Make your invitations specific

How to increase the chances that a get-together happens

Making friends and maintaining friendships as an adult can be challenging. Everyone is busy. People have the best of intentions, but somehow we wind up scrolling around during our free time rather than getting to know people we’d like to know.

So how to solve this problem? You can suggest getting together with people, but whatever you do, don’t utter the phrase “we should get together sometime.”

This statement is just unworkable. Even if the other person enthusiastically says yes, you are now facing multiple back and forth texts or emails to arrange anything. The odds of the plan falling apart during that rigamarole are high.

Offer limited but confirmed options

Instead, make your invitations more specific. If an acquaintance whose company you enjoy has suggested she’d like to exercise more, you could suggest you two go for a walk together and — this is key — you should offer a limited number of times and places where this would work.

So, you could text this person “Hey, the weather is looking great this week! Would you like to walk at the trail behind the elementary school? I could do Thursday or Friday right after drop-off.”

Or perhaps you’ve chatted amicably with a few parents on your kid’s soccer team. You might get their numbers and then text “Hey, I’m organizing a walk over to Starbucks during practice on Saturday afternoon. Let me know if you’d like to join me or just find me then!”

Or to a colleague whose company you enjoy: “Hey, I want to try that new Vietnamese place that opened around the corner. I’ve got a longer window Thursday at noon, would you like to join me? Let me know if there’s anyone else who’d like to join us too.”

Because these requests are specific, the person can just say “yes” — or maybe the time doesn’t work out (that is a possibility), but in many cases people “match” the bids that others make. If someone genuinely wants to see you, and you’ve suggested Thursday and Friday morning at 9:00 and neither of those work, she is highly likely to suggest another specific time that might. You’re at least closer to something actually happening.

How to answer an invitation

Of course, not everyone in the world reads this newsletter, so it’s possible that you might be the recipient of an earnest but vague “we should get together sometime!” bid. If you’d like to make it happen, then simply make your response as specific as the invitation you would have sent. The goal is to make a get together possible with only one response from the other person.

So you might respond “Yes, I’d love to get together. Want to grab drinks next week after work? I could do Tuesday or Thursday at 5:30, and I love Buck Mulligans near the train station.”

Then hopefully the person will just say yes to one of those — and you will be on your way to some time becoming a specific time.