Most advice about meeting people seems to be written by extraverts. Join a club. Go to the networking night. Say yes to every party. Walk up to a group and introduce yourself. If the thought of any of that makes you want to stay home with a book, it’s easy to conclude that making friends is a game built for someone else.
It isn’t. Introverts make good friends, and plenty of them want more friends than they have. What they usually need isn’t more courage. It’s a different way of going about it.
What introversion is, and isn’t
Introversion isn’t the same as shyness, and it isn’t disliking people. Shyness is about worrying how you’ll be judged. Introversion is more about energy and stimulation: a loud room, a lot of new faces and a long night of small talk use up more of an introvert’s battery, and they need quiet time afterwards to recharge. You can be shy without being introverted, introverted without being shy, or both.
Plenty of introverts are warm, funny and very good company, especially with one person at a time. The problem isn’t that they can’t connect. It’s that most of the usual ways of meeting people are set up as big, loud, open-ended group events, which is close to the worst format an introvert could design.
The good news: it’s usually better than you expect
The Canadian psychologist John Zelenski and colleagues at Carleton University spent several years asking what happens when introverts act a bit more outgoing. In a set of five studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2013, some people were asked to predict how they would feel acting extraverted in a group task in the lab, and others actually did it.
Introverts consistently expected it to feel worse than it did. They overestimated how uncomfortable and self-conscious they would be. And when they actually did it, the enjoyment didn’t depend much on personality at all: introverts and extraverts both tended to feel good when they were being sociable. The researchers suggested this forecasting mistake may be part of why introverts hold back. The anticipation is worse than the event.
That will sound familiar to anyone who has dreaded a catch-up all afternoon and then had a lovely time.
The catch: it costs something later
There is a cost, though, and it’s worth taking seriously.
In 2019, researchers led by Luke Smillie at the University of Melbourne published a randomised trial in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. They asked people to act more extraverted in everyday life for a whole week: more talkative, more assertive, more spontaneous. Overall, it helped. People felt more positive. But the more introverted participants got smaller gains, and some reported more negative feelings, more tiredness and feeling less like themselves.
A Finnish study points the same way. Sointu Leikas and Ville-Juhani Ilmarinen tracked 48 people five times a day for 12 days, and published the results in the Journal of Personality in 2017. Acting outgoing went with a better mood in the moment, but more tiredness about three hours later, and that delayed tiredness seemed to come from the number of people someone had been dealing with. The effect was small, and it applied to everyone, not just introverts.
Put the research together and you get a fairly practical picture. Short bursts of being sociable usually feel better than introverts predict. Being “on” for long stretches, with lots of people, drains them. So the answer isn’t to pretend to be an extravert. It’s to choose the kind of socialising that gives you the good part without the long tail.
How to meet people as an introvert
Go one-on-one. One person at a time is the single biggest change an introvert can make. There’s no group to perform for, no jumping into conversations, and fewer faces to keep track of, which is exactly what the tiredness research points to. You can actually listen, which is what most introverts are good at anyway. There’s more on this in the case for meeting one person at a time.
Give it an end time. Open-ended plans are hard for introverts, because you never know how long you’ll need to stay switched on. An hour is long enough to have a real conversation and short enough to leave with energy to spare. It’s the reason the one-hour coffee works so well as a first meet.
Choose a quieter room. A café at ten on a weekday morning is a completely different experience from a pub at six on a Friday. Pick somewhere you can hear each other without leaning in, and a table rather than a spot standing at the bar.
Do something side by side. Walks, classes, a community garden, a weekly volunteering shift. When there’s an activity in front of you, it carries the conversation, and the silences are comfortable instead of awkward. Volunteering in particular gives you a job to do and a reason to be there.
Repeat rather than reinvent. Meeting a new group every week is exhausting. Seeing the same few people at the same class every Tuesday gets easier each time, because they stop being new. Friendships are mostly built that way anyway, as we wrote in same time next week.
Skip ahead to the real conversation. A lot of introverts find small talk harder than deep talk. That’s fine, because the research is on your side. In a 2010 study in Psychological Science, Matthias Mehl and colleagues had students wear small recorders that sampled their conversations through the day. The happier participants had less small talk and more substantive conversations. A couple of good questions in your back pocket will get you there faster. Here are some ideas for what to talk about in a first coffee.
Plan the recharge. The psychologist Brian Little, who describes himself as an introvert who spends a lot of time acting otherwise, talks about “restorative niches”: quiet time you deliberately build in after you’ve had to be outgoing. Don’t stack three social plans in one day. Put a quiet evening after a big one. Knowing the recovery is coming makes it much easier to say yes.
Say what works for you. “I’m better one-on-one than in a big group” is a perfectly normal thing to tell a new friend. Most people would rather know, and plenty of them will quietly agree.
Don’t wait until you feel like it. The Zelenski research suggests your forecast is the least reliable part of the process. If you wait until going out sounds appealing, you’ll stay home more often than you’d actually like to. Book the small, short, quiet version, and let the hour itself change your mind.
Where Flat White fits
Flat White is about as introvert-friendly as meeting someone new can get. We match you with one person for one hour over a coffee, at a café we’ve already picked, for friendship, networking, a mentor or a date. No group to break into, no swiping, no endless chat before you meet, and a natural end time built in. We’re opening across Australia city by city, and joining the waitlist moves your city closer to the front.
An hour, a coffee, someone new.
One person, one hour, then home. Join the waitlist at joinflatwhite.com →