How to Make Friends in Retirement (Borrow This Trick From Online Dating)
You can be around perfectly nice women all week and still not have one real friend among them. Most advice about making friends in retirement is logistics, and logistics is the easy half. This post gives you a fifteen-minute exercise that names who you are now and who you’re actually looking for, plus where to meet like-minded women and how to get past small talk.
Nearly every woman I work with wants the same thing. She’s looking for like-minded women and has no idea where they are.
One of my clients put it to me this way: “Are we all just sitting in our own little globes, wishing for a friend?”
She wasn’t isolated. She had a calendar with things on it and plenty of people who would have been glad to see her. What she didn’t have was one woman she could call on a bad day and tell the truth to.
The most useful thing I know about making friends in retirement comes from an online dating profile, which is not where I expected to find it.
What my friend told me about my dating profile
After my divorce, I put up a profile on a dating site. A guy friend of mine was on the site too, and he offered to read mine and tell me what a man would make of it.
He told me it was only half written. It described me, and there was nothing in it about who I was looking for.
He said a guy reads your profile and works out whether he checks most of your boxes. If you never say what the boxes are, he has nothing to check.
So I wrote the second half. Someone who votes the way I do. Someone who drinks once or twice a week and not more, and no drugs. No polyamory, though you do you. Enough education to match my own, and someone who had been married and had children, so he’d understand the life I was living.
Writing down what I wanted in a man felt wonderful. Until then the whole thing had been about whether I was good enough for whoever read it. Now I was the one deciding.
Then I went on dates. There was a photojournalist who covered wars and wrote about people living deep in the Amazon, and I dubbed him Indiana Jones. He was, I am sorry to report, a terrible kisser.
Then there was the artist. I arrived at the restaurant, spotted him waiting in a booth, and knew before I sat down that we weren’t a match. By the time I got home there was a message from him about how great our connection had been. Were we sitting at the same table?
Every one of those dinners taught me something. Some of what I’d written down mattered more than I’d expected, and a few things I hadn’t thought to write down turned out to be what I cared about most.
Making friends in retirement is the same assignment
I think of it as the two-halves exercise. Before you go looking for more places to meet people, it helps to write down who you are now as a friend and who you’re actually looking for. Once you know what a good match looks like, it gets much easier to recognize one when she’s sitting across the table from you.
Almost all the advice about making friends after 60 is logistics. Join the class. Introduce yourself. All of it assumes the only thing standing between you and a friend is opportunity.
When we retire, we lose daily contact with our colleagues, and that’s usually when the friend question turns urgent. If you’ve been surprised by how much you miss people from work you were never that close to, I wrote about why that happens here.
What’s easy to miss is what you’re also getting, which is a fresh start. You get to build friendships in better ways this time, without repeating what hasn’t worked.
If you’ve always been the one who organizes everything, you can decide not to be that person now. If you want to text a couple of times a week and she wants to text daily, you get to say so at the start instead of two years in.
Write both halves
The first half is who you are now. It’s easy to assume you already know that one. If you spent 30 years introducing yourself by what you did for a living, who you are now is a real question, and it tends to be harder for women who were good at their jobs.
The second half is who you’re looking for, and it covers more ground than it looks. We all say we want like-minded women, and almost none of us have said out loud what we mean.
Shared values are part of it. So is how she does friendship. Does she take the initiative? Does she listen, or does she only want to be heard?
If you’re new here:
The first half is the one that stops most women. My free Who Am I Now? Guide has five short reflections to help you answer it.
Look at what you bring
Writing the first half means looking at your friendship habits too. Some are worth carrying forward. Others may be ready for retirement.
A client of mine was the one everyone wanted around. She organized, she drove, she remembered. She made everyone feel like they were her closest person. She gave so much that her own needs always came last, and she ended up resentful and feeling like nobody really saw her.
What she said to me was: I don’t want to be the ringleader. The camp counselor.
Before you go looking for your people, you might think about what you want them to get when they get you.
Someone has to go first
Knowing who might make a good friend gets you to the door. What happens after that decides whether you ever get past acquaintance.
If we don’t tell people what’s really going on with us, the friendship stays on the surface. You can have coffee with a woman for three years and still be acquaintances, because neither of you has said anything that felt risky.
Another client was asked to step down from a volunteer position she’d held for years. They still wanted her there. She had done the job so well it no longer needed doing. It devastated her.
She could have hidden that. Instead she told two women in the group how much it hurt. She didn’t hint. She said it was killing her.
One of them put a hand on her shoulder and told her about nearly dying, twice. The other told her they loved her and to stop putting herself down.
Once she admitted the pain, she told me, everything else opened up. She came away feeling genuinely connected to those women.
Communication researcher Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas put rough numbers on how long friendship takes: somewhere around 40 to 60 hours together before someone becomes a casual friend, 80 to 100 before a friendship takes hold, and 200-plus before she’s a close friend.
The kind of time mattered. Leisure time, meaning relaxing, hanging out over food or drinks, or watching TV or a movie together, built closeness. Hours spent working side by side didn’t do the same job, which helps explain why so many work friendships don’t last after retirement.
My first reaction to those numbers was, “Gosh, this is going to take a lot of time. Bummer.” But the research points to something more useful than a stopwatch. Catching up, joking around, and serious conversation brought the college students closer, and small talk didn’t. Practically, that makes a standing walk every week a better bet than a lovely lunch three times a year.
Hall’s participants were college freshmen and adults who had recently moved to a new city, not retirees, and he wonders himself whether older adults need more hours. So treat the numbers as rough guideposts rather than a retirement timetable.
Depth doesn’t arrive with time. It arrives when somebody goes first. That willingness is part of who you are, too. If we want friends who talk about what matters, we have to be willing to start those conversations.
Not sure what you’d even say?
Going first means saying something true about your life, and that’s hard when you’re not sure what’s true for you anymore. A Retirement Clarity Session is a good place to work that out. It’s 45 minutes on Zoom for $97, spent on the one place you’re stuck, and you’ll leave with written notes and one concrete next step.
Try This: The Two-Halves Exercise
All you need is fifteen minutes and a piece of paper. Nobody sees this but you.
Part one, who you are now. What you value, and which of those you’d want a friend to share. How much time with people leaves you full, and how much leaves you depleted. What you actually like doing. How open you want a friendship to be.
Part two, the harder part of that same half. How do you want to show up differently so history stops repeating itself? Are you the one who always invites, or the one who waits to be asked? Do you do more for your friends than they do for you? Do you go quiet when things are hard, then reappear once you’re fine? Write down one thing you’d like to do differently this time.
Part three, your friend wish list. Write down what you want in a friend, and be specific. Someone who asks about your life and listens to the answer. Someone who takes her turn, sharing as well as listening. Someone who can talk about something besides the grandchildren and everyone’s health. Someone whose politics don’t make your jaw tighten. Someone who wants to see you about as often as you want to see her.
The list works like a metal detector at the beach. Once you know what you’re listening for, it beeps when you get close.
So where do you actually find her?
When this ran on Sixty and Me, a reader told me I’d skipped the part she needed most. She’d taken classes at the local college, gone to church, joined the library book club, and signed up at a gym. She wanted to know where the people are. She’s right that I left it out.
The best places aren’t the ones with the most women in them. They’re the ones where women have a reason to talk to each other.
This fall I joined a seasonal circle for women. The facilitator brought prompts, and we went around and answered them one at a time. It was a wonderful way to get to know each other, practice being honest, and hear what other women are struggling with. I’m already looking forward to the next one.
In a class, a religious service, or a gym, you’re near other women, but everyone is facing the front or focused on her own workout. A table turns you toward each other and gives your hands something to do while you talk.
A table helps. I learned to knit this year, and so did one of my clients, and we’ve both noticed the same thing. Yarn shops attract women who bring their projects, sit around a table, and talk for two hours. Many shops have free or inexpensive drop-in hours, and plenty of libraries run the same thing. Quilting groups, pottery studios, and community gardens work the same way, and so does any group where women make something together and the conversation happens on its own.
Women you already know count too. Before you go looking anywhere new, it can help to take the list you just wrote and ask whether a woman already in your orbit matches more of it than you’d noticed. It’s easy to go looking for a stranger when a good match may be someone you already know.
Two places built for exactly this. AARP runs Ethel Gathering Groups, private local Facebook groups led by volunteer organizers who plan in-person get-togethers for older women: coffee, walks, brunches, workshops. They started in 2024, they’re free to join, and you don’t need an AARP membership. One caveat worth knowing is that each group covers a big region, sometimes several counties, so it helps to check how far the nearest events actually are.
Meetup is the other one. Browsing and signing up as an attendee is free, though individual events sometimes charge, and you can search by interest rather than by age. Local Facebook groups and Nextdoor are worth searching too. A reader told me a woman on her Nextdoor started a group for women over 55.
That’s how I found my circle. A woman who’d just moved to the area posted on my community’s Facebook page that she was looking to make friends, and several women suggested the circle. I looked into it and joined.
Listening for the connection. Another Sixty and Me reader said this better than I did in the comments: knowing where to meet people is half of it, and the other half is recognizing the connection when you find it. What I listen for is whether she asks me something about myself and then waits for the answer. The other is whether she says something slightly true instead of only pleasant. A woman who tells you the class is harder than she expected has handed you an opening.
Then there’s how you show up. That’s the question I’d add to hers. When you sense there might be something there, what do you actually do? Most of us default to pleasant and safe, and I include myself in that. Saying one true thing a notch sooner than feels comfortable is what turns a conversation into the start of something.
Inviting one woman. The next step is inviting one woman on her own, rather than the whole group. Coffee after class or a walk on Saturday is plenty, and something easy to repeat is even better. This is where nearly everyone stalls, because asking a woman you barely know to spend an hour with you feels uncomfortably like asking someone on a date. I’ve never found a way around it.
Or you can start something yourself. The woman who didn’t want to be the camp counselor did exactly that. She started a book club and got specific about who she wanted in it: professional women over 60 who come for a real conversation. Six women was plenty. She’s meeting people through a painting class too, and a women’s organization, and friends of friends, and she’s doing it as someone who gives a little less than she used to.
I did a version of this myself. My bestie and one of her friends each invited one or two women they knew, and five of us got together over snacks at her house. Now we have dinner once a month, out or at someone’s house, and a group text where we share photos of our travels and grandkids. We’ve even planned a weekend away in the mountains.
None of this is fast. Hall’s numbers say it takes real hours, and a coffee after class is one hour. What both halves change is whether those hours go to a woman who could actually become your friend.
A First Step
You may finish the exercise with everything you need: a clear picture of the women you want around you, and one woman you already want to know better. That’s a good place to start.
But if the first half stopped you cold, that’s useful information. Not knowing who you are without the role that organized your life for 30 years reaches a lot further than friendship. It shows up in what you say yes to, how you spend an open afternoon, and what you do with the next twenty years.
“Elaine asked great questions that opened me up and before I knew it, we were talking deeply and (for me!) surprisingly about what I was experiencing as a newly retired person.”
— Nancy H., Retired Professor
Getting clearer on who you are now is what a Retirement Clarity Session is for. It’s 45 minutes on Zoom, $97, to talk it through with someone who has no stake in what you decide.
A few days beforehand you fill out a short reflection, about fifteen minutes, based on Martin Seligman’s research into what makes a life feel good. That alone shows you where your life feels full right now and where it feels thin.
After our session, I send you written notes with your key insights and one concrete next step. Women tell me they pull those notes back up weeks later, on the nights the doubt comes back.
Frequently Asked Questions
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I’d start by writing down who you are now and who you’re looking for, before you go anywhere. Most advice jumps straight to where to go, and the going works far better once you can recognize a good match when she’s in front of you. Then I’d look for places where you’ll see the same women regularly and have a reason to talk, like a knitting group or a standing weekly walk, rather than one-off events.
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Most friendships stay polite until somebody says something honest about what’s really going on, and that feels risky, especially if you spent years being the one who had it handled at work. So a lot of us keep things pleasant and wait for the other woman to go first. Retirement also ends the daily contact work used to provide, so you have to make time together on purpose.
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Research by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas suggests roughly 40 to 60 hours together before someone becomes a casual friend, around 80 to 100 hours before a friendship takes hold, and 200-plus hours before someone becomes a close friend. Leisure time, like hanging out or sharing a meal, built closeness, while time spent working together didn’t. The study was done with college students and adults who had recently moved, not retirees, and Hall himself wonders whether older adults need more hours. Treat the numbers as rough guideposts rather than a timetable.
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In my experience, the easiest places are ones where women sit facing each other with something to do with their hands. A drop-in knitting session at a yarn shop or library, a quilting group, a pottery studio, or a community garden all work that way, and a lecture or a gym usually doesn’t. The places you already go can work too, once you start inviting one woman at a time instead of waiting for the group to become friends.
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Yes. AARP runs Ethel Gathering Groups, private local Facebook groups led by volunteer organizers who host coffees, walks, and other in-person events for older women. They’re free and don’t require an AARP membership, though each group covers a wide region, so it helps to check how far the nearest events actually are. Local Facebook and Nextdoor groups are also worth searching for women-over-55 groups in your area. You can also start your own. My bestie and a few friends of friends did, and the five of us have had dinner together every month since.
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Seeing her again on purpose helps, and so does letting one conversation go a step deeper than usual. Time together builds the friendship, but time alone isn’t enough. If you want a friendship where you can talk about what matters, at some point one of you has to risk saying something real.
Related Posts to Keep Exploring
Why Retirement Feels Harder for High-Achieving Women (And What Actually Helps) (The Identity Shift)
Why You Miss People From Work You Were Never That Close To (Belonging & Real Connection)
5 Retirement Surprises Women Encounter — And How to Embrace Them (Retirement Lifestyle Planning)
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Know a woman who keeps saying she wants to meet like-minded women and can’t find them? The two-halves exercise in this post is the part nobody tells her to do first. Use the share buttons to send it her way.
About Elaine
Elaine Belansky, PhD, is a retirement transition coach who helps thoughtful, accomplished women design a next chapter that feels intentional, meaningful, and fully their own.
After a 30-year university career in public health and education, Elaine now supports women navigating the identity shifts, emotional complexity, and loss of structure that often accompany retirement. Drawing on psychological research and lived experience, she guides clients through a structured process to clarify who they are becoming, design a weekly rhythm that supports energy and engagement, and choose ways to contribute that feel purposeful — not obligatory.
She is also a regular contributor to Sixty and Me, where she writes about the emotional and identity shifts women face in retirement.
Learn more at elainebelansky.com.
Adapted from an article originally published on Sixty and Me.
