8 Reasons It’s So Hard To Keep Friends In Your 20s

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1. You’re busy trying to balance your work and home life. You’re trying to keep your job and maintain your love life and stick to an exercise routine and keep the fridge stocked and your pets fed. It’s hard to fit a social life into the equation. You have so many responsibilities now that it’s hard to balance them all.

2. You’re dead tired at the end of your work days. Even when you’re able to squeeze some free time into your schedule, you don’t really want to spend it out of the house. You would rather catch up on sleep and the Netflix shows you’ve fallen behind on watching. You would rather stay in your room, in your pajamas, under a blanket.

3. Your schedules never line up. Not everyone works nine to five on Monday through Friday. Half your friends work night shifts. The other half work weekend shifts. Since you don’t want to stay out until two in the morning when you have work the next day, your schedules make it hard to meet up at a time that works for everybody.

4. You don’t live down the street from each other anymore. The days of meeting up in between classes to gossip are over. Now, it’s physically impossible to see some of your friends. They live in other towns, other states, other countries. You would have to hop on a plane in order to see them — and neither of you have that kind of money right now.

5. Social media tricks you into feeling closer. You see pictures of your friends all the time. You feel like you know what’s going on in their life because you’ve seen their college graduation pictures and pictures of their kids and pictures of them drinking with their newer friends on weekends. You know a like on a picture isn’t the same as a phone call, but it’s the best you can do sometimes.

6. You don’t have the same idea of fun. Some of your friends have families now. Some of your friends are still into the partying lifestyle. That means some of them probably won’t be up for a spontaneous road trip and others won’t be interested in a quiet board game night. You have to redefine the way you spend your time together because it’s not going to be the same way you spent your teenage years.

7. You’re broke. You have to pay for groceries, for gasoline, for rent. You have a lot of bills that keep adding up. You don’t always have enough cash to sit down for an overpriced dinner or take a road trip or afford concert tickets.

8. Friendship doesn’t mean the same thing as it did when you were younger. Some people expect to talk to their friends every single day. Some people expect to see their friends in person every weekend. And other people will consider you a friend if you’re able to hang out every six months and text every few weeks. Adult friendships don’t look the same for everyone and that’s the tricky part.