When we’re young, it’s easy to take making friends for granted. Our relationships brokered on the playground, in the dorm, and at early jobs come with ease and expectedness. But when we grow older, and our attention becomes commandeered by responsibility (and often romantic love), it becomes clear that making friends as an adult is… hard.

This is unfortunate, believes Marisa G. Franco, Ph.D. “Friendship’s impact is as profound as it is underestimated,” writes the bestselling author and psychologist in her book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. Franco unpacks years of research around platonic connection, underscoring how we’re going through what she calls “a friendship famine” today and why science says friendship is essential for good health.

Plus, the best part: Franco tells The Sunday Paper that it’s never too late to make a new friend—and she shows how we can open ourselves to creating new bonds.

Editor’s Note: Marisa Franco will be taking part in our upcoming Radically Reframing Relationships Summit, beginning February 13. Stay tuned for more information!

Why we need connection

We know diet and exercise are key to obtaining optimal health and longevity. But another factor, which has been getting more attention as of late, is connection and our lack of. Research shows that loneliness is akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, says Franco. “So it’s quite toxic for us to be disconnected.” Adding to this, Franco says one of the biggest predictors of happiness is how connected one is. “So connection, in general, we need.”

How we benefit from friendship

Platonic connection carries special weight for various reasons, says Franco:

#1: It helps us honor our identity.

We’re each nuanced, and different parts of ourselves are emboldened by different people. “If we are only around one person, we only have one experience of ourselves,” says Franco. “To make this personal, I love tennis but my spouse doesn't. Am I going to play tennis around my spouse? Probably not. I have to find someone else to feel like a whole person.” So friendship plays a large role in helping us to feel like our whole selves.

#2: It strengthens our other relationships.

Research shows that when people spend time with their friends, they're less affected by conflict in their romantic partnership, Franco tells us. “When you have friends, it makes your romantic relationships a lot better.”

#3: It honors the fact that we’re a communal species by nature.

Franco points out there are three types of loneliness: intimate, which is when we don't have very close connections with a partner or best friend; relational, which means we feel lonely due to a lack of friendships; and collective, when we lack a community. “Research finds, if any layer of that is missing from our lives, we can still feel lonely,” she adds. “So we need friendships to feel whole, to feel good and connected, and to be at homeostasis.”

How to make friends (as an adult)

So we know how good friendship is for us. But this doesn’t answer the conundrum of how to make new friends when we’re older (and let’s be honest, set in our ways). The first step? We need to stop assuming friendship will just happen for us. “The problem with friendship right now is that we think it's going to happen organically because it did when we were kids,” says Franco. When we were young, we had many of what sociologist Rebecca G. Adams refers to as unplanned interactions—a template that made it easy to connect. This includes consistent scenarios like recess and lunch, “circumstances that allow us to put our guard down,” adds Franco. But we start to lack these when we’re adults. “Even in the hybrid workplace, we're not vulnerable with each other, even if we see our colleagues every day.”

Instead of relying on an assumption, we need to take initiative, says Franco. We can do this by:

#1: Creating interaction:

Think about what hobbies you enjoy and how you find a community to pursue them in. “Maybe you want to join a hiking group. Or if you like to write, you can join a writing group. Doing this mirrors the continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability that we had as kids, notes Franco. “You're creating the infrastructure that we don't have as adults, and you’ll see each other repeatedly over time.” Franco adds that when we see people repeatedly over time, “we have this unconscious tendency to like them the more that we see them.”

#2: Assuming good intent—and thinking positively.

When we think we’ll be rejected, we tend to get closed off and withdraw, according to research. “We actually reject people first and then they reject us back,” says Franco. Alternately, when we’re open and we assume people like us, we encourage others to be open. “People are a lot less likely to reject you than you think they are,” she says, citing a research theory called “the liking gap,” which posits that we tend to underestimate how people like us after interacting with them. So flip this and think positively. “If we can just recognize that the social world is a lot more open than what we tend to assume because of our own negativity bias.”

#3: Generating exclusivity.

Franco says when you’re in a group, find someone that you’d like to generate exclusivity with. Be open and introduce yourself. “Maybe you want to invite this person to hang out outside of the group, or you want to meet up before for coffee. When you generate that exclusivity it helps you make friends.”

Why friendship makes the world better

“Every time you make a friend, someone else does, too,” says Franco. “The key to belonging is making other people belong.” In Platonic, Franco cites a study that finds the number one thing people look for in a friend is someone who makes them feel like they matter. “So if you're someone that can make people feel like they belong, they're going to want to make you feel like you belong.”

Fundamentally, if you want to make friends, you must be a friend. “So as you build these great skills of connecting, you're helping other people build those skills and rewrite their fears of rejection. And that's what's magical about it: Friendliness is contagious.”

Marisa D. Franco Ph.D. is a New York Times bestselling author, professor, and psychologist. She communicates the science of connection in digestible ways and is passionate about sharing research with the people it could help the most. Learn more at drmarisafranco.com.

Question from the Editor: What's one step today you can take to being more open toward making a new friend? We'd love to know below!