Janice McCabe: Friendship Markets - January 23, 2026
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neutral zone, where every perspective gets diplomatic immunity. This is The Last Show with David Cooper.
Making friends as an adult can feel weirdly hard. Like everyone else has theirs locked in and how do you do it? But what if that doesn't have to be you? What if you can make friends as an adult? You just have to think about it a little differently. I'm here with someone who's recently written about this in the New York Times. The name of her piece is called I Study Friendship, Here's How You Make Lasting Friends. Her name is Janice McCabe. She's a sociology professor at Dartmouth College. Janice, welcome to the show.
Great to be with you.
Perhaps it's the case that people blame their own awkwardness for not making friends. Is that true? Like, are people just too awkward as adults to make friends?
I mean, sometimes people do say the wrong thing or get in their own way. But I find that more often, right, there are times when making friends in our lives feels effortless and other times it feels really challenging. And if it's easy, it might be a friendship market that you've stumbled upon. Yeah, I...
Moved to New York five years ago, and it just, I don't know, it felt like everyone had their groups when I first moved here, and I couldn't penetrate in. Time behind the wheel is kind of how we fix that, my partner and I, but why does it feel like when you move to a new place or enter a new context, like a new job or something, or perhaps for young people, a new school, it just feels like it's not open to you?
Yeah, so I use that term friendship market to describe just what you'd captured there, which is the idea that sometimes we come to a new place, a new job, a new city, a new school, and we're looking for friends. We're in the market, but other people aren't the other people that are there. So we're there, you know, ready to like buy and sell our friendship to talk about it in this kind of crass sort of way. And other people aren't nearly as open to that.
It's like a board of a company.
What challenges do adults face when making new friends?
They're not looking for more seats. Is there something wrong with you in that moment? Or do you need to start thinking about it like I'm in a new place? I got to find a friendship market that's open for business.
Yeah, that later point. So, you know, there were people that I interviewed that did, you know, all the right things, you might say, personally, interpersonally, in trying to make friends, but they hadn't found a market. And so the piece that I wrote in the New York Times talks about times when People, you know, are shifting their identity or looking to deepen some part of who they are. And they stumble into places like I talk about this group for new moms. But there can be other things. So rather than just taking a yoga class or a chess class, if you're really looking to become like passionately active, part of that, you know, for that to be part of who you are. You're more likely to find a group or a friend or possibly a community there.
For me, I was beginning stand-up comedy about 11 years ago, and I started hanging out at this open mic with a lot of other new beginner comedians. And I reflect on that time as the time where I made the most friends. Some of those people are still my closest friends. Applying this kind of framework, that it was a friendship market, I guess it wasn't luck. It wasn't something I did that was super intelligent around friend-making. It was just everybody in this new context was looking for community. in that moment, and it was perhaps the most open friendship market I'd ever found. What would you recommend to people to find friendship markets, I guess, like I found 11 or 12 years ago?
Yeah, I think, you know, to look at your interests, you know, not to just show up to something that you have absolutely no interest in, in hopes of making friends, because that's not going to work out either. But similarly, one of the people that I talked to spoke about an improv group being a place that they found community, too. And, you know, it wasn't something at first that they were looking to, you know, become a part of their identity, but it was.
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