Audio Version
Have you been forever searching for your ultimate friendship group? The one where you feel completely understood, accepted, and connected? The group that feels like home, or maybe even better?
Some of us never stop trying to find it.
We join local gyms, start new hobbies, sign up for book clubs, team sports, art classes, and community groups in the hope that this will be the time we find the friendships that were missing in our lives. We keep putting ourselves out there again and again, hoping for the kind of deep, effortless connection that everyone else seems to have… But when it doesn’t happen, it’s easy to blame ourselves.
We might think, “Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe I’m looking in all the wrong places. Maybe everyone else knows how to make friendships work and I don’t. Maybe I’m unlikable and there’s something wrong with me.” These ideal forever friendships have got to be out there somewhere… but where?
What many of us don’t realise is that our expectations around friendship and belonging are shaped in much the same way as our expectations about romantic relationships. Movies like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Hangover, and Toy Story, songs such as Lean on Me, You’ve Got a Friend in Me, and I’ll Be There for You, television shows like Friends (of course), Sex and the City, and social media posts constantly portray friendships as uplifting, seamless, and indestructible.
While we’ve become better at recognising unrealistic expectations around love and romance, we rarely stop to consider how these same influences shape the way we believe friendship, fitting in, and belonging are supposed to feel.
Sense of belonging is a fundamental human need. It’s the feeling that we are accepted, valued, and emotionally safe with others. When this need goes unmet, it can create a persistent sense of loneliness, even when we’re surrounded by people. Over time, it can begin to feel personal, as though failed friendships are saying something about us.
But often, the real difficulty is not that we are incapable or unworthy of connection. It’s that many of us are trying to meet this need through a lens shaped by unrealistic expectations. We hold the belief that one day we will simply “find our people,” and once we do, everything will fall into place. In reality, adult friendships are rarely sustained through instant connection alone. They are influenced by timing, proximity, repetition, emotional availability, shared values and experiences, and life stage. Many meaningful relationships also develop slowly and unevenly, and often don’t resemble the dramatic “found your tribe” moment we’ve come to expect.
Belonging comes with its own challenge. We may find ourselves hiding, softening, or compartmentalising parts of who we are in order to avoid rejection and continue fitting in. This is a silent struggle. When your personality contains many “selves”, i.e., professional, creative, intellectual, social, active, introverted, extroverted, adventurous, emotional, or spiritual, it is difficult to find one group that feels like a complete fit.
Struggling to find a strong sense of belonging does not mean there is something wrong with you, or that you are different, or hard to love. It more often reflects a misalignment between culturally reinforced expectations of how friendships are supposed to work, and your actual experiences. It could also mean that your identity is more expansive than the narrow version of belonging you were taught to expect.
While it can feel uncomfortable when reality falls short of our expectations, it can help to recognise and accept the space between the two. Expectations can still guide us, but we don’t need to hold onto them so tightly.
It may also help to shift from the belief that “these are, and should be, my people entirely” to the understanding that “different people hold different parts of me.” This can reduce the gap between what we hoped for and what relationships realistically provide.
At first, this can feel disjointed or disappointing, but it is often a more accurate reflection of reality, and reality is rarely perfect. When we remind ourselves of this, we may become more open to where life and relationships naturally take us, rather than clinging to what we hoped they would be.
A sense of belonging is often layered and complex, rather than centered around one ideal friendship group. We spend our lives trying to force ourselves into spaces that were never designed to hold all parts of who we are, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. As adults, we come to realise even more that a sense of belonging extends across many areas of life: the people who know us professionally, the friends who share our humour, the communities connected to our hobbies and interests, the family and relationships that ground us, and the slow-burning connections built over time. Belonging becomes less about finding one place where everything aligns, and more about accepting ourselves as complex, layered, and evolving, while allowing expectations to guide us and connection to develop naturally across different spaces as we move through life.