We need to know the difference between party friends, context friends, and our secure base friends.

Secure base friendships are characterized as: available, responsive, reciprocal, and repairable.

Proper framing helps us not resent the friends that disappoint us, because we understand them better.

When someone says it’s hard to make friends in adulthood, we tend to believe them. What comes next is a focus on making friends through advice such as “get out there more,” “initiate,” “try new things.” These recommendations help adults get exposure to people who could be their friends. After this, we need to start asking the question: Are we making the right friends?

A lot of clients I work with sigh when considering the effort it takes to find and make new friends, because they tell me: What if I put in all this effort and it doesn’t work out? This is a real problem and reality that causes friend-making burnout and has an impact on our growing isolation.

And it makes sense that if we are going out there and expecting every new person we meet to be best friend material, we will burn out and be disappointed because not everyone fits that bill — but we don’t need them to be. Research shows that we humans actually have limits to how many friends we can have, and that number shrinks when it comes to the close friends that I call our "secure base" friends (more on that........

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