How to make friends in your 20s (without a dating app)

It’s Friday night. You’ve scrolled through a few hundred other people’s weekends, sent a laughing emoji to a group chat that’s mostly memes, and opened a dating app because it’s the only place that seems to offer anyone new. And yet there isn’t one person you could text “fancy getting food?” without overthinking it for twenty minutes.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not failing at adulthood. Your early 20s are some of the most disrupted friendship years you’ll ever have, and the numbers back that up. Here’s why it happens, and what the research says actually works.

Why is it so hard to make friends after uni?

School and uni did the hard work for you. Same people, same corridors, week after week, with hours to kill between lectures. Then you graduate and it all goes at once. Your friends scatter to different cities. You start a job where most people are older, settled and gone by half five. You move into a flat with people you found on a listings site.

The other missing ingredient is time. In a study published in 2018, communication researcher Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found it takes roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. At uni you could hit 50 hours with someone by the end of freshers’. Now you might not spend 50 hours with anyone new in a whole year. Hall’s work also suggests that time you choose to spend together counts for more than hours you happen to sit near each other at work.

Is it normal to feel lonely in your 20s?

Very. When Meta and Gallup surveyed people in 142 countries for their 2023 Global State of Social Connections report, young adults aged 19 to 29 came out as the loneliest age group: 27% said they felt very or fairly lonely, compared with 17% of people aged 65 and over.

The UK picture looks similar. Office for National Statistics data from late 2022 to early 2023, analysed by the Campaign to End Loneliness, showed 16- to 29-year-olds were more than twice as likely as over-70s to feel lonely often or always (9.7% against 3.7%).

In the US, the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness flagged a big change in how young people spend their days. Using American Time Use Survey data, it reported that 15- to 24-year-olds spent roughly 150 minutes a day in person with friends in 2003, and about 40 minutes by 2020: a fall of nearly 70%. 2020 was a lockdown year, which exaggerates the drop, but the study behind those figures found the pandemic deepened a decline that was already under way. A smaller Harvard survey from the same period found 61% of 18- to 25-year-olds reported serious loneliness.

So if you feel like the only one, you really aren’t. A lot of people your age are quietly waiting for someone else to go first.

Online all day, close to no one

You’re the first generation to grow up fully online, and this isn’t a lecture about phones. Scrolling can feel like being around people: you know where everyone went on holiday, who got a new job, who’s moving in with who. But watching people isn’t the same as knowing them, and nobody on your feed is asking how you are. Group chats are brilliant at keeping a friendship alive. They’re just not great at starting one. And the group chat that only wakes up for birthdays isn’t really a friendship, it’s a calendar.

Then there are dating apps. For a lot of people in their 20s, they’ve quietly become the default way to meet anyone new at all, even when what you actually want is a friend: the swiping, the openers, the chats that fizzle by day three. Ofcom found that about one in five online 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK used a dating service in May 2024, more than any other age group. But the same 2024 report recorded Tinder’s UK reach falling by around 600,000 people in a year, and Ofcom noted analysts’ view that for Gen Z the novelty is wearing off. If you’re burnt out on swiping, you’re in a very big club. And if what you’re really after is friendship, a dating app was always a strange door to knock on.

The bigger issue is what apps train you to do. Judge quickly, keep it light, move on. Friendship asks for the opposite: show up again, get curious, let things be a bit slow.

How to make real friends in your 20s

1. Choose one regular thing and keep turning up

A different event every weekend feels productive, but you meet everyone exactly once. A weekly run club, five-a-side, choir, climbing night or volunteering shift gives you the same faces at the same time, which is how Hall’s hours quietly add up. Pick one. Give it two months before you judge it.

2. Assume they like you more than you think

In a 2018 study, Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark found that after a conversation, people consistently underestimated how much the other person liked them. They called it the “liking gap”. It showed up in the lab, in workshops, and between first-year university students getting to know their flatmates, where it lasted for months. That awkward post-chat replay in your head is mostly wrong.

3. Go one question deeper

We tend to assume other people want to keep it light. In 2022, psychologists Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found people underestimate how much someone they’ve just met will enjoy a deeper conversation, and how connected they’ll both feel afterwards. Swap “so what do you do?” for “what’s been taking up most of your head lately?”

4. Message the person you drifted from

Your old coursemate or the friend from your first job counts too. Research by Peggy Liu and colleagues, published in 2022, found people underestimate how much others appreciate being reached out to, whether by a quick text or a small gift. The gap was biggest when the message was more of a surprise and when the tie was weaker. In other words, exactly the “haven’t spoken since graduation” message you’ve been putting off.

5. Say hello even when it feels awkward

In a 2014 experiment, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked Chicago commuters to talk to someone near them on the train. Most expected it to be unpleasant. Afterwards, they reported a more positive commute than people who sat in silence. It’s one setting and single conversations, not friendships, but it’s a useful reminder that the first minute is the hardest part.

Try this: a four-week friend plan

1. Week 1: sign up for one thing that meets weekly. Go, even if you leave early.
2. Week 2: learn three names and ask one real question that isn’t about work.
3. Week 3: suggest the second time. Be specific: “Coffee after next Thursday’s session?” lands better than “we should hang out sometime”.
4. Week 4: send two messages to people you’ve drifted from. No agenda, just “saw this and thought of you”.
5. Every week: swap one evening of swiping or scrolling for one hour in a room, or on a call, with an actual person.

None of this is glamorous. That’s the point. Friendships in your 20s are built less by big moments and more by being the person who keeps showing up.

Where Everconnected fits

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-conne
2. Kannan, V. D., & Veazie, P. J. (2023). US trends in social isolation, social engagement, and companionship: nationally and by age, sex, race/ethnicity, family income, and work hours, 2003-2020. SSM - Population Health, 21, 101331. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250
3. Meta & Gallup (2023). The Global State of Social Connections. www.gallup.com/analytics/509675/state-of-social-connections.
4. Gallup (2023). Almost a Quarter of the World Feels Lonely. news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/512618/almost-quarter-world-f
5. Campaign to End Loneliness (2023). Younger Brits report higher levels of loneliness (analysis of ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey data, November 2022 to February 2023). www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/press-release/younger-brits-
6. Weissbourd, R., Batanova, M., Lovison, V., & Torres, E. (2021). Loneliness in America: Just the Tip of the Iceberg? Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education. mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america
7. Ofcom (2024). Online Nation 2024 Report. www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and
8. Ofcom (2025). ’Appy Valentine’s Day: top online dating trends revealed. www.ofcom.org.uk/media-use-and-attitudes/online-habits/appy-
9. Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278-1296. doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225
10. Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756. doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
11. Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367-398. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000281
12. Liu, P. J., Rim, S., Min, L., & Min, K. E. (2023). The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(4), 754-771 (published online 2022). doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000402
13. Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980-1999. doi.org/10.1037/a0037323