Trouble making friends as an adult? There’s an app for that!

Making friends for young adults is not as easy as it used to be. Whether you’re working from home, commuting on a train filled with people wearing earbuds, or spending more time online than in person, those connections are harder to come by.

But Boston 25 News found many people in our area are now using apps that were originally set up for dating, to meet life-long friends.

Prerana Tirodkar and Kassie Little sat down with Boston 25 recently at Tatte in downtown Boston to share how they used the Bumble for Friends app earlier this year to become friends.

“I had joined all the Facebook groups, I did all the social meetups and I felt like it was basically a group of let’s go and do something together, not let’s make a connection,” Kassie told anchor Rachel Keller.

“I didn’t know anyone when I moved to Boston and I was like, ‘Okay, where do I meet people?’” added Prerana.

Bumble for Friends General Manager Beth Berger says Boston has a lot of app users who are new to the city for school or a job opportunity and others who lived here for a while and joined for different reasons.

“Maybe you’re the first of your friends to have a kid, or you’ve gone through a breakup and you’re trying to figure out who are my people now,” Berger said. “We are in a moment where many of ways that we’ve used to make new friends and build local community have changed with remote work and other changes over the last few years.”

Lane Moore, author of the book: “You Will Find Your People,” says despite what you may see in someone’s Instagram feed, the struggle to connect is real right now.

“When you’re a kid, all it really takes to form a friendship is like, ‘Do you like blue? I like blue.’ When we’re adults, we’ve been through so much. We’re these complex people and finding a really good fit can be really, really challenging,” Moore said.

Moore cautions friendship apps can come with some of the same pitfalls as dating apps: Being ghosted... or finding a bad fit.

“If it was that easy to hop on an app and meet a best friend and have everything go perfectly for the rest of your life, no one would ever be lonely. So obviously it’s more complicated than that,” Moore said. “I wish we treated friendships more like romantic relationships in terms of realizing that they’re going to take work.”

Prerana and Kassie say they joined the app because they’re willing to put in the work, especially now that they’ve formed a bond.

“That’s every relationship, right? If you want to build a community, you need to put in the work,” said Prerana.

She and Kassie say they’ve used the app to meet each other, but also to make a group of friends. They recently went to the Taylor Swift movie opening weekend with a group of new friends, saying sometimes the larger groups are more comfortable at first.

Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.

Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW

©2023 Cox Media Group