One day when I was 10 years old, I walked over to a new girl I had just met, offered her a jelly bean, and asked if she wanted to be friends. She took the jelly bean on offer and said yes. It turned out she lived on the same street as me and for three years we were inseparable best friends. Now that I’m on the other side of 30, I’m left pondering the question – when did making friends with other people get so hard to do?

It’s easy to make friends and stay close to people when you see them every day and share bonding adolescent experiences with them. (Having not gone to public school, I can only conjur up images of cliched coming-of-age movies, but I assume those have some basis in truth.) If you’re lucky, you’ll carry your schoolmates into your 20’s – and if you’re really lucky, you’ll take them with you even further.

But once you leave school/uni and get out into the real world, you find it a different game altogether; and if you don’t keep your old connections, you’re socially screwed. Start a new job, take up a new hobby, have a sea change or move to a new town and you’ll find an established social circle which may or may not have room for you. They don’t particularly mind you joining them, but it’s quite clear that you’re the “new guy”, the outsider, at best that kinda cool person they haven’t quite yet made their minds up about.

And for some reason society puts a taboo on loneliness and turns it into something to be ashamed of, to be scared of, to be hidden under the carpet. People associate loneliness with desperation and deeply distrust both. So in order to make new friends, you have to play it cool, you have to act like you don’t need new friends. Because “Hey, I think you’re cool and I’d really like it if we could be friends,” just doesn’t exist in the adult vocabulary. The catch is that if you’re too good at playing it cool, you only end up convincing people you don’t need their friendship. And that gets you nowhere.

So you try to find the balance, but you try way too hard. You wrangle invites to things, you stand on edges of conversations pretending you’re included, itching for a chance to jump in with something relevant and contribute. You do the washing up at every damn party, you volunteer for the jobs nobody else wants and somehow it’s always your shout for coffees or beers. You go out of your way to be nice, to seek out an unfilled niche in the group, settle into it and make yourself indispensable.

And if you manage to find someone who might actually be a potential BFF, you get excited. You bombard a them with emails, texts, invitations and Facebook friendship requests. Congratulations, now you’re known as “intense” at best, “desperate” at worst (and the word “stalker-ish” also springs to mind. They now think you’re weird and will slowly back away while you’re talking to them,

Maybe this is just how it is for me. Maybe all the home-schooling fried all my social circuits into oblivion, and I’m doomed to be hot mess of awkward behavior. But I know one thing for sure: I would give anything for the days when you could just walk up to someone, offer them a jelly bean, and ask them to be your friend. Failing that, can someone please produce a line of “let’s be friends!” greeting cards (perhaps with an awkward turtle motif)?