Stop worrying about what to say: friendships grow from doing things together
Loneliness & connection · Équipe Viatous · 4 min
Remember your childhood friends? Nobody sat across from you and asked, “So, what do you do?” You built a den, played football, survived a disastrous school project together. The friendship just showed up along the way, while your hands were busy with something else.
As adults, we tend to do it the other way round: meet first, then find something to talk about. And that’s exactly why it feels so hard.
Face to face puts the pressure on
Coffee one-on-one with someone you barely know is a demanding exercise. You have to find topics, keep things going, handle the silences, seem interesting. You spend more time monitoring yourself than enjoying the moment, a bit like a job interview where nobody has a job to offer.
The result: lots of people give up before they even try. Not because they don’t like people, but because the exercise wears them out.
The activity does part of the work for you
Change where you’re standing and everything changes. When you do something together, side by side instead of face to face:
The topic is built in. The recipe that flops, the missing puzzle piece, the trail that’s way too steep: plenty to talk about without trying.
Silences stop being awkward. You’re busy, you’re focused, and nobody minds.
You really get to know each other. You see how someone reacts when things go wrong, whether they’re patient, funny, curious. Far more than you’d learn from a summary of their life.
There’s a start and a finish. No awkward “when do we leave?”: the activity sets the frame.
Shared time is the main ingredient
Researcher Jeffrey Hall, at the University of Kansas, estimated it takes about 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, and about 90 hours to become friends. Crucially, he found the kind of time matters: hanging out, joking around and playing games moves a friendship forward, while hours spent working together count much less ( University of Kansas, 2018 ).
A shared activity is exactly that: free, chosen, enjoyable time. Every session adds a little to the count, without anyone feeling like they’re “working on” a friendship.
Which activities work best?
The best ones for building connection share three things: you do them with others, they leave room to talk, and they can be repeated.
Board games : perfect for laughing fast, even with strangers.
Cooking together : you chop, you taste, you share the result.
Hiking or walking : you talk side by side, without eye contact, which makes it easier to open up.
Language exchange : everyone helps everyone, so the balance is natural.
Volunteering : you work for something bigger and feel useful together. In France, the Fondation de France found that taking up volunteering strongly reduces loneliness among people supported by community organisations ( Fondation de France, 2026 ).
A creative project : a podcast, a mural, a small vegetable patch.
What if you’re on the quiet side?
Then this is exactly where activities work best for you. You don’t need to shine or tell your life story. You can listen, join in at your own pace, and speak when you feel like it. Go for small groups, where everyone has a place, and calmer activities: a workshop, a board game, a walk. And give yourself permission to leave a bit early if your energy dips. You’ll be back next week, and that’s what counts.
Three tips to make it stick
Come back. One session is a meeting. Three sessions are the start of a connection.
Stay a little longer. A coffee after the hike, ten minutes of chat after class: that’s often where an activity turns into a friendship.
Suggest what’s next. “Rematch next week?” is often all it takes.
Viatous is built on exactly this idea
On Viatous, you don’t start with profiles to scroll through. You start with something you want to do. You write it in one sentence, and Viatous looks for compatible people to form a Room of 2 to 4 people, online or in person.
For example: “Looking for two or three people to play a board game online on Thursday evening.”
Roomi, the Viatous robot, welcomes the group, walks everyone through the steps and hosts the activity. You don’t have to break the ice alone: the activity and Roomi take care of that. And if it clicks, the Room can become a Circle so you can meet regularly, but only if everyone wants to.
There may be no den to build this time. But the recipe is the same as when you were ten: busy hands, easy talk, and friendship showing up along the way. Pick your next game, your next walk, your next workshop. Find an activity you’d enjoy .