I think we all remember meeting someone on the playground as a kid, striking up a conversation about cartoons, or where our parents worked, or what flavor of ice cream is best, and quickly finding ourselves tossing out those formerly oh-so-easy words: “Want to be friends?”
If only it were that easy as a grown-up.
Unless…It still can be?
I, an introverted 20-something in my final semester at CU Boulder, feeling nostalgic for my easy social butterfly days as a kid and wanting to take a few steps out of my adult cocoon, set out on campus over roughly two weeks with a mission: strike up a conversation with 10 strangers to see if the days of impromptu friendship haven’t quite outgrown us yet.
I’m going to be honest with you—my first attempt at striking up a convo with a stranger was a complete failure. In a perfect display of why I chose to do this experiment in the first place, my adult brain totally chickened out.
As I waited for the bus in the covered bench terminal at the Euclid stop around 6pm on a Wednesday, ice coating the ground and frigid, blustering, wind accosting the group of students waiting for the Dash and the Skip on the curb in front of me, a kind looking girl with a blonde ponytail joined me in hiding from the late January cold in the terminal. It was perfect: the plastic walls provided some quiet from the street, she didn’t have headphones in, and she looked friendly.
I tried for several minutes to get up the courage to toss out the easy, disarming phrase I’d been practicing in my head: Hi! Gosh, it’s really freezing out here, huh? But I just couldn’t do it, worrying that I’d seem endlessly weird for trying to kindle a friendship at a bus stop in the middle of an arctic event. Score one for the adult brain.
As it turns out, trying to once again use those long-forgotten childhood social butterfly muscles requires a little stretching first.
Fortunately, I managed to get my courage up by the time my bus arrived, and I scored my first official jumpscare friendship victory on the ride home. Actually—make that victories!
My fabulous first friendship victims included Mel from Chicago and Millie from Ghana, who, based on the jolly and gregarious conversation happening between the two of them before I approached them on the bus, I assumed had known each other for years. Not so—they’d accidentally performed their own version of this experiment, and had met on the bus only minutes before.
“I’m a really friendly person, but I don’t usually approach other people unless they approach me,” Mel described, their square, wire-rimmed glasses glinting in a passing streetlight as they spoke.
“In Chicago, you’re kinda taught to avoid people at all costs, and to just keep your eyes down.”
“This kind of friendliness is normal in my country!” Millie exclaimed from the window seat beside them. “Everyone talks to everyone like this. And look at us”– she gestured with a fluffy winter glove towards the very ginger, very smiley Mel seated in the aisle seat beside her – “we’ve only just met, and we’re laughing and slapping each other on the backs!”
I was so engrossed in my conversation with Millie and Mel that I nearly missed my stop, which caused the less-than amused bus driver to have to reopen the doors for me.
My next convo was with Bianca, a fellow caffeine fiend I met at The Laughing Goat in Norlin on a Thursday while waiting for my Americano. My in? Complimenting her cute hairpiece. Never underestimate the ability to strike up a conversation via a genuine compliment.
“Things have definitely changed since we were kids,” Bianca lamented. “We used to be able to talk about everything and anything!”
After a bit more chatting, Bianca told me that if I’m looking to make some friends, I should go to the Violet Peak coffee shop at the business school.
“That’s where I go when I’m trying to get distracted from my work,” she laughed. “Very different vibes there from the rest of campus. You’ll see.”
As a journalist, I’m not one to ignore a lead.
At the business building the following Tuesday, I encountered a few failures and one success.
I saw two guys talking animatedly to each other near the entrance when I first arrived, but felt that familiar sense of learned embarrassment at the thought of sidling up to them at their table and hitting them with the tried and true, and completely mortifying, “Hi! What’s your name?”
I know, I know–cluck, cluck.
Next, I tried chatting with the nose-ringed barista at Violet Peak while I ordered (simple small talk, like, ‘I like your necklace!’) but didn’t want to bother her at work, so ultimately abandoned that attempt as well.
My last try before leaving the business building proved much more fruitful than my first two.
Three girls sat together at a tall table down the stairs from the coffee shop, laughing and talking. Two were facing towards me, and one was seated on the other side of the table, with her back to me.
I approached them with all the friendliness of my 10-year-old self, practiced spiel spilling from my mouth before I’d registered any of their faces.
”Hey! This is going to sound super weird, but do you remember when we were kids, and it was so easy to…”
Oops. Turns out, the one who had been facing away from me wasn’t quite a stranger after all—I just hadn’t recognized her from behind.
I hadn’t talked to her in a long while, though, and because of this, I’m calling that particular attempt a solid 2 and ½ of the 10 strangers I talked to for this article.
The other two at the table, named Grace and Abby, were, however, total strangers to me, and their kind and smiling reception of my silly little ramblings about how easy it used to be to make friends reinforced for me that most adults—if they aren’t having a particularly bad or introverted day—are more receptive to chatting like we did in the good old days than you might think.
I also met Joseph this same day, a classmate from a writing course who I hadn’t talked to or learned the name of before approaching him for the article.
I felt inspired by another classmate’s nonfiction workshop story in class that day, which chronicled the dramatic revelation he had had as a kid that cooties weren’t, in fact, real. The crux of the story felt endearingly in line with the inspiration behind the one I am writing here—i.e., the ridiculous, dramatic, easy-ness of being a kid around other kids—and gave me the extra little nudge I needed to collect another convo.
Joseph and I chatted about graduating soon, the possibility of grad school, and his majors—English and computer science—and he told me he wants to write a novel later on. The way I instinctively got excited when I said, “Me too!” felt exactly like when you’re little, and you discover that another kid likes the blue popsicles best too.
If you’re keeping score at home, Joseph put me at my 7th (or 6 1/2, if you factor in the acquaintance I came across by chance who was sitting with Abby and Grace), out of 10 strangers-turned-maybe-friends.
I met Erin, my 8th stranger, walking off the bus at the Regent stop on a much-warmer-than-the-last Wednesday, after admiring their bat keychain the whole ride to campus.
Their smile as I complimented it reminded me why this experiment matters to me.
“Bats don’t get enough appreciation!” they beamed, “So thanks for saying that!”
My 9th stranger was another coffee shop find. I met Katherin at Fen’s Cafe in the Atlas Building, and took the compliment route this time, too. She was wearing black earrings that looked like ornate wagon wheels with a bell hanging from the bottom, and I couldn’t help but comment on them.
“Your earrings are so pretty!” I told her.
We talked about how her friend had gotten them for her as a present from India. While we chatted, I admired her long, red checkered scarf and fuzzy boots. It wasn’t the world’s deepest conversation, but it was a sweet one all the same.
To my surprise, my 10th and final stranger actually approached me, not the other way around.
It was *technically* on campus, and by that I mean I was driving past Euclid when it happened.
I was waiting at a stoplight on my way home around 10pm, wailing the lyrics to an Olivia Rodrigo song (as one does), when I caught the eye of a girl in the passenger seat of the car next to me. While not the star of this interaction, I’ll call the girl a ½ of a talk-to-a-stranger success. She was smiling at me in a way that felt genuine—not like the kind of obligated, quarter-second smile you receive from a grocery store clerk or from the person who holds the door open for you in public—but the kind of smile you’d get from a friend. I smiled back and focused back on the road. But the second the light changed, the driver—a young guy with an afro who I hadn’t noticed before—peeked out from behind his passenger, turned his head towards me and, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, gestured for a race.
Now, I’m friendly, but I don’t have a deathwish (or a court date wish) so I laughingly declined from my own window with a head shake.
But, dear reader, it didn’t end here.
We stopped next to each other again at the next light, with me and Barbie, my 2007 Honda CRV, arriving at the light significantly slower than the other car did. As the other car’s passenger side window began to roll down, I realized that it was a Porsche, dark blue and newly washed.
“Come on, let’s race!” The driver exclaimed, grinning, as if I simply hadn’t understood the first time around. There was someone in the backseat too, but it was too dark to see them. I’ll count them as about 1/18th of a “meet a stranger” success.
“In this old thing?!” I shot back, referencing my car, which is built more for carting around kids and soccer balls than it will ever be for racing on the streets of a college town. “No way she can handle that.”
“Awe, come on!” He prodded. I shook my head, but the smile I gave him was real.
“Alright, I see,” he said, “Pretty girl in a cute car— I like it.”
He asked me where I was from, and what I was doing in Boulder.
“College!” I called from my window.
For the first time in this experiment, the other person—the guy driving—asked for my name first. I’ll cite my surprise at this as the reason I completely forgot to get his name, or the name of his smiling passengers.
This conversation had all the spontaneous, connective energy of when we were kids—only, instead of chats about which scented marker smells best or who should play the shopkeeper in a burgeoning make believe game, it involved an invitation for street racing and some ill-fated flirting by John Porsche.
This conversation, collected across a bridge of dotted white lines and car bodies, was probably my favorite out of all of them. It also put me at 10 strangers, officially concluding my friendship experiment.
My main takeaways from this experiment:
- I probably don’t need to tell you this, but if you’re trying to make some spontaneous friends, setting matters. I found my most success approaching a group of people who were already chatting amongst themselves and seemed open to conversation.
- Something else I probably don’t need to tell you: Common ground matters just as much with adult conversations as it did when we were kids, especially when it comes to spontaneous chats! (Ala, “I want to write a novel too!” with Joseph).
- It’s not only possible to survive talking to 10 strangers (as an introvert, no less), but it can actually be pretty fun, too. I met some new people, learned some new things, and figured out I’m a little braver than I thought I was.
- Just like when we were kids, some conversations I had were more prolific, connective, or fun than others, just depending on who I got along with, and who got along with me. And some people didn’t want to talk at all. But this didn’t deter me at all in my mission to talk to 10 strangers. Clicking more so with some people and less so with others will happen no matter who you are, or how good you are at making friends. Because of this, less-than-stellar convos didn’t mark any kind of failure for me during this experiment.
- This experiment required some level of breaking down some learned adult social norms, which left me with some shifted thoughts on how we’re taught to interact with the world around us. The expectation that we essentially pretend that the people around us don’t exist unless we already know them or have a specific reason to interact, like with an employee at a store, starts to seem plain odd when you really think about it. This experiment, and this epiphany, if you want to call it that, made me want to open my eyes (and mind) a bit more to the people around me in public, even if I don’t plan to try and strike up a conversation with every stranger I pass by in a day.
So, the big money question, after making it to the other end of this experiment: Is it still possible to make friends as adults as easily as we did as kids?
My answer isn’t a basic yes or no. It lives more in the realm of a hopeful “sort of.”
We’ve definitely collected more learned social norms as adults that make those easy days of childhood connectivity a bit harder to grasp. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the days of spontaneous friendship are over just because we’re trying to make friends in the bar, on campus, or at the store, instead of on the playground.
One thing I can say for certain after this experiment is that the friendly energy you put into interacting with others really, truly can come back to you as a result.
I wouldn’t have known to go to the business building if I hadn’t chatted with Bianca. I wouldn’t have gotten that genuine smile from Erin if I hadn’t complimented their keychain. If I hadn’t introduced myself to Millie and Mel, I wouldn’t have been able to connect with Mel over shared experiences in Chicago. If I hadn’t said hi to Joseph, I wouldn’t have learned that we both want to write novels in the future. And the reason I had the conversation I did with the guy in the Porsche was because I smiled at his passenger genuinely enough that the people in that car thought I might be game for some fun.
All this to say: you really can put out some intentional energy when it comes to connecting with others, even as adults. And if my experience is any indication, you might just get some of that energy back.
It may not be quite as easy to make friends as adults as it was when we were kids, but it’s certainly not impossible, as I hope this experiment has exemplified.
If you’re looking to make some new connections out in that big scary world of ours, know that it’s possible! If I, a 20-something introvert, can dust off my childhood social butterfly wings and give them a stretch, you can, too.