7 Tips to Make Friends When You Have an Empty Nest

Be brave and practice​

Jen McDonald, 53, is a pro at making friends, having moved a dozen times during her husband’s 30-year military career. She now lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is the author of You Are Not Alone: Encouragement for the Heart of a Military Spouse. Making friends wasn’t always easy, she says. In her early 20s, she was so nervous about attending a women’s group that she convinced her husband to wait for her in the entryway. “I’m not like that at all now,” she says. “I think it’s just something you must practice. You reach out to people and see how it goes.”

​There have been times in her life when that bravery was important, she says, such as when her kids left home.

​“When your kids are young, you are automatically connected with people because you’re going to sit in for practice or you’re dropping them off or you’re at the pool or wherever,” she says. “And then you kind of hit that phase as they’re teenagers where you phase out of that. And it is challenging at this age, you kind of have to go seek it out.”​

Be vulnerable​

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Friendships should be “whispers of confidentiality,” says Billy Baker, a reporter with The Boston Globe and author of We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends. When Baker, 46, was assigned a story about male friendship, it sparked a quest to reconnect with longtime buddies and to make new ones. Baker’s kids haven’t yet reached independence, but his search for friends took him beyond fellow parents, setting him up to be prepared for empty nesting. One key to his success was vulnerability, a challenge for most men, he says. ​

“Putting yourself out there is always going to be a vulnerable thing, but anytime I put myself out there, the universe reciprocated by rewarding me,” Baker says. “By making myself vulnerable, it made it OK for other guys to feel vulnerable.” ​

Be intentional​

Fluker uses her commute to call friends. “If they’re up, we may say, ‘OK, Wednesdays at 6 a.m., we’re going to do a 15-minute phone call,’ ” she says. “We know we can’t do that every day, but maybe like once a week or once every other week, we’re going to schedule a phone call.”

Baker organized Wednesday night gatherings for guys at a friend’s barn. That eventually morphed into something more meaningful and flexible. “I built a squad,” he says. “I didn’t have a squad, a gang, a crew, and now I do.” The social evenings are no longer limited to Wednesday nights and can take place anytime with whoever might be available. ​

Be habitual​

“If you really want to reap the health benefits — the health miracles of connection and friendship — it needs to be something that’s as much a part of your daily life as your diet and your fitness,” Baker says. “That’s where I feel great. That’s when it’s every day. It’s now a habit, and I’ve made it a habit for the people I’m connected with.” ​

Be optimistic​

Optimism is key for meeting people, Franco says. “If you’re pessimistic, you’re not even going to try,” she says. ​

Assume people are going to like you or be glad to hear from you, she advises. “There was recently a study that came out that found that our friends are happier to receive our rekindling text messages than we think they might be,” Franco says. “And the more surprised by it they are, because they haven’t heard from us in a while, the happier they actually are.” ​

Use the right technology​

Baker believes that although social media sites such as Facebook create the illusion of having “friends,” what he refers to as his “tribal media” — more intimate forms of electronic communication ­­— is best for truly connecting. “Social media is when you get your megaphone and you broadcast to anyone that wants to listen,” he says. “Tribal media, which is the group text, which is the group Zoom, those things feel like they have value.” ​

Be welcoming​

Spending holidays as a single parent while her husband was deployed encouraged McDonald to think less about her own loneliness and more about other people. “There’s always someone, and I think when we get too inwardly focused and we’re just unhappy or lonely, we stop seeing what’s right around us,” she says. “I think that because of the years of being a new person [after moving to a new place], my eyes are drawn to the edge of whatever room I’m in. If I’m at a work conference, if I’m at church, I’ll look for that person that’s just kind of by themselves because I still relate to that.” ​