Adult Friendships: Why They're So Hard and How Therapy Can Help

By Caitlin Bovard, LPC, Certified Couples Therapist, Dual-Certified Sex Therapist (AASECT CST) offering online sex therapy for individuals, couples and partners in Colorado

The Crunch of Adult Life and the Shrinking Circle

Forming new friendships in adulthood often feels harder than anyone prepared us for. Many of us grew up watching shows like "Friends" that make adult friendship groups seem like the easy, natural norm, of course free from rifts, traumatic shifts and major changes (especially when some start sleeping together!). As we get older, our lives become packed with obligations: careers (often remote), families, caregiving, and endless to-do lists…. friendships are rarely spontaneous anymore. Mel Robbins calls this shift “The Great Scattering,” where diverging life paths make connection feel less organic.  Making time and energy for meaningful connection can feel like just another task on a long list of emotional labor. 

And yet, even when we do try, many adults report feeling like their efforts fall flat. One major reason for this is something psychologists call the liking gap, a social bias where we consistently underestimate how much other people like us after we interact with them. Research suggests that we tend to leave conversations thinking we were awkward or forgettable, even though the other person likely walked away with a much more positive impression.

This self-doubt can create a feedback loop: you might avoid following up with someone you enjoyed meeting because you assume they didn’t feel the same way. Or you replay the conversation in your head, criticizing your tone or timing, and ultimately withdraw rather than risk “trying too hard.” For neurodivergent adults, the liking gap can be even more pronounced, especially when masking, social exhaustion, or rejection sensitivity is in the mix.

When you're already short on time, energy, or confidence, this invisible mental gap can quietly sabotage budding connections before they even have a chance to grow.

ADHD Adds Layers of Complexity

If you’re living with ADHD, those typical adult friendship challenges can feel amplified. Symptoms like inattention, impulsivity, and poor memory may lead you to interrupt, forget plans, or struggle with follow-through, usually unintentionally, and these can strain friendships. Executive functioning challenges like keeping track of important dates or staying organized aren’t character flaws; they’re neurological realities that can lead to misunderstandings or hurt feelings.

Sometimes, friendships with ADHD include another invisible layer: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). This isn’t just overreacting, it’s an intense emotional and sometimes physical pain triggered by perceived rejection or criticism. People liken it to feeling punched in the chest or stabbed emotionally, even when no actual rejection occurred. For those of us with ADHD, this sensation can make neutral moments feel shattering and need a lot of recovery and processing. This makes it “expensive” with spoons and capacity, when many ADHDers are constantly fighting off or in burnout.

How Many Spoons Does It Take to Make a Friend? Costs of Investing in New Friendships

For people with chronic health conditions, disabilities, or neurodivergence, “spoons” are a powerful metaphor for energy. Starting a new friendship isn’t just emotionally risky—it can be incredibly energy-draining. If you’re masking (hiding or minimizing parts of yourself to fit in socially), each interaction may cost more spoons than others realize. Even something seemingly simple like meeting for coffee might involve planning, transportation, small talk, sensory overload, and recovery time.

And if driving (or parking in Denver especially) drains you or triggers anxiety, your geographical radius for friendships shrinks. Finding a friend who’s close by and gets it? That can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

This doesn’t mean friendship is impossible. But it’s okay to acknowledge: the process can be exhausting. If it feels like a lot, it’s because it is a lot.

What Marisa Franco Teaches Us About Finding Real Friends

In her book Platonic, psychologist Dr. Marisa G. Franco offers an evidence-based approach to cultivating adult friendships, one that feels especially helpful when you're low on spoons.

One key insight: you don’t need to find a friendship event if you could even find one, you need to find a repeating activity that aligns with your interests.

Franco’s formula? Go somewhere you enjoy regularly, where others return regularly. A book club, a pottery class, a support group, a cooking class, a hiking meet-up, a game night. That repeated exposure builds “mere-exposure effect” (we tend to like people more the more we see them). And if you don’t make a friend right away? At least you enjoyed the activity. There’s no wasted effort.

This approach reduces pressure. You’re not showing up to “make friends” (cue: anxiety) you’re showing up for you and something you find interesting, and allowing yourself to be open to connection happen if and when it does.

What Sex Therapy Teaches Us About Friendship Dread

Here’s a surprising overlap: in sex therapy, we talk about responsive desire: the kind of desire that doesn’t appear spontaneously, but builds after intimacy has started. It’s the difference between being instantly turned on versus realizing, "Oh, this feels good once I'm here."

Now think about that friend hangout you RSVP’d to a month ago. When the night finally comes, you feel exhausted. Maybe even anxious. Your brain says, “Why did I agree to this?”

But then, you lower the barrier and make a pact with yourself that you’ll just go for an hour and then you can leave. Without forcing yourself, you feel the fear and go anyway. You start talking. You laugh. You feel seen. You remember: This is why I came.

That’s responsive social desire. You don’t have to feel excited before you go. You just have to give yourself the chance to warm up. That’s not fake. That’s real connection unfolding, in its own time. This is very different than forcing yourself, guilting yourself or not listening to your own consent cues though, to be clear.

When Friendships End, It Can Feel Like a Breakup

Friendship loss is often minimized in our culture. But the truth is, when a friendship ends, whether suddenly or through slow disconnection, it can be as painful as a romantic breakup.

You may feel grief, confusion, or even shame. Dr. Franco in "Platonic" makes a great point that you don't have unlimited romantic partners (or one if you're monogamous), but you can in theory have closer to unlimited friends. This can make the rejection or lack of fit even more brutal.

There are also rarely rituals to mark the end of a friendship, which makes it harder to find closure. In therapy, we hold space for these losses. Maybe we brainstorm together about what ritual you personally want or need to vent or move towards healing. You deserve support, validation, and a safe place to process what the relationship meant to you.

Gentle Strategies for Navigating These Challenges

1. Normalize the Effort: Friendships don’t fall into our laps. You may need to treat it like any other part of adult life: intentional, scheduled, effortful, and worth the trouble.

2. Honor Your Energy: Don’t beat yourself up if you cancel or need recovery time. Friendship isn’t only built in coffee shops or crowded rooms, it’s also built in quiet DMs, shared memes, and checking in weeks later.

3. Use Dr. Franco’s Formula: Pick one recurring activity you enjoy for its own sake, and commit to showing up. Notice if you gravitate toward one person and take the chance of asking them to get coffee or the like. That’s how slow friendships form.

4. Reframe the RSVP Dread: Feeling resistant before a social event doesn’t mean you’re antisocial. You might just need to let connection grow through presence, not anticipation. Ask yourself: What if it goes well? Especially if your brain is good at automatically concocting ideas of what could go poorly or reminds you of past friendship misses.

5. Talk About Your Needs: If/when you feel safe, open up about how ADHD, RSD, anxiety, or chronic fatigue show up for you. It can be scary, but vulnerability is often the bridge to true connection. Plus, your friend might appreciate the context and have more understanding if you cancel from time to time or arrive late rather than assuming you don't care.

6. Validate Your Losses: If a friendship ends, give yourself space to grieve. You don’t have to move on quickly. You just have to honor that it mattered. Grief happens even if it was a good thing in the long run for the friendship to end, by the way.

How Online Therapy Can Support Your Social Life

As a therapist in Colorado, I work with clients who are navigating all of the above:

• Adult friendship challenges

• ADHD and RSD dynamics

• Masking and social fatigue

• The grief of friendship loss

• The desire for deeper, more sustainable connection

• How these dynamics impact dating, sex and relationships

  
  

Here are a few tools we explore together:

Normalize the effort: Friendships take work. That doesn’t make you needy or high-maintenance. It makes you human.

Honor your energy: If you cancel or need to reschedule, it doesn’t make you a bad friend. We work on setting boundaries and pacing yourself.

Use repetition to your advantage: Again, following Dr. Franco’s advice, we identify low-pressure events that you can return to regularly without overcommitting.

Explore responsive desire: We build self-compassion around dread and discuss how to show up for yourself even when you don’t feel like it.

Validate your grief: When a friendship ends, you don’t have to “get over it.” You get to honor what you had. Explore stages and tasks of grief using a few different paradigms to deepen your understanding of why and how we grieve.

You Are Not Too Much, and You are Enough

If you live in Colorado and you're struggling with friendships, social fatigue, or emotional overwhelm, you are not too much. You are navigating a complex social world with courage and care. And you do not have to do it alone. A quote (likely from Mel Robbins, but origin murky) I remind myself of is:

You haven't even met all of the people who are going to love you yet.

Book a free phone consultation today, and let’s create the kind

of social life that actually works for your brain.

I have a bunch more blogs, including a whole series on ADHD that can be found here. Last week, I blogged about attachment styles and sex and next week, I'll talk about how sexual shame can be combatted with self-compassion.

Just a heads up: This blog is for informational purposes only and isn’t meant to be taken as medical or mental health advice or treatment. Always talk with a licensed provider about your specific situation and reach out to emergency services if in crisis.