A reader wrote to me recently with a story that will sound familiar to a lot of you. She’d always been the outgoing one – put her in a room of strangers and she was completely at home. But somewhere in her sixties, that started to change. Old friends, scattered across the country, were increasingly hard to reach – dealing with illness, mobility problems, the accumulating weight of getting older. A visit she’d been looking forward to for months turned into a string of near-misses: one friend with Covid, another recovering from a stroke, a third who could barely make it into the restaurant without her husband’s arm to lean on. And the new people she’d met since moving somewhere for a fresh chapter? Friendly enough. But nobody reached out the way she did.

She asked me, essentially: is it actually harder to make friends as we age, or is it just her?

It’s not just her. And there’s real research behind why.

The friendship math changes as we age

Sociologists who study adult friendship talk about three ingredients that reliably produce close relationships: proximity, repeated unplanned contact, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down. Think about where your closest friendships actually formed – school, university, early jobs, the parents’ group from when your kids were small. Almost none of that was intentional. You were simply in the same room as the same people, often enough, for long enough, that friendship had no choice but to happen.

After 60, all three ingredients tend to quietly disappear at once. Retirement removes the workplace. Adult children moving out removes the school gate and the sporting sidelines. A move to a new city, a new state, or simply a smaller home removes the neighbours you’d built twenty years of nodding acquaintance with. You’re not imagining that it’s harder. The machinery that used to manufacture friendship for you, almost without your involvement, has been switched off. From here on, it has to be deliberate.

The other half of the problem: grief hiding as social fatigue

There’s something else worth naming honestly, because my reader touched on it without quite saying it outright: some of what looks like difficulty making new friends is actually grief for the ones you’re slowly losing. Watching people you’ve known for decades move from walking upright to a cane, to a walker, to a wheelchair – or simply become harder to reach, physically and otherwise – is a real and cumulative loss. It makes sense that a heart doing that kind of quiet, repeated grieving might feel less available for the effort of starting over with someone new. That’s not a character flaw or a sign you’ve become closed off. It’s an entirely reasonable response to an entirely real loss. But it is worth distinguishing from the separate, solvable problem of simply not knowing where to meet people – because the two require different things from you.

What actually helps

Go where repetition lives, not where a single event lives. A one-off morning tea or a single seniors’ expo rarely produces friendship, no matter how pleasant it is, because pleasant strangers need to become familiar faces before they become friends. Look instead for anything with a recurring structure built in: a weekly class, a regular volunteer shift, a standing walking group, a book club that meets the same day each month. The friendship isn’t really the point of the activity – the activity is just the excuse that gets you into the same room, with the same people, often enough for something to grow.

Volunteer, specifically. My reader mentioned this herself, almost in passing, but it’s genuinely one of the most reliable paths to connection later in life – not just because it puts you around other people regularly, but because it restores a sense of purpose and belonging that pure socialising doesn’t always provide. Feeling useful to something larger than yourself turns out to matter almost as much as feeling liked.

Be the one who follows up – at least at first. It stings when you’re the one always reaching out and it isn’t returned. But new acquaintances, particularly those who already have full social lives of their own (family visits home, existing friendships, a partner, a pet, a garden), often simply haven’t yet decided you’re worth the effort – not because of anything about you, but because that decision takes repeated contact to form. Being the one who initiates a few times running isn’t a sign of weakness or desperation. It’s usually just what it takes to move someone from “nice person I met” to “friend.”

Keep the long-distance friendships alive differently, rather than trying to replace them. The old, deep friendships – the ones who’ve seen you through divorces, deaths and decades – don’t need replacing, because they can’t be. What they need is a lower-effort way to stay present when visits become harder: a regular phone call, a standing video chat, even the improv Zoom classes my reader mentioned, which let her stay connected to people from home while she works on building something new locally. New friendships and old ones aren’t in competition. You’re allowed – and it’s healthy – to be tending both at once.

Lower the bar for “enough in common.” After 60, the instinct to look for someone just like you – same background, same stage of life, same sense of humour – can actually narrow the field more than it needs to. Some of the most durable later-life friendships form between people who’d never have crossed paths at 35, simply because they showed up to the same pottery class or same walking group and kept showing up.

The honest bottom line

It is harder to make friends after 60 – not because something is wrong with you, and not because people your age have become unfriendly, but because the natural machinery that used to do this work for you has largely stopped running. That means it now takes intention where it once took none. The good news, if it can be called that, is that intention is something entirely within your control, even when circumstances – grief, distance, illness, a new postcode – are not.

Have a question for Bess? Write to her at community@startsat60.com with “Dear Bess” in the subject line.