Quick Friendship Tip: Use the Freshmen Energy Trick to Make New Friends as an Adult

Episode #115: Today's "Quick Friendship Tip" is about how to capture the attitude and spirit of that special "freshman energy" apparent on any college campus in the first three weeks of school when making new friends as an adult.

There is something real happening in that freshman year, specifically the first three weeks, that is magical for friend making. I saw it while dropping off my son for his freshmen year of college in August, and I remember it from my own freshmen year. 

I'm grateful to former guest, Gretchen Rubin, (who also recently dropped off a child for freshmen year) for sharing a 2015 NYT article in her newsletter by Nicholas A Christakis called "Making Friends in New Places." Christakis described in more detail what exactly is happening in those first three weeks. I did not imagine it just a few months ago during the initial college move in days. 

While adult life cannot replicate those three weeks in exactly the same way, I have some ideas about how we can take what's essential about that vulnerable time and use it to our advantage as adults when we're in periods of having to make new friends or just wanting to get out of a friend rut. 

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Transcript

I say this a lot on the podcast that there's ideal and then there's real, and I like to deal in the real life.

[00:00:05] Nina: And it's not enough to say like, oh, everyone should be friendly and everyone should be open minded about making new friends. That's nice. And that would be great, but it's not how it goes. So how can we capture this freshman energy? 

Welcome to Dear Nina, Conversations About Friendship. Today's quick episode, the quick friendship tip QFT, I'm calling them—Quick Friendship Tip—is about how to capture the freshman energy when making new friends in other parts of adult life. The idea is that there is something real happening in that freshman year, specifically the first three to four weeks, even maybe more micro the first one to two weeks that is so magical for friend making. It's such a particular time that people are open to new attitudes. How can we take this and learn from it and put it into our adult life?

Can't quite recreate it because there is something really particular about freshman year in college. This episode is not for college freshmen. This episode is for adults. 

Now I happened to just bring a college freshman to college. My husband and I brought our son to college a month ago. I was seeing firsthand this freshman energy that everyone talks about, and I remember it myself. It is this openness. It is not embarrassing to introduce yourself. It is not embarrassing to walk up to someone you've never met before. When someone you've never met before comes up to you, you're not like, why is this person talking to me? Sadly, that is not true in all of life. 

Talk to any adult who has tried to make friends in a new town. They don't know where to start. They don't know how to not feel weird. 

Gretchen Rubin, who has been on this show before, who has been talking a lot lately about college drop offs. She just dropped off her, second and youngest child in school. And so she's talking a lot about, uh, she doesn't call it the empty nest. I think she's calling it the open nest. She has like a different name for it. I can't remember exactly. But you can check out, Happier, the podcast, that she does with her sister for more on that. She shared in her newsletter, an article in the New York Times called making friends in new places. It's from 2015.

So I'm glad she dug this out. And the author, Nicholas Christakis wrote about this freshman energy that I've actually been talking about for the past month since I dropped my son off. And I talked about it a lot in my Facebook group right when I got back in August. But I just now saw this 2015 article, thanks to Gretchen. And again, it's called Making New Friends. I'll link it in the show notes. He talks a lot about this real thing, this thing that I witness and that I felt myself when I was in college, which is that vulnerability people are willing to have and he said that in his observation and through studies, it's three weeks.

It's about three weeks this lasts, and he wrote: “At the start of freshman year, there's a window of opportunity when customary rules about social interactions are suspended and when it seems perfectly normal for someone to sit down next to you at lunch and class or strike up a conversation.” He said, “Social inhibitions tend to dissolve when a group of strangers enters a new environment. Think of adults on a cruise, teenagers at a summer camp, and so on. The bond is all the more guaranteed when facing a shared hardship, say the boredom of freshman orientation sessions, or the stress of placement exams. But after that critical window, a curtain begins to fall on the welcoming social scene.”

“In my experience,” these are his words, “which includes serving as a master of residential college of both Yale and Harvard, this tends to occur about three weeks in. Attitudes begin to solidify, friendships become fixed, and behaviors that initially seemed open and generous might come to feel forced or even a little creepy.”

I think we've all seen that. I think many of us have seen that happen in post school life. And he's saying post the first three weeks. 

He goes on to say, “It turns out that we are hardwired to seek and make friends in novel, stressful circumstances. Students naturally assemble themselves into elaborate social networks and not just Snapchat, Facebook, or Twitter. Our modern technology is merely put into the service of more ancient and powerful impulses.”

So I think something we can take from this, this idea that people are more willing to be open and friendly when there's a little bit of hardship.

[00:04:27] Nina: Getting to college, there's a hardship not knowing a lot of people. Moving in, it's so stressful. I mean, even just the physical act of moving in and organizing your room in this tiny space and all the parents are around. Actually find the parents are even extra friendly in this time, too. People are introducing themselves.

Everyone's kind of willing to help out a little more than they might be if it was just a stranger next to you while you were moving a kid into an apartment building, later in their 20s. Like let's say you were helping your kid move in. I don't know that you're talking to everyone you run into, but on the college campus, there's something about the first couple days even.

The adults are feeling that freshman energy too. I witnessed people introducing themselves to my son and my son introducing himself to people in a way that I can't imagine they are still walking up to strangers and being like, Hey, I'm so and so. I mean, that'd be nice. I say this a lot on the podcast that there's ideal and then there's real, and I like to deal in the real life.

And it's not enough to say like, oh, everyone should be friendly and everyone should be open minded about making new friends. That's nice. And that would be great, but it's not how it goes. 

So how can we capture this freshman energy? I think if you are in a new town or you're just in a stage of life looking to make new friends, the thing to do is to sign up for a class of some kind or join a group. It doesn't have to be a class. It could be, you know, training for a marathon or something. That's not really a class, but it's a training session. It doesn't have to be something physical. It could be something like learning to crochet. It could be just learning a whole new skill. But the key is that everybody in that group is also learning for the first time.

What it does is create some of the same vibe that we're talking about here of everyone's a little nervous. Everyone's like wondering, it's just going to be a good teacher or not. Is this going to be a good class or not? Is the temperature going to be too cold in here in the winter? I mean, there's things that people get anxious about when trying new things and everyone has different anxieties, but that means that you're coming to this experience, maybe with a little bit of vulnerability because you're not completely comfortable.

And when you're not completely comfortable, you are willing to maybe share in that with somebody else. Even if no one says it, it's like this knowledge that all of us here are a little bit uncomfortable. And I'm not saying you're going to make best friends right away. I often advise signing up for things that you enjoy because of nothing else at least you are either doing something you enjoy or you're learning a new skill. And both of those are worthwhile endeavors. And it could be that out of this experience you end up making some connection and maybe that friend you make isn't even from that class. It's someone you meet through someone from that class.

You just never know and it's good to have and new and open experiences in your life. So that is my very quick friendship tip to try to capture that freshman energy, that willingness that people have to meet new people, to accept you at the lunch table, so to say, by creating a kind of adult freshman experience by trying something new, doing something that you enjoy.

And let me know if you end up trying this. I have definitely done new things in my life. And I spent about 10 years leading writing groups in Minneapolis that oftentimes people didn't know each other and they had to be very vulnerable to do that and to show up in person or sometimes, uh, like during COVID years, it was online.

People were nervous and they were sharing really personal things. Friendships definitely formed out of that. And it was never right away. It often took time. It often took years for real friendships to happen outside of class, because for a friendship to really develop, it does need to be taken outside of the context you met in, but it is a great place to start.

Thanks for being here with me today. I hope you'll be back next week for another interview. If you're missing these friendship conversations in between episodes, they are also happening on Dear Nina: The Group on Facebook. It's a not huge, but not tiny, Facebook group that is growing as a community of people interested in friendship. We talk about books and TV and recipes and friendship stuff, of course.

I am on TikTok and Instagram @Dearninafriendship, and you can watch these on YouTube also. I personally never watch a podcast on YouTube, but I guess some people do and no, shade to that. I take time to upload these each week to YouTube. So I hope some people are doing it on YouTube. Meanwhile, I hope to see you back here in some capacity, wherever you find us. Lots of fun interviews coming up this fall.

Come back because when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. Bye.