Have you ever felt like the older you get, the harder it is to make and keep real friendships?
Friend, if you feel that way, you are not alone.
I remember my freshman year of college like it was yesterday. There was never a dull moment. I always had a friend to connect with, a function to attend, a late night on my roommate’s bed just catching up on the day. It was a sweet season, and friendship felt effortless. I never once had to schedule it.
Then I graduated, married my college sweetheart, and we moved twelve hours away for my husband’s job to a place where we knew absolutely no one. It was a special time—we were newlyweds, figuring out our life together—but it was also the first time I had ever had to work at building friendships. There was no dorm hallway. No built-in community. Nobody knocking on my door. If I wanted a friend, I had to go find her.
That season taught me something I have leaned on ever since: Jesus really is the friend who sticks closer than a brother (Prov. 18:24). He was faithful in a city where I knew no one, and He has been faithful in every season since.
Now fast forward almost twenty years. I am a mom of three. A wife. I have a job and a household to manage. Life is full—the good kind of full—but navigating friendship in this season takes more intention than I ever expected it to.
Here is what adult friendship often looks like: waiting for the other person to reach out first. Long delays between texts. Audio messages. Rescheduled coffee dates. Snips of conversations here and there at kids’ sporting events. Apologies.
It is so easy to slip into the rhythm of our own daily schedules and let friendship and community quietly fall to the wayside. But this is not what Scripture describes for us.
“As iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another.”
— Proverbs 27:17
I love that Solomon chose iron. Iron sharpening iron requires contact—friction, nearness, the sound of two things bumping into each other. You cannot sharpen a blade from across the room. And I think that is the part that’s so important!
As I have gotten older, I had to stop mourning the friendships that belonged to different seasons. Some friendships were for a chapter, and grieving them was keeping me from focusing on the women right in front of me. Different women carry different things, and in different seasons of life. This is OK and necessary. It’s actually a beautiful picture of the body of Christ as Paul described in Romans 12:4-5, “Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.”
Friendship is not a formula, but I wanted to share the things that have genuinely made the difference for me in this season.
Standing plans beat good intentions.
Choose a time—the same place, the same hour, week after week. I used to believe that kind of structure would squeeze the life out of a friendship, but I had it backwards. The decision was the thing standing in our way; once it was gone, so were the excuses. We no longer ask whether we’re meeting—now we just show up!
Let them see the mess.
Let’s be honest. We all have a good junk drawer somewhere, right?! It’s easy to feel like we need to have our home sparkling clean or the perfect charcuterie tray ready on the dime, but if I am honest, the times I have felt the most comfortable in other people’s homes haven’t been when everything is perfectly in its place—it’s when I see a pile of kids’ papers that need sorting or dirty socks on the floor. Something shifts when a friend is invited into our everyday lives. There’s real comfort in being able to look across the room and say, I get it, friend! You’re not alone.
Be the one who initiates.
I know this is hard, but it’s so important because “A friend loves at all times” (Prov. 17:17a). “All times” includes the seasons when she does not have it in her to reach back. Sometimes friendship is simply being the one who keeps asking. Doing this helps us show up for our friends, even in ways we probably don’t realize. We never know when a simple hello or a small invitation is exactly what someone needed that day.
Overlap what you are both already carrying.
Sit beside her at the game. Take the walk together. Fold laundry while she talks. Some of the sweetest hours I have spent with women in this season were not scheduled as friendship at all. They were just two of us doing the ordinary work God gave us.
Celebrate the small things.
We tend to save our celebrating for the milestones the world recognizes—the engagement, the baby announcement, the new job. But so much of life is in the mundane. I have felt more loved by a text after a long week of solo parenting than by almost anything else. A milestone remembered. A quiet win noticed. When we learn to show up in the mundane, we stop being the friends who appear for the ceremonies and become the ones woven into actual, everyday life!
Call each other forward.
There is a version of friendship that stays comfortable. We pray for each other here and there, we say we are doing fine, but we never quite let anyone close enough to see where we are struggling. James does not tell us to confess our sins privately and hope for the best. He says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed” (Jas. 5:16a). Healing lives on the other side of being known.
The friend who knows what I am wrestling with—who knows when I last opened my Bible and when I last avoided it—is the friend who can walk with me. Not because she has answers, but because she is close enough to notice when I go quiet.
This kind of transparency is uncomfortable at first. But trustworthy are the wounds of a friend (Prov. 27:6), and I would rather be lovingly corrected by a friend who knows my story than admired by someone who only knows the tidy parts.
Where do I go from here?
If you have been waiting for life to slow down before you invest in friendships, can I gently tell you that season may not be coming. This is the beautiful, hard work we get to partake in as sisters in the body of Christ. Hebrews 10:25 tell us, “not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.”
So do not wait for it. Pick the name of a friend. Send a text—set a day and time to get together! Today. From where she sits—in a life just as full as yours—she may be pondering the very same thing.
Need more encouragement about friendship? Read this if friendships are hard to find.
About Alison Fargason
Alison Fargason is a graphic designer at Lifeway with more than a decade of experience designing for the women’s ministry space. Her work spans branding and identity, detailed print design, web layouts, social media, and email marketing campaigns.
