How to actually make friends in Toronto as an adult

Nobody tells you that the hard part is not meeting people. It is meeting the same person twice.

Toronto is a city of three million people and it is famously difficult to make a friend in. The usual explanation — everyone is busy, the winter is long, the suburbs are far — is true and does not help. What actually goes wrong is more specific, and once you can name it you can do something about it.

You are probably meeting plenty of people

Between work, the gym, the dog park and whatever you did last Saturday, most adults in this city meet a handful of new people every week. Almost none of those turn into anything, and the reason is that friendship needs three things that a chance meeting does not provide: repetition, low stakes, and someone willing to suggest the next thing.

The third one is where it usually dies. Two people have a good conversation, both think “I should message them”, and neither does, because suggesting a coffee to a near-stranger is a small social risk and adults are extremely good at avoiding small social risks.

Pick things that repeat

This is the single highest-return change you can make. A one-off event gives you one conversation with fifteen people. A thing that happens every week gives you fifteen conversations with the same people, and the fourth or fifth of those is where a friendship starts.

In Toronto, the ones that work are mostly free and mostly already exist: a run club that leaves from the same spot every Wednesday, a weekly pick-up game, a choir, a volunteer shift, a Sunday market you always walk through, a bouldering gym at the same hour. Pick one, go six times before you decide whether it is working. Six is the number. Two is not enough to tell you anything.

Lower the stakes on purpose

The easiest invitation to accept is one that costs nothing, is short, has an end time, and is somewhere the other person can leave from. “There’s a free thing at the Bentway on Thursday at seven, I’m going for an hour” is a much easier yes than dinner. It also fails gracefully: if it is awkward, it is awkward for one hour in a public place and then it is over.

This is also why free events are so useful for this. Nobody has to decide whether the other person was worth twenty dollars. Toronto has a lot of them — the City publishes its whole calendar, and a surprising amount of it costs nothing.

Be the one who suggests the next thing

Someone has to, and statistically it is not going to be them. The trick is to make it concrete and dated: not “we should hang out” but “there’s a thing at Christie Pits on Saturday at two, want to come”. A vague invitation asks the other person to do the work of turning it into a plan, and they will not.

You will feel like you are doing all the work for the first few months. You are. It evens out once there is an actual friendship there, and the people who are good at this are almost always just the people who kept suggesting things.

Pick a neighbourhood and stay in it

Toronto is enormous and travel time quietly kills more friendships than personality ever does. A person forty minutes away is somebody you see four times a year. Somebody a twenty-minute walk away is somebody you see when you both happen to be free. Where you can, build your regular things within one part of the city — these are the places people actually meet, and they are grouped by neighbourhood for exactly that reason.

Give it a year

This is the part nobody says. Going from “I know nobody here” to “I have people I can text on a Friday” takes most adults somewhere between six months and two years, and it is not a sign that anything is wrong with you. The people who make it look easy have usually been showing up to the same thing for three years.

And if the first move is the bit you cannot do

That is a real and common problem, and it is the one Churr was built for. You talk to it once; it builds a twin that knows what you are into and when you are free; overnight that twin talks to other people’s twins across Toronto. In the morning you have an introduction and a first thing to do that both sides already agreed on. Nobody had to send the first message. How it works →