Making one new friend is hard enough. This woman is on a quest to make 52

“Let’s be friends?”

It’s the kind of thing a child might ask the kid playing next to them in the sandbox. With a simple nod and a sharing of a shovel, the relationship is cemented, and the besties go off hand-in-hand.

But once childhood is behind you, making friends takes a lot more energy, intention and vulnerability. It’s a process that can frankly be both scary and exhausting despite the potential reward.

So imagine, as an adult, trying to reach out to make a friend, every week, for an entire year.

That’s what 25-year-old Miriam Amdur is attempting to do with 52 Friends, a project born out of a period of loneliness during the pandemic.

The product marketer from Richmond Hill is on a mission to document a connection each week with someone new or reacquaint herself with someone from her past. She knows the conversations will be about friendship, but is also hopeful that friendship may come out of the conversations.

She is nearly halfway. She just published her blog post on Friend #20 — an author with 4,867 Facebook friends and whose attention Amdur caught with the emailed subject line “let’s be friends?”

Friend #19 was Amdur’s old high school teacher; Friend #10 was someone Amdur had seen in passing while studying business at York University but had never spoken to; Friend #5 was a woman she met at a corporate networking event.

At this rate, she’ll make Friend #52 in the fall. While that may seem like a lot — Canadians typically claim to have a network of about 10 people they rely on — “if you really dig into your network,” said Amdur, “you start realizing that 52 is not that difficult.” And the ultimate goal, she adds, is not the actual number, but to address the stigma around loneliness and encourage others to reach out and prioritize friendship.

“I don’t want this to be seen as an oversimplification for wellness,” said Amdur. “I don’t think meeting a bunch of people will help with loneliness, (but) people are very vulnerable with me and I’m vulnerable with them, and I think that is what helps with the loneliness, when you sit with someone and you feel a sense of closeness to them.”

Survey looks at loneliness

A 2021 StatsCan survey found that more than one in 10 Canadians over age 15 always, or often, felt lonely. Young women and people not part of a couple reported the highest levels of loneliness.

“Pre-pandemic, people did not talk much about this,” said Julie Aitken Schermer, a professor of psychology at Western University. Admitting to loneliness “was almost like a negative characteristic … it came across as a weakness.”

Loneliness, said Schermer, whose research has determined a genetic component, is largely and generally, across cultures, found in two stages of life: in adolescence through the early 20s, and in the elderly.

But during the pandemic, when nearly everyone was either isolated or in small social bubbles, we came to share a heightened sense of what we were missing in terms of relationships.

“There’s a stigma surrounding loneliness,that if you’re lonely, you’re unlikeable,” said Amdur. “And I don’t think that’s true at all.

“It’s just sometimes we end up in situations in our lives when for one reason or another, we feel lonely.”

For Amdur, that happened while she was in Miami. After initially isolating with her family in Richmond Hill and going on walks with nearby friends she had known since Grade 5, she moved to the sunny tech hot spot, popular with young people, and continued to work remotely. But eventually, an unhappy romantic relationship, some back and forth to Toronto, an argument with an old friend while travelling, and a burst appendix all wore her down.

“I really felt it throughout my entire body, this loneliness, this depression. I felt so sad and down.”

Someone she knew suggested she needed to surround herself with people she liked. The idea for 52 Friends was planted.

Friend #1 was actually her dad’s, one of the first people he met after arriving in Canada from Israel more than 40 years ago. While Amdur knew the man and his wife, she couldn’t recall ever really talking to them. The couple invited her over to their Miami condo for Shabbat dinner.

That first post was dated Oct. 29, 2022. Each week since — usually on Sunday — Amdur publishes a recount of her most recent connection in a lively style that is full of self-revelation.

While there has sometimes been hesitation, especially from men, most people have said yes to Amdur’s overtures. “The person has to openly welcome you into their life and you have to openly welcome them into your life,” she said. “They need space for a friend and you need space for a friend.”

Reconnecting with teacher

Her most surprising burgeoning friendship so far, she admits, is with Mr. Shaw, who taught her Grade 10 history and Grade 12 philosophy.

Still not ready to drop the honorific and just call him Wayne — “She can make that transition if she wishes,” he told the Star — Amdur said she loved his classes, excelling in them. But more importantly, Mr. Shaw, she said, created an environment where students could be themselves.

That ease was still apparent nearly eight years later when they agreed to meet for coffee.

“It was quite surprising how comfortable it all was,” said Shaw, 61, who is retired from York Region District School Board. “As a student she was bright and lively, and conversations were thoughtful and reflective, even at that point, so it was a continuation of that, with more age and experience under our belts.”

One of Shaw’s best friends had just died and so there was a poignancy to their conversation, which ranged from relationships to comedy and religion.

“It provided reflection as to how much I enjoyed teaching,” said Shaw. “I walked away from it with a real sense of how fortunate I was to have taught and met some of the students I did.”

Different friends fill different needs, though, and Amdur thinks that when it comes to her former teacher, she’ll seek him out to discuss ideas. They’ve already begun to share reading recommendations.

With Friend #5, the connection is different. At 29, Lilian Gordon is closer in age to Amdur. She also works in marketing. They first met at a tech networking event in Toronto last fall, where after a speed-round of introductions, the two declared to each other, “You’re my favourite person.”

“(Miriam) is really easy to connect with instantly,” said Gordon, recalling how Amdur was vulnerable and talked about her personal life. “That’s so rare.I just felt like I knew her a lot more after five minutes than anyone else there.”

Gordon agreed to sit down for the 52 Friends project. That meeting led to more texting and hanging out, including a recent dinner party Amdur threw for a handful of her new friends.

The two have gone from industry peers to something more — potentially best friends, an idea both raise with hope in their voices.

Amdur expects out of 52 people she will profile, she’ll end up with a handful of really strong connections. “It’s obviously a very personal experience. I may need five close friends to feel not lonely, but someone else may only need one.”

It really is about the quality of the friendship over quantity, said professor Schermer.

Past research that put numbers on the scope of friendship has been somewhat debunked over the years because it very much depends on the individual: whether you are an extrovert or an introvert. The problem with such data, said Schermer, “is it made people feel inadequate ... like, ‘I need one more friend and then I have the ideal number.’”

She added, “I have a couple of good friends and a dog that I talk to, so that’s sufficient for me,” noting Gromit was lying on the floor at her feet in her office.

Schermer acknowledged, however, how challenging it can be for young people to make connections, especially in person. Where once she used to walk into lecture halls and had to shush the students so she could begin teaching, she now walks into silence, everyone’s head down looking at a phone or computer. Schermer makes her students put their electronics away and talk to each other for 10 minutes: “They look like I just asked them to donate an organ. They’re terrified.”

“It is hard to make friends in your late 20s,” Gordon agreed, “and it was even more challenging because of the pandemic because you didn’t necessarily have those spaces like work or school (to meet people).” But, she added, she finds Amdur’s project has assuaged some of her own fear about reaching out to people: “Taking that first step is usually the hardest part.”

Since launching in October, Amdur is feeling better, less lonely. She hopes to eventually turn her friendship diary into a book and inspire others by her storytelling.

“I think that’s the power that this has. What I can do is encourage people to reach out to an old friend or check in on someone who they may think could be lonely.”

SHARE: