Recognizable questions
- ‘Are you getting something to drink after the training?’
- ‘Shall we go for a walk together next week?’
- ‘I had a nice time. Shall we exchange numbers?’
- Recognizable questions How do I make new friends as an adult? Where do I meet people outside the congregation? Why do new connections feel so superficial at first? How do I build a social life without the fixed structure of meetings and field service? And why can I meet new people and still feel lonely?
- For many Jehovah’s Witnesses, the congregation is an important part of their social life. Meetings, field service, conventions, and contact with other Witnesses mean you regularly see the same people. Friendships, faith, and social activities can therefore become strongly intertwined. When you become inactive or leave the organization, that structure can partially or completely disappear. Some people keep family and friends, while others lose a large part of their social network. That raises a very practical question: How do you rebuild a social life as an adult?
Why can that be difficult?
Making new friends can be hard for any adult. But when a large part of your social life has taken place within one community for years, there can be extra hurdles:
You may have little experience building friendships outside the congregation.
Some social situations may feel unfamiliar or awkward.
You carry a background that you may not always want to explain right away.
You may miss the ease of always seeing the same people within the congregation.
You may be afraid of losing people again.
New contacts may feel superficial compared with friendships that existed for decades.
That last point is important. When you have known someone for three months, you may unconsciously compare that relationship with someone you knew for fifteen or twenty years.
New friendships need time to develop a shared history.
You don’t have to look for friends right away
It may sound strange, but you don’t have to go out with the assignment: ‘I need to find friends.’
A more practical first step is:
Where would I like to go regularly, even if I don’t immediately make friends there?
Think, for example, of:
a sports club or regular exercise class;
a language, music, painting, or writing course;
volunteer work;
a walking group;
a hobby club;
neighborhood activities;
study or education;
a peer support group.
The advantage of places like these is repetition. You see the same people again. That allows conversations to naturally pick up where they left off last time, and familiarity can develop.
From acquaintance to friend
Within a congregation, you may not have had to consciously think about how you built social contacts. You naturally ran into each other.
Outside such a fixed structure, contact sometimes takes more initiative.
A friendship can start very small:
Not every contact becomes a friendship. It doesn’t have to.
Maybe you meet someone you have coffee with occasionally, someone else you exercise with, and yet another person you can talk to about personal things.
No single person or group has to replace everything the congregation used to provide.
Social freedom can take some getting used to
A new social world can offer more choice, but that very choice can feel awkward at first.
Who do I want to spend time with?
How much do I want to tell about myself?
What activities do I actually enjoy?
What boundaries do I want to set?
What do I expect from a friendship?
These are questions you may not have an answer to immediately.
You also don’t have to do everything that is common outside the organization. You don’t have to enjoy going out, drink alcohol, celebrate birthdays, or adopt certain social customs in order to belong.
Freedom also means being able to discover for yourself what does and doesn’t suit you.
Rebuilding trust
For some ex-JWs, trust can be a sensitive topic. When important relationships have changed or disappeared after a change in faith, the thought may arise:
‘What if these people end up letting me down too?’
That doesn’t mean every ex-JW struggles with trust. But if you recognize this, you don’t have to tell a new friend your whole life story right away.
Trust can grow in small steps.
You can share something personal and see how someone handles it. You can set a boundary and experience whether it is respected. You can discover that a disagreement does not automatically have to mean the end of a friendship.
That’s how you get to know someone — and that person gets to know you.
And if you actually miss the congregation?
Building a new social life does not mean you are no longer allowed to miss your old community.
Maybe you are building new connections while still missing certain people from the congregation. Those things can exist side by side.
Ask yourself:
Do I miss these specific people?
Do I miss the feeling of belonging somewhere?
Do I miss the religious community?
Or do I miss my faith itself?
These are different needs. New friends can offer social connection, but they do not have to, for example, answer questions about faith or meaning.
This is also an interesting question for active Jehovah’s Witnesses
Even if you are a Jehovah’s Witness and do not want to leave at all, you may ask yourself:
How broad is my social network?
Do I also have contacts with people outside my faith? Can I have a good relationship with someone who thinks differently from me? And how much of my social life is connected to my religious community?
There does not have to be a right or wrong answer to that. A close faith community can, in fact, provide a great deal of connection and support.
It can still be interesting to realize how much faith, community, and friendship are intertwined in your own life.
About loneliness
You can be among people and still feel lonely. Especially when you long for the familiarity of relationships that existed for years, new connections may not feel the same at first.
So try not to see loneliness as proof that you can’t find belonging outside the congregation — but also not as something you should simply ignore.
If your loneliness persists, becomes very heavy, or is accompanied by, for example, sadness or the feeling that you no longer belong anywhere, it may be wise to talk about it with your GP or another professional counselor.
In conclusion
A new social life usually does not come into being all at once. It grows out of small encounters that repeat themselves.
First you know someone’s name. Then you have a chat. Then maybe you have coffee together. Months later you suddenly realize that you call someone when something important happens.
You do not have to replace your old social world as quickly as possible.
And you also do not have to become a different person in order to make friends outside the congregation.
So perhaps the first question is not:
‘Where do I find a new community?’
but rather:
‘Where can I regularly meet people while doing something that suits me?’
From there, something can emerge that does not have to be organized or predetermined, but gradually grows: a social life that you shape yourself.
