Parallel Play Isn't Just for Toddlers

Developmental psychologists have a term for how toddlers socialise before they can hold a conversation. They call it parallel play: two children sitting near each other, each absorbed in their own block tower or crayon, not talking much, but not alone either. It looks like nothing is happening. Something is.

Adults are not supposed to need this. We are supposed to be able to walk into a room and talk to strangers. Most of us cannot, or would rather not, and there is nothing wrong with that. The useful thing is to stop treating conversation as the only entry point into a social life and start treating shared activity as one instead.

The problem with “just talk to people”

If you have ever stood at the edge of a party working out how to start a sentence with someone you don’t know, you already understand why “just be more social” is bad advice. It puts the entire weight of connection on a skill — small talk — that a lot of people find draining, and it puts you on the spot the moment you arrive.

An activity removes that. If you are both kneading dough, learning to solder, or running the same 5k loop, there is already a shared task doing the work that conversation usually has to do alone. You are not required to be interesting. You are required to show up and do the thing.

This isn’t just a comforting theory. A 2022 meta-synthesis of social prescribing programmes — schemes where a GP or health worker refers someone into a community activity rather than, or alongside, treatment — found that structured, purposeful group activity produced more benefit than contact alone. People described getting something back beyond company: a sense of participation, of doing something that mattered, that talking in a circle rarely produces on its own. The activity wasn’t incidental to the connection. It was the mechanism.

Why this matters more than it used to

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone documented the decline of American clubs, leagues, and societies — the very same, the theory goes, that used to happen through shared activity. Bowling leagues did not exist because people wanted to talk to each other; they existed because people wanted to bowl, and talking happened around it. As those leagues emptied out, so did one of the main structures that let side-by-side connection happen without anyone having to engineer it.

Eric Klinenberg’s argument in Palaces for the People is close cousin to this: physical spaces built for shared use — libraries, pools, community gardens — carry an enormous amount of social weight simply by giving people a reason to be in the same place doing the same thing. Ray Oldenburg called these “third places” decades earlier, distinct from home and work, and the activity is usually what defines them. A café is a third place partly because coffee gives you a reason to sit there without talking to anyone, and partly because the barista and regulars give you a low-stakes way to talk if you want to.

The American Enterprise Institute’s 2021 survey on American friendship found that 12% of Americans report having no close friends, up from just 3% in 1990, and that the share of men with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27% over the same period. Men in particular have historically formed friendships around doing things together — sport, work, hobbies — rather than through direct emotional disclosure. When those activity-based structures disappear, men lose the route into friendship that suited them best, and a lot of them do not have a backup.

What to actually do with this

The bar here is lower than “join a club.” It is: find one recurring activity where the point of the gathering is the activity, not the talking.

A running club works because the run is the shared task; conversation, if it happens, happens at the edges — before, after, or in scattered breaths during. A pottery class, a choir, a community garden plot, a Meetup group built around chess or birdwatching or woodworking — these all work on the same principle. Meetup remains the largest platform built specifically for recurring interest-based groups, reported at around 60 million members, and its free tier makes it a reasonable place to start looking for one near you.

If eating together suits you better than a hobby, Timeleft organises weekly dinners that seat strangers matched by personality with no messaging beforehand — the meal itself is the shared task, and you are seated regardless of what you’d have said to break the ice. Buffet, which now runs as a set of curated group experiences you claim a seat at each week, works on a similar logic: a table confirms once three people join and caps at six, so you are committing to an activity slot, not to a conversation you have to carry.

None of these fix loneliness on the first visit. A 2025 study of college students coming out of the pandemic found that it was the regularity of connection, not any single encounter, that predicted whether people actually felt less lonely — which tracks with everything else in this literature. The activity gets you in the room without needing a script. Going back is what turns the room into something that knows you.

Pick one thing with a fixed day and time, not a vague intention to “meet new people.” Show up for it four times before deciding whether it’s working. The talking, if it comes, will come on its own schedule.