How to make friends and deepen your relationships, in 7 steps

Initiating new friendships can be complicated if you are experiencing social stagnation. What to do?

Many of the things we enjoy in our day-to-day lives exist because of our ability to connect emotionally with other people. Human beings are highly social, which is why we tend to form bonds with each other on a constant basis, whether formal or informal.

However, it is not only the quantity that matters; the quality of these social ties must also be taken into account. In particular, the possibility of having friends is one of the aspects that produces the most happiness and satisfaction. But this is not something that is easy for everyone. That is why, in this article, we will review some tips on how to make friends more easily.

How to make friends: 7 tips

These guidelines to follow are not essential to find new friends, although having them as a reference in our daily lives will help to achieve this goal. The fundamental thing is to be clear that each case is unique, and it is necessary to know how to adapt these steps to the context in which you live.

1. Ignore stereotypes

There are people whose main difficulty when it comes to making friends is that they are repulsed by the idea of being seen with the kind of people for whom they feel affinity.. It is easy, for example, that if you have grown up in a relatively homogeneous social environment certain types of friendships are strange or even generate criticism, but submitting to these unwritten rules is almost always worse than breaking those rules based on misunderstanding and stigmas.

At the end of the day, what is achieved by going beyond this peer pressure is to have access to a much greater variety of possible friendships than we had before, and while this may have somewhat negative consequences on some personal relationships in the group that previously occupied most of our lives, the problem was already there long before, although not in an overt way. If someone does not accept us for not being in their schemes by showing us as we are, their friendship was very relative.

2. If you can use the Internet, do it

The use of the Internet is highly stigmatized, as there are people who mistakenly believe that friendships and relationships that begin in this virtual environment are less sincere and "natural" than those that were formed decades ago, when computers did not exist or had a much more limited versatility.

But this makes no sense at all: the network is a perfect place for break with many of the limitations of the material environment in which we have grown up or in which we are living. or in which we are living. For example, if we have developed a hobby that no one in our environment shares with us, it makes no sense to refuse to use the Internet to find more people with these tastes.

In fact, it is very easy to access forums and websites specialized in very specific topics, so that we are guaranteed to be able to find potential friends with similar interests to the ones we have..

3. Cultivate your cultural background

There is nothing to keep a good conversation going like knowing a little bit of everything, having general culture. Even if what we know about a topic is very little, it can help to develop an interesting dialogue in which doubts are resolved, for example, about the country our interlocutor comes from.

4. Take care of your non-verbal language

In this regard, the main thing you should know is that it is good to follow two principles: look them in the eye and not to have a non-verbal language associated with tension and a defensive attitude. In addition, externalizing your positive emotions always helps, since smiles are contagious (as long as they are not forced). This is one of the most useful tips to know how to make friends, since its effects are noticeable from the first moment.

5. Start to lose the fear of starting a conversation.

This step is important to leave behind many of the limitations linked to shyness. limitations linked to shyness and the fear of making a bad impression. It is complex and requires weeks of work, but it can be learned.

The main idea behind this process is that content matters much less than form, and that your attitude can make a seemingly absurd topic of conversation very playful and not seem strange or out of context if it conveys self-confidence.

6. Boost your spontaneity

Avoid memorizing very detailed behavioral guidelines; it is preferable to keep in mind very basic and intuitive ideas about what to do, and do it without thinking too much. This way, your attention will be focused on the interaction, your attention will be focused on the real-time interaction with the other person, not on the "script".and not on the "script" you have prepared, which, by definition, is something that is outside of the actual dialogue.

7. It is not necessary to form large groups

Having friends does not mean being part of a large group of friends. This is something that is hard to understand especially when you are very young, because at certain ages the usual tendency is to socialize in "networks-2 of many people who know each other.

But having friends who don't know each other is perfectly valid, so it's not worth worrying about whether or not they like each other. Trying to bring them together in a very forced way is often counterproductive, especially if you've known those people relatively recently.