Make a Friend Day

What the day is

Make a Friend Day is observed on February 11. The instruction is to make one new friend, or to take one step toward it, which for most adults is a larger request than it sounds.

Its position on the calendar is pointed. It sits three days before Valentine's Day, in a week otherwise given over entirely to romantic relationships, and quietly suggests that the other kind matters too.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, and no founder or sponsoring organization is reliably known.

What research on adult friendship does suggest is that the difficulty is structural rather than personal. Friendships form most readily under three conditions: repeated unplanned contact, shared activity, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down. School, university and early jobs supply all three automatically. Adult life, particularly after moving, changing jobs or having children, supplies almost none of them, which is why people who had no trouble making friends at twenty find it baffling at forty.

Time is the other factor. Studies of how acquaintances become friends consistently find it takes many hours of contact, and that the hours have to be spent doing something rather than only talking about meeting up.

Loneliness has become a recognized health concern in its own right, with sustained isolation associated with elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, depression and early mortality. The effect sizes are debated; the direction is not.

How to take part

• Choose repetition over novelty. The same class or club every week beats a series of one-off events, because the mechanism is familiarity.
• Extend the invitation you have been meaning to extend. Most adult friendships stall at the pleasant-acquaintance stage because nobody escalates.
• Be specific: a date, a place, a time. Let us get together sometime almost never converts.
• Re-contact someone you have lost touch with. Rekindling is easier than starting and people are usually glad to hear from you.
• Expect it to take months. The timescale is the part people get wrong, and giving up early is the most common failure.