery class (or honestly go to a bar). You have probabbly been told to put yourself "out there." But as many of us have discovered, this rarely works. Sociologists have long understood why: friendship isn't forged in a single, planned event. It requires two crucial ingredients that adulthood systematically strips away: repeated, unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.

A weekly pottery class is too structured. You see people, but you don't encounter them in the organic, repetitive way you did in school. You share a hobby, but you rarely share the kind of unguarded moments where real connection takes root. Everyone is busy, guarded, and on a schedule.

Compounding this is the great, defining feature of our generation: transience. In cities full of ambition and opportunity, connection often feels temporary by design. Everyone you’re trying to build a friendship with is the same person who is moving to a new country or city next year for a job. We are a generation in constant motion, chasing careers across continents. Friendships begin to feel like leases, with a built-in expiration date. It makes the act of investing in someone feel like a high-risk, low-return gamble.

Is it a situationship?

This struggle has to a large extent contributed to the growth of "situationships" which are half romantic half platonic 💯 confusing. We often ask why our romantic lives are filled with so many dead talking stages and "situationships" that never become relationships. The answer is the same.

The same fear of investing in someone who might leave, the same lack of deep, vulnerable connection, the same hyper-awareness of time and effort—it all applies to friendship. We are living in an era of the platonic situationship.

It’s the person you text memes to but never see. It’s the colleague you always say "we should grab a drink sometime" to, and you both know you never will. It's the collection of low-stakes, low-effort connections that provide the illusion of a social life without the risk of genuine intimacy. We keep things shallow because shallow doesn't hurt when it ends. We hedge our emotional bets, forgetting that friendship, like love, requires a leap of faith.

We are all walking around, lonely but terrified of the effort required to be less so. We want the community of the village, but we live the lives of isolated nomads. We want the roots, but we are addicted to the freedom of being able to leave.

So where do we go from here? There is no easy answer, no five-step guide to reclaiming the effortless connections of our childhood. Perhaps the first step is simply to acknowledge the quiet tragedy of it all. To admit that it's hard, and it's not our fault. Adult friendship isn’t a passive thing you fall into; it’s a conscious, often difficult, choice. It’s an act of deliberate creation, of choosing to be vulnerable in a world that encourages us to be guarded, of choosing to plant roots in soil that is constantly shifting beneath our feet. It's quieter, slower, and much, much harder than asking your mum if you can go play. But it’s a choice we must keep making.