It’s easier to get a mortgage in Ireland than it is to make a friend in your 30s. While the mortgage process might be mildly humiliating, at least there’s a collectively agreed process. You show up, prove your worth with payslips, and sit across from a steely adviser who explains interest rates with the calm authority of a parish priest. At the end of it, if you are lucky, there is a letter of approval. Unfortunately, making new friends in your 30s doesn’t come with a step-by-step guide. I had the house, the job and a partner who loved me and had no interest whatsoever in acquiring additional humans at this stage of his life. On paper, everything was in place. In reality, my social world had slowly narrowed. Over the years, gatherings marked the dissolution of friendships: going-away parties for those seeking a better quality of life Down Under, and housewarmings for others who, weary of Dublin’s cost-of-living crisis, retreated to the countryside, drawn by a sense of community and the promise of simpler, slower lives. Ireland understands community instinctively. We gather for everything: grief, weddings, matches, christenings. Yet the data tells a less comforting story: in the CSO’s most recent survey on wellbeing indicators, 15 per cent of Irish people aged 16 and over said they felt lonely at least some of the time in the past month. At 34, I wasn’t lonely in the Banshees of Inisherin sense; no one was pointedly refusing to speak to me. I wasn’t isolated: I went to friend dinners and midweek coffees (they just need to be arranged weeks or sometimes months in advance). I could fill a weekend with home improvement and the agreeable, numbing satisfaction of being “busy” assembling Ikea furniture. And yet there were moments, while embarrassing to admit, when I would reach for my phone to text someone and realise I didn’t quite know who. So one night, after receiving my sixth consecutive “we MUST catch up in the new year” voice note from a friend last seen in 2021 falling into a taxi on George’s Street, I did what any self-respecting millennial would do in search for a cure-all to their problems: I downloaded an app. Could a dating-style app help me find a new friend? Bumble BFF is an app designed specifically for making new friends. It’s a spin-off of the popular dating app Bumble and uses the same swipe-right feature you might know from apps like Tinder. First it guides you through prompts which assume a version of adulthood that includes hobbies, balance and plenty of free evenings. You create a profile that signals stability: I am normal. I am friendly. See? Here I am holding a cute dog. Then you begin swiping through profiles presented as potential friends.My first “friend date” was in Clement & Pekoe cafe in Dublin. I arrived early, ordered coffee and sat at a table that suddenly felt too exposed. Across from me sat a PhD research student with the gentle, slightly anxious energy of someone who spends long hours in libraries. We’d matched two days earlier. He liked chess, indie films and “reasonable walks”. I liked design, books and getting through the working week with my nervous system intact. The algorithm thought we’d get on. Halfway through the coffee he asked what I was looking for in a friend. It caught me off guard in the way simple questions do when you’ve spent years avoiding them. Adults are not often asked to name what they want socially. Friendship usually comes into our lives through happenstance – through work, shared flats and mutual friends. It is not supposed to be something you pursue deliberately, with a stranger, like a weekend hobby. And yet, here I was, so I gave the only answer I could give when cornered: “Someone sound.” What I wanted to say was less dignified. I wanted gay male friends who weren’t trying to turn me into a triathlete. Someone who liked coffee dates. Someone who didn’t need the night to begin at 2am. Someone who had their life together – or at least held it in a state of semi-functioning chaos similar to my own. [ Moving to Vancouver: ‘I love that you can finish work and go camping under the stars’Opens in new window ]The PhD student was, in fairness, sound. He was the kind of man who would help you move house and apologise for not bringing you a housewarming present. We met a few more times at a pub, then another pub, but then it drifted as adult life did what adult life does best: it pulls two people out of each other’s orbit. I could have taken it as a disappointment, but I decided in full Brené Brown mindset to take it as a proof of concept: friendship, in theory, could be engineered through a dating app’s algorithm. It just didn’t come with an instruction manual. Loneliness, like death or a messy break-up, is a universal experience that most of us would rather not examine too closely. It often creeps in through the slow accumulation of small, seemingly insignificant social losses until your world grows quieter. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, using the 2022 EU Loneliness Survey, found loneliness to be most prevalent in Ireland, with more than 20 per cent of respondents reporting feeling lonely. This year, the CSO found that 11.8 per cent of men reported feeling lonely at least some of the time in the previous four weeks, compared with 18 per cent of women. The split can encourage an easy conclusion: women are lonely; men are doing a bit better. 'Do you hike?' When I replied honestly – 'no, I prefer horizontal landscapes' – the chat would die politely. Photo: Getty But men are rarely fine. We are simply fluent in other languages first: stress, irritation, tiredness or work. These, we have been taught, are acceptable states, ones which imply competence. Loneliness, by contrast, implies need, and this still sits uneasily in Irish masculinity. The app sent me lonely hikers first. So many hikers. Men suspended from cliffs, men in Patagonia jackets and Gym+Coffee fleeces, men describing sunrise swims as “life-changing”. Their profile photographs were a cascade of blue and pink skies, red cheeks and grins that implied suffering as a form of bonding. Every conversation inevitably led to the same question: “Do you hike?” When I replied honestly – “no, I prefer horizontal landscapes” – the chat would die politely. One man said he found it difficult to relate to people who didn’t “connect with nature” and, unfortunately for him, I connect with nature from cafe windows and the occasional alarming spider in the bath. Then came the sporty gays, whose weeks were plotted like military operations: tag rugby on Tuesdays and something called Hyrox at dawn. One invited me on “a coffee walk” that turned out to be a 5k. Another evangelised cold plunges with the intensity of a man describing spiritual rebirth. This, I quickly discovered, was not my tribe. There were even conversations that fizzled before they started. The men who matched, said hello, and mysteriously vanished mid-thread. Ghosting, it turns out, is not just a phenomenon confined to romance and the Dublin Bus schedule. The next day he unmatched. I have never been more happy to have been the victim of a ghostingThe IT officer had three photos: one with a pint of Guinness in hand, one in a sports jersey, one so blurry it looked like CCTV. His bio said: “Chill. Not into drama.” Which, in my experience, means he is the drama, just not in the telenovela format I enjoy. We met in a pub after work. He was already seated, staring at his phone with the expression of a man awaiting bad news. I sat opposite him and felt, within minutes, that I had made a mistake. He spoke in short bursts. “Yeah. Grand, yeah.” “Long day.” Every question I asked collapsed into vagueness. “What do you do for fun?” “Ah, bits.” [ I’ve told AI countless times to quit that servile tone, but it just starts snivellingOpens in new window ]Bits. An entire inner life reduced to bits. I tried safer territory: music, TV, books, the city. Each topic died instantly, like a match struck in the rain. He seemed vacant in a way that made me feel oddly sorry for both of us: two grown men sitting opposite each other, trying to create a friendship out of nothing but an algorithm I was beginning to question. When it ended, he shook my hand limply and said: “We should do this again sometime.” The next day he unmatched. I have never been more happy to have been the victim of a ghosting. A few weeks later I met a man who worked for one of the Big Four. Within minutes of our first awkward handshake, he leaned in and said: “You seem cool. I feel like I can be myself with you.” There are sentences that behave like a trapdoor, and this is one of them. He pulled the lever and what followed was a Fringe Festival-worthy monologue on relationship breakdowns and family tensions. The language of therapy was deployed fluently – boundaries, emotional labour, “doing the work” – and without any awareness that we had not yet, in my mind, established the basic shape of the relationship he was treating as a safe space. By the time we finished our drinks, I felt drained, as if I’d done a shift as a therapist rather than met a potential friend. He thanked me for listening. I smiled, wished him well, and walked home aware of a weird, guilty relief. I have discovered friendship, when it works in your 30s, is less about chemistry and more about tempo and timingMeanwhile, my gal pals found the whole project gripping. They demanded updates in the same way I used to ring home from the Gaeltacht, frantic to discover who’d just been evicted from Big Brother in a world without English-language television. One friend living abroad, new baby in hand, wanted a full breakdown after every date. What did he wear? What did you wear? Was he nice? These are strange questions to be asked in your 30s, but for her my life had become a YA novel. For me, it was more like field research for a self-help book. Another friend, still in Dublin but largely absorbed into toddler life, reacted with envy. “You’re meeting new people?” she said, as if I’d told her I was cheating on her. “Like actual adults? Who can talk in full sentences?” Women, I’ve noticed, tend to understand the labour of friendship instinctively. They schedule, they follow up and they notice absence. For my friends, the idea that men might need a dating app to facilitate friendship was both hilarious and bleak. My partner was supportive in the same way he has been of every short-lived obsession I’ve adopted over the years, from sourdough to adult Lego. For someone who sees friendship like a pension (if you didn’t invest early, don’t expect much of a return), he listened to my stories with affectionate detachment, like someone trying to fall asleep to the Shipping Forecast. By the time I matched with Jay* I was beginning to think the friend-dating experiment might be fundamentally flawed, as the whole exercise seemed to magnify the awkwardness of adult life. But when the chef appeared in my matches, I swiped without hesitation. His profile was simple: he loved cooking, liked coffee and wanted “a few good friends”. Yes it’s true, it’s easier to get a mortgage than to make a friend in your 30s. Photo: Getty Jay began to fold into my life through ordinary outings: dinners, a bottle of wine that became two, day trips and conversations that stretched into the kind of late night you don’t plan in your 30s. We talked about work and the steady, boring and sometimes ridiculous maintenance of adulthood – boilers, bins and back pain – and then, about the personal stuff too. At Christmastime we went to the markets. We drifted through crowds under lights that made everyone’s face look slightly feverish, ordered mulled wine and stood in the cold long enough to justify the Luas journey there. It was the kind of evening you might take for granted in your 20s and then suddenly realise you miss. Later there were more dinners, more wine, more walks, and a rhythm emerged. I have discovered friendship, when it works in your 30s, is less about chemistry and more about tempo and timing. You need to say, “I enjoyed that, let’s do it again”, with the same zeal as two children deciding to be best friends because they had matching Power Ranger backpacks. And you need to risk the mild humiliation of wanting and rejection.I hadn’t built a tribe, and most of those I met drifted back into their own orbits. But Jay has remainedWhile CSO data suggests loneliness has eased since the pandemic peak, it hasn’t vanished. Neither has the structural problem underneath it: the way modern adult life narrows, and the way men in particular have been trained to treat the narrowing as normal. While I can’t solve that, I can refuse to accept it. By the end of my year of friend dates, I hadn’t built a tribe, and most of those I met drifted back into their own orbits. But Jay has remained. Yes it’s true, it’s easier to get a mortgage than to make a friend in your 30s. But while one gives you keys, the other gives you dinner guests, plans and someone who knows where you keep the good glasses. And for me, that is more than enough. *Jay’s name has been changed, partly to protect his privacy and partly to protect him from being matched with hikers