As You Get Older, These Are 6 Reasons It's Hard To Make New Friends

Illustration of making new friends (Unsplash / Courtney Cook)

JAKARTA - As a social being, everyone has a relationship outside his family. For example, by establishing friendship with colleagues and outside of work. However, based on scientific research, the older you get, the harder it is to make friends.

Is this normal to happen? One study published in Personal and Invidual Differences conducted interviews with 30 participants.

Based on the results of the interview, the participants' answers were identified and found that there are 6 categories of reasons why it is difficult to make friends at an increasingly mature age.

Introversion

The internal reasons for each person may vary, but in the first category the difficulty in making friends at this age is due to shyness, hoping that the other person opened the conversation first, and not being good at opening the conversation.

If it is based on personality traits, you could say that introverts are more quiet. Although that does not mean that it is difficult to make friends because of the introverted personality, because there are many variants of the reasons, including those mentioned above.

Fear of rejection

No one likes rejection. Being afraid of rejection is also the reason it is difficult for someone to open up to make friends.

By category in the research findings, this second reason includes thinking about what other people think of us and making anxiety increase.

Pragmatic reasons

The next reason that makes it difficult for someone to make friends is the distance or barrier. For example living in an area that has a different culture. Another reason, in the pragmatic category, is that you already have a friendship, so you are reluctant to make new friends.

Suilt trusts other people

Lack of trust in other people can be influenced by bad past experiences. Actually it is difficult to make friends is not a mistake, but this condition can be resolved slowly, especially for those of you who find it difficult to trust other people.

Do not have time

Having a busy life certainly takes a lot of time, including time to make new friends. Like being busy working and devoting time only to your family so you don't have time to strengthen friendships.

Illustrations have no time (Unsplash / Luke Chesser)

Too picky

There are several reasons people choose friends, for example, they feel they need a suitable friend, have the same frequency, have the same hobbies, and so on. Choosing friends is necessary, especially choosing friends who can make life more quality and support every choice.

Of the 6 reasons based on the findings of the above study, a follow-up study was followed by 662 participants with an average age of 33.7 years in women and 34.1 years in men.

The results obtained conclude that the reason for the difficulty of making new friends is because of low trust often experienced by women. Meanwhile, men tend to experience pragmatic reasons and lack of time. Are you experiencing the same thing?