What it’s actually like to find a best friend as a grown adult

You know that thing where you’ve been to a hundred playdates and you’re always secretly counting the minutes until you can load the snack plates into the dishwasher and get everybody out of your house? Yeah. This was not that.

I met my best friend because our daughters couldn’t manage to hand each other a piece of paper. For three solid months, those two first-graders tried to exchange our phone numbers. We’d send a note home. We’d get half of it back. We’d get a phone number scrawled on someone’s actual hand. At some point I genuinely started to wonder if the other kid was imaginary.

She wasn’t.

How do you even make friends as a grown adult?

Nobody warns you that adult friendships don’t just happen — you have to stumble into them sideways, usually through your kids or a shared waiting room or a mutual hatred of something. The idea that you’ll just organically meet your person feels increasingly absurd the older you get.

And yet. There I was, scrounging through craft supplies at Michaels when my daughter screamed — and I mean screamed — “MOMMY THERE SHE IS! THERE IS MY BEST FRIEND!” And those two little girls ran at each other and hugged like something out of a movie. An actual movie. I stood there holding a bag of googly eyes wondering what just happened.

We finally exchanged numbers. In person. Like people who aren’t six years old.

What was that first playdate actually like?

She came over later that week. The girls were young enough that mom tags along for playdates, which meant we just… sat there together while the kids did their thing.

She brought her other daughters — turns out there were twins and another kid in the mix, which I respected enormously — and while the chaos unfolded around us, we talked.

I kept waiting for the moment where the conversation dried up. Where one of us started fake-laughing at something that wasn’t funny and checking the time. That moment never came. We didn’t have a ton on paper in common, but we had everything in common in the ways that actually matter — the way you think about things, the way you see the world, whether you’re actually listening or just waiting for your turn to talk.

Some people just click. That’s the whole explanation. I don’t know what else to tell you.

Is it weird to call another adult your best friend?

A little bit, honestly. There’s something almost embarrassing about it, like you’re supposed to have outgrown the concept. Best friends are for slumber parties and passing notes in class, right?

But what do I know? Maybe we’ve been selling adult friendship short this whole time. Maybe having one person who gets you — actually gets you, not just tolerates you — is the whole ballgame.

I’ve written before about what it means to find your people as you get older and I keep coming back to the same thing: it’s not about having a lot of people around. It’s about having the right ones.

What makes a best friend different from just a good friend?

A good friend is someone you’re happy to see. A best friend is someone you could talk to forever and still have more to say.

That’s the only definition I’ve got, and I think it holds up. The conversation doesn’t have an end point. You don’t run out of material. You can sit in the same room doing nothing and it doesn’t feel like nothing — it feels like exactly where you’re supposed to be.

I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for a playdate buddy, someone who’d take my kid off my hands for two hours on a Saturday. What I got was infinitely better and I’m still a little stunned by it, honestly.

If you’re still waiting on your person — they might be standing in a Michaels holding googly eyes. Keep your eyes open. The universe has a truly absurd sense of humor about this kind of thing.

The girls are older now, and they’re still close. Which means I still have a standing excuse to see my best friend, even though we stopped needing excuses a long time ago.

If you’ve got a friend like this — you know. If you don’t have one yet, don’t give up. Sometimes it takes three months of botched phone number exchanges and a chance encounter in a craft store aisle. But what do I know?

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