Your Relationships and the Let Them Theory

Mastering Adult Friendship

Motivating Other People to Change

Helping Someone Who Is Struggling

Choosing the Love You Deserve

The more you let peoplebe who they are, the betteryour relationships will be.

— Mel Robbins

Mastering Adult Friendship

CHAPTER 11 The Truth No One Told You about Adult Friendship

Let's be honest: Adult friendship is hard. Every person I know is struggling with adult friendships: creating them, losing them, or even just finding the time to keep friendships going.

If you've gotten to a point in your life where you're wondering, Where did all my friends go?, you're not alone. Perhaps you feel like you have no friends. Or, you're in different phases of life than the people you were once close with. Maybe you find yourself getting caught up in drama, waiting for someone else to reach out, or feeling unsure about where you stand. Or you feel like everybody else's life is a big party that you're missing out on. You want better friendships; you just don't know where to find them.

I've struggled with this too.

In this section, we are going to tackle adult friendship, which up until now, you've approached the same way you did as a kid: You just expected it to happen. Because of this, your friendships aren't what they could be.

The truth is, friendships change dramatically when you become an adult—and no one sees the change coming. That's why you need to use the Let Them Theory to take control of this area of your life.

Friendship is one of the best and most meaningful aspects of the human experience. You deserve to have amazing friendships in your life. Friends are awesome—they make your life more fun and fulfilling, and they can become the family you've chosen for yourself.

The Great Scattering

The reason why it is hard to navigate adult friendship is that when you reach your 20s, friendship changes from a group sport to an individual one—and no one understands this.

When you don't recognize that this change happened (and no one does), you don't change your approach to adult friendship, which is why you end up feeling lonely. You'll also find it challenging to stay connected to the people that you do love in an increasingly busy and distracted world.

As you grow and change and move jobs and cities and fall in and out of love, you'll constantly be confronted with the challenge of “finding your people” in new places and in new chapters of your life.

The Let Them Theory will help you understand adult friendship at a deeper level and it will empower you to strengthen existing friendships and set you up to meet your most favorite people in life, many of whom you haven't even met yet.

So what changes?

Let's talk about the difference between friendship when you were a kid and friendship after the massive change that happens when you're an adult.

When you were little, you and your friends and your classmates felt like a team, moving through life at the exact same pace, and in the exact same place. From kindergarten to high school, you and your friends had the same daily routine, you rode the same buses, you read the same books, and learned the same subjects in school.

You saw everyone your age all the time: in class, in the halls, on the sports fields, and in your neighborhood. You also had the same milestones. From birthdays, to graduations, to the exact same vacation schedule, you participated in the same clubs, activities, sports, and classes—which made you feel subconsciously like there was a big group of people moving through life with you, and you were a part of it.

This is why it felt like friendship was a group sport. Why? Because everyone traveled in groups, and that is simply what you did when you were younger.

For the first 20 years of your life, the structure of friendship was planned for you, by your parents, the school system, sports teams, college dormitories, fraternities and sororities, or extracurricular activities that made it easy for you to be around people your same age, going through very similar experiences at the exact same time.

Therefore it was not only easy to make friends but you were spending so much time together, and sharing so many experiences, that you also had everything in place to create really deep friendships.

And the reason why it was more of a group sport was that if you were part of a team, or a friend group, or a club, you expected to be invited whenever something was planned.

Your childhood trained you to believe you'd always be invited, friendship would be easy, that you'd see your friends all the time—and something fun would always be going on.

And then BOOM. You enter your 20s, and into a phase of friendship I call the Great Scattering.

The Great Scattering looks like this: High school or college ends, and all friends scatter in different directions. Suddenly, everyone is living in different places, and very soon, all your friends are on different timelines, working different jobs, hanging out with different people, and achieving milestones at different paces. And the structure that supported all your friendships is gone.

That's why you feel a tremendous loss of control about every aspect of your life. There is no longer a track, a template, a timeline, or milestones for what to do next or when you're supposed to achieve it. It's all up to you.

In other words, your adult life begins. For the first time in your life, you are officially on your own. It is entirely up to you to choose how you want to spend your time, where you want to work, what city you want to live in, and who you are going to hang out with.

And as time passes, those close friends of yours that moved to a different city start to feel further and further away. No one has any free time. Trying to coordinate everyone's calendars to get together feels impossible. And what is holding the friend group together is a text chain that gets quieter and quieter over time. Naturally, everyone is concentrating on living their lives and focused on the people right in front of them.

And this is when that loneliness really hits. This is when adult friendship gets hard. The structure that created the opportunity to see your friends 24/7, and the expectations that you would, is gone. Then you start to wonder, Where did all my friends go? You may feel out of control. And you cling. And feel insecure. And grip harder.

The reality is adult friendships come and go. Expecting friendship will destroy it. You need a more flexible and proactive approach. Which is why you're going to find yourself saying Let Them all the time.

Let Them move away. Let Them prioritize their new friends. Let Them not have time for me. Let Them not text me. Let Them not include me. Let Them go to brunch without me.

It happens to all of us, but it can still be incredibly confusing and disorienting. Now and forever onward, it's up to you to change the way you think about and approach friendship as an adult—because the Great Scattering has already happened, and versions of this will continue to happen over and over as you age.

When your single friends get married, they scatter. When your friends start having kids, they scatter. When people move out of the city and into the suburbs, they scatter. When people become empty nesters or get divorced, they scatter. When people get older, or downsize, or retire, or go through a loss, they scatter.

It's going to happen again and again in your life and with your friends. This is normal. This is why you need the Let Them Theory. It will teach you how to be more flexible in your approach to friendship, and show you how to use your time wisely to create some of the best friendships of your entire life.

The Three Pillars of Friendship

There are three factors that I believe make great friendships possible: proximity, timing, and energy. These pillars are the invisible foundation every friendship is built on.

When friends drift away, fall apart, or lose touch, it is because one or more of these three essential pillars is missing. Most of the time adult friendships fade not for personal reasons, but because of these three pillars: proximity, timing, and energy.

Understanding the role these three factors play will help you use the Let Them Theory to be more flexible, understanding, and proactive in your adult friendships.

The first pillar of friendship is proximity.

Proximity means how often you are physically near them. This matters because when you are physically near someone, you naturally spend a lot more time together. If you don't live near each other, you are not going to see each other as often. It will require more effort to stay connected.

You can absolutely do it, but it is harder. It is easier to grow closer to people you see all the time. And this isn't just common sense. It's a fact.

This concept of proximity has been researched and proven to impact who you become friends with, and who you don't. And the reason why this matters so much is that the more times you see someone in person, the more opportunities you have to get to know them, to spend time with them, to share experiences together, and to click and form a deeper friendship.

According to a University of Kansas study, to become a “casual” friend, you have to spend 74 hours with someone. And to become a “close” friend, you have to spend over 200 hours with someone. Let's put this research in the context of friendships when you are younger, and how they change when you become an adult.

In high school, you clocked 200 hours with friends every five to six weeks. In college, you spent even more time with your friends because you lived with them. You ate every meal with them. You spent every weekend with them. This proximity allowed you the time to fortify your connections and share infinite experiences and memories that allowed you to build trust in your relationships.

If you're physically next to someone, whether you're living across the street, or in the dorm, or across the hall, or sitting at the desk or the cubicle next to them, or seeing them every weekend at your kid's soccer game, you naturally spend time together because of proximity.

This matters. And it matters a lot. It also explains why it was much easier to create friends when you were younger. You were physically next to people your age all the time. This also explains why as an adult, when everyone scatters and is suddenly on a different schedule, it is hard to make new friends—because getting 200 hours with someone is a lot of time.

And get this: When you're an adult, you don't have as much free time as you did when you were younger to hang out, because you're working. According to the American Time Study, scientists found that from the age of 21 through 60, you will spend more time with your co-workers than your family and friends combined.

Which means your only chance to hang out with your friends is after work or on the weekends. Think of how many coffee dates, walks, and barbecues it takes to get 200 hours with a new adult friend! And it also makes you wonder, if proximity is so important, why are you not automatically best friends with all of your co-workers, since that is who you spend most of your time with?

The second pillar of friendship is timing.

Timing refers to the chapter of life you are in right now. If you're not in the same chapter of life with someone else, it's much harder to relate because you have less in common.

And nowhere is the impact of timing more evident than how it impacts friendships with co-workers. As you just learned, from the ages of 21 to 60, you will spend more time with your co-workers than your friends and family combined, but here's the catch: Everyone at work is in a different chapter of their life. That means for over four decades of your life, the majority of people at work who you spend the most physical time with are not in the same period of their life as you are.

For example, if everyone you work with is forty years older than you, it can be hard to relate. One of my daughters would always share that she would be on these team meetings at work and the “break the ice” question of the day would be something like “Where did you get married?” or “What is your retirement plan?”

She felt like she had to lie about her life every Monday morning when everyone was sharing what they did with their kids over the weekend, while she had gotten drunk with her girlfriends and thrown up in a garbage can.

This is why the timing of all life matters. Because despite spending so much time with her co-workers, and being really friendly with them, and liking a lot of them, they were in very different stages of life. It's why they never hung out on the weekends and they never went out to dinner after work—they had nothing in common other than work.

I can give you another example of how timing impacts friendship. Chris and I have family friends that we both love. I think they are so cool. I love hanging out with them. But we are fifteen years younger and they are grandparents. We have a lot less to talk about because we are in very different stages of our lives.

Are we still friends? Of course! I love them to death! But that friendship can only go so deep because we don't live near them, we don't see them a lot, and the timing is off—we are in very different stages of life. And what I love about understanding these three pillars of friendship is that it makes you realize that none of this is personal.

Friendships come and go. You can feel close and then you can feel distant. And none of this is personal. It's proximity and timing.

The Let Them Theory has really helped me loosen my grip on adult friendship. It will help you do the same, because the more you grow in your life, the more people will come in and out of your life. Let Them.

When you stop expecting to have everyone be your best friend, or to be invited to everything, or be included in everything, or that you will click with everyone, friendship gets a lot easier. There is an entirely different way to view adult friendship using the Let Them Theory; and it will make your life so much more fulfilling, healthy, and happy.

The third pillar of friendship is energy.

You either click with some people or you don't. You can't explain it, and neither can they, but you have to trust it. The energy is either on or it's off. There is no scientific reason to explain it. You just have to trust it.

And here is another hard truth: Energy shifts over time. Sometimes for the worse, and sometimes for the better. And that's a good thing, because it means that you and the people in your life are growing into new versions of yourselves.

For example, maybe you lived with five friends during college, and you loved them, and you clicked, and it was the best experience of your life. Then, two of you move in together after you graduate, and within four months, something just feels off. This is normal. It means you're both growing and changing, and it doesn't mean the friendship is over.

The mistake that we make is that we start to obsess over what is wrong, instead of just focusing on acceptance, kindness, and admiration for the other person. Just because you were best friends during one stage of your life doesn't mean you will be best friends during the next stage.

In fact, while we're on the topic, I hate the term best friend. It puts too much pressure and expectations on a relationship that will always need room to grow and evolve. As people come in and out of your life, Let Them. Trust the timing.

There are certain people who are meant to be in your life for a season. There are people that are meant to be in your life for a specific reason. And there will be people who will be with you for a lifetime.

This is normal. And when someone drifts away, or the energy feels off, do not make them your enemy. You can tell when a friendship is forced, and the energy is changing, because it starts to drain you. Conversations feel awkward. You'll start to feel like something is off or conversations are forced. Trust that feeling. I learned the hard way that gripping on to something, and trying to force it, just makes things worse.

We tend to hold on to things that we know deep down are not meant for us, because we know the second we stop forcing it, the relationship will fade. That is exactly what happened to me. All of a sudden, I found myself on the outside of what I thought was my closest friend group. I didn't know what to do, and I definitely did not handle it well.