Unfortunately, you really do need to “put yourself out there.”

Whether you’ve just moved to a new city or need to surround yourself with new people after a bestie breakup, building a friend group from scratch can seem like an impossible task. Finding local events in your neighborhood is hard enough as it is, and attending one solo just to spark a conversation with a stranger is a whole other obstacle. Although there’s no manual on how to make friends as an adult, meeting new people outside of school and work is possible. Ahead, five people share how they made friends in their twenties and thirties, plus tips for building your own social circle.

Don’t expect their advice to be easy, though, because if there’s one thing these stories all have in common, it’s that making friends as an adult requires more effort than it did on the playground.

Be A Joiner

The platform may feel outdated, but Facebook is still good for two things: keeping tabs on which high school classmates just got engaged… and bringing people together. But to find your squad, you’re gonna need to do more than send a friend request. Luckily, there are region-specific groups centered around hobbies, activities, and even fandoms. This is exactly how Libby Harrington, 26, found her people.

In 2021, Libby was part of a now-defunct Facebook group for Denver-based listeners of a pop culture podcast, where she saw a post about starting a book club. Her nerves got the best of her ahead of the first meeting, but she forced herself to attend the next one, held at a local park. She was uncomfortable and quiet until she realized she wasn’t the only one flying solo. In fact, everyone came by themselves.

As the women opened up about relationship drama and funny stories from their pasts, they began to bond. “We just hung out and had fun, and then we had something to laugh about because somebody [in the group] kissed their ex-boyfriend [at the bar],” Libby tells Bustle. “I thought, ‘Wait, these people don’t have to just be my book club friends. They could be my actual friends,’” Libby says. “Now they’re the people who I text first about certain things.”

Open Up

There are plenty of event-based organizations that use Instagram to build their communities, and @girlswhogather, the account behind [gather] is just one of them. It’s a non-profit founded by Lauren Franco, 26, that provides women with a safe space through quarterly discussion-based events in six cities — New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Osaka, Japan — themed around topics including building and freedom. When Lauren moved from California to New York for college, she realized just how many women were struggling to find friends. Craving “solid friendships” herself, she decided to create a space where folks could assemble and discuss the challenges of navigating the city as a woman.

When she decided to host the first gathering out of her NYU dorm in December 2017, she didn’t expect nearly 40 attendees would show up — all of whom heard about the event through word of mouth. “It was the day of SantaCon and there was a blizzard,” Lauren recalls. “I was like, ‘Nobody is going to come to this.’” She turned out to be wrong. The open and honest conversation topics from that first night have remained the cornerstone for [gather], and the organization now also hosts picnic hangs and walk and talks. Even Lauren met some of her closest friends through [gather] – her bestie Betty helped arrange the dorm gathering that started it all, and she met her pal Laura during the early stages of the org about a year later. They’ve been BFFs ever since.

Find Friends On Your FYP

TikTok isn’t just a place for recipes and trends anymore. You can also use the FYP as a tool to make friends. Just ask Jackson Moehler, 23, who inadvertently created a local friend group just by posting a TikTok after moving back home after graduation. In the 2022 video, she wrote, “If you currently live in the Atlanta area, love dogs, shopping, going out to eat, getting margaritas, and going to workout classes PLEASE be my friend. I’m currently going to the mall alone and I’m in desperate need of friends.”

Despite using a sound that was viral at the time and relevant hashtags (#someonebemyfriend), Jackson didn’t expect much to come from the video. Though she hardly had a following at the time, soon she had roughly 30 girls from the Atlanta area in her DMs. It took her a week to build up the courage to create the group chat. “[But then I thought] ‘I don’t have any other option for making friends, and there’s a group of girls just sitting right in front of me that could potentially be my really good friends,’” she says.

From the initial group, six girls consistently expressed interest in actually meeting up. To make the first meet-up a little less daunting, Jackson asked a high school acquaintance to join the outdoor bar hang. “We were like, ‘How do we even find these girls?” she recalls. “‘Unless they looked at our Instagram and stalked us, they don’t know what we look like.’” When they found one another, they went around in a circle asking each other about college, sororities, and more. “It honestly was just first date vibes,” Jackson says.

After that, Jackson says it was tricky finding an activity for everyone to enjoy. “The next couple of times, we tried to do just dinner because not everybody drinks, not everybody wants to go out, not everybody wants to just go on a walk,” she says. It took a few hangouts for them to be comfortable with one another, but consistently meeting up a few times a month helped break down their “barriers.” In March, the group took their first trip together to a cabin in north Georgia, and now, they’re actually close. In a follow-up video, Jackson wrote, “Last year I made a TikTok about how I didn’t have any friends post-college… Almost a year later and I have 6 new best friends.”

Swipe Right On Your New BFF

Though you might have swiped through a fair share of dating matches on Bumble, you can also use the app to find forever friendships. If there’s any success story that can convince you to make a profile, it’s Laura Bolt and Ellie Medhi’s.

After moving back to her hometown region of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Laura, 31, was eager to find friends for her and her husband. Similarly, Ellie, 32, was on the lookout after she and her husband had relocated from Seattle. They swiped right on one another in hopes that their partners would be friends, too, before discovering their own shared love of crafts and reading.

The future BFFs met at a coffee shop in 2022 and hit it off instantly. Ellie had been on a few friend dates before, but it was Laura’s first foray into Bumble’s pool. Before the meet-up, the duo came up with the code word “teacup” they could use with no hard feelings in case one of them felt like it wasn’t a match, but the conversation never stalled. It went so well that Laura didn’t even remember the word when recounting the meet-up. “That’s how you know I didn’t need it,” she says.

Less than a year later, Laura and Ellie have merged their individual friend groups, created a book club, and now coordinate a trivia group that meets every Wednesday. Ellie threw a “really wonderful” daisy-themed party for Laura’s most recent birthday, filled with hand-painted candles, delicious food, and a balloon arch. For Ellie, the effort was worth it.“She just gets all of the things that make me me in a way that friends I’ve had for years don’t,” Ellie says. “It’s a really special connection.”

Sure, it can be tough to put yourself out there, but as Laura puts it, “A lot of good things in life are worth work and putting yourself outside of your comfort zone.” So go ahead and shoot your shot.

This article was originally published on Oct. 6, 2023

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I’m The “Luckiest Girl Ever” But Can’t Shake My Doubts About My Boyfriend

Wanna Come With?

I’d Rather Go To Costco With My Best Friend Than Almost Anywhere

Long live the random errand hang.by Alexis Morillo

Updated: Sep. 23, 2026

Originally Published: Sep. 23, 2026

It’s 3 p.m. on a summer Friday in July, and while everyone else is using their lax seasonal schedule to hit the beach or enjoy a spritz on a patio, I’m at Costco. I’d argue I’m having more fun than they are, and that’s because my best friend Cassie is here. She waits in line with me at the customer service desk and snaps a picture of me getting my membership card photo taken for our group chat. The employee asks if I want to add her to my membership, likely because they assume we’re partners. Did we both find that hilarious and not not true? Absolutely. This is the errand hang, and I’d argue it’s the highest form of friendship.

Sure, I love getting dolled up to share small plates and sip a few martinis with my girls at a spot we found on Instagram. I live for a park day with friends where we bring snacks and board games and stay until sunset. But I’d trade both for a spur-of-the-moment chunk of quality time: meandering through the grocery store, hunting for a new stainless steel pan, or reorganizing their closet.

Others agree. On TikTok recently, people have been saying that running errands with your pals is a true litmus test. “The stage of friendship where it truly doesn’t matter what the hangout is,” says one TikTok with more than 1 million likes that shows a pair going through the car wash. Another video with the caption, “Yes of course I’ll paint your walls with you and you can come to my blood drawing appointment” yielded comments like “my bestie just came with me to my first pap smear” and “people forget that this is like… the point of friendship.”

The errand hang comes with no pressure to post. You don’t have to perform.

There’s even a name for it floating around online: “body doubling,” a focusing strategy that some doctors say is particularly helpful for those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The idea is that working on a task gets easier when someone else is simply in the room. If you’ve ever sat on the floor while your friend assembled some Ikea furniture, you get it. As the refrain goes, if you want a village, you need to be a villager. Errand hangs are how you show up.

Cassie is one of my tried-and-true errand friends. We met five years ago through my college roommate, her best friend from childhood. She introduced us after we had both just moved to New York, and we joke that we haven’t stopped talking since.

Outside of our Costco adventure — which ended with us buying absolutely nothing except a Chicken Bake and cookie each — we are constantly meeting up at Sephora to restock on makeup or at H Mart to graze the hot bar and do a grocery run. We catch each other up on our weeks between aisles and on the subway ride back home, until she has to get off a few stops before me. One time, we walked to a toy store in a torrential downpour to pick out a Jellycat for our friend Mariana’s birthday. One of our umbrellas broke, we arrived soaking wet, and we landed on the pink macaron. It was a blast.

We still enjoy our set-in-stone dinner plans and wild nights out, but as a Virgo and Taurus who love our routines and get overwhelmed balancing our work, social lives, and personal responsibilities, we appreciate simply being together while getting through our boring to-do list. Just a few weeks ago, I cooked dinner and brought it over to her place so she didn’t have to buy a new batch of groceries before vacation. We watched a crappy movie, and she got to eat some vegetables instead of takeout before her trip. A win-win.

Social media has infiltrated what seems like every outing. I can’t log on without seeing another artsy photo of cocktails or group pictures from an international girls trip. The errand hang comes with no pressure to post. You don’t have to perform. You can wear leggings and that T-shirt from college orientation to watch your friend switch their closet from summer to fall, walk their dog, or finally schedule their annual physical.

The errand hang is a playdate, but for adults. When the friendship is real, it doesn’t matter what you do together. What matters is that you make time for one another even during the busy weeks. And when you have that much fun doing the boring stuff, a chaotic night out bar-hopping is even more of a thrill — especially when you know there’s a Costco-size bag of pizza rolls waiting for you when you get home.