We asked 4 DINKs how they make new child-free friends

Other DINKs have had to examine their ideas around friendship in their 30s.

“A lot of people just think of friendship as all or nothing,” Alexander said. “If we really look at our friendships, we have people we go to for work problems, people we travel with — certain friends might fill a lot of buckets, a lot of needs.” When some of her longtime travel buddies now had kids, she said she and her husband adjusted to inviting new friends on vacations.

Gonzalez, who’s met friends through work and some interest groups, made some unexpected connections: age-gap friendships with parents of older kids.

“Since their kids are older, they can stay home alone or their kids also have their own events and social life,” she said. “It frees the parents up a little bit more.”

Finding deeper friendships than the ones forged in their 20s

DINKs deal with a big transition period once most of their friends start having kids.

The majority of one’s friends having kids is a big transition period. “You suddenly realize that you are not the priority anymore as friends,” Lorimer said. “You have to readjust your expectations of what your friends can reasonably manage.”

But that readjustment can also bring DINKs and parent friends closer together. Lorimer said that having so many friends with kids (or trying for them) exposed her and her husband to conversations they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

“We have friends talking about fertility, and we have work colleagues talking about infertility and miscarriages, which are just life experiences that we won’t ever go through,” she said. “I think it’s been interesting from an empathy perspective.”

While Kushnir lives far from her childhood friends, she still keeps in contact with them. “They ask me questions about my life and update me, and I share some of my fears about having a family with them,” she said.

New friendships also have the potential to go deeper. Alexander tries to stay open to all new connections, including an older woman in her neighborhood. “When we see each other, we’ll sit at the same table at our neighborhood coffee shop and we’ll chat,” she said.

For DINKS like Kushnir who eventually want to become parents, having more time means finding a stronger network of support for when she does have kids. “I would like to go through being pregnant and having a kid with somebody else,” she said, and is trying to time her pregnancy with one of her friends.

Going against the grain has its perks

While being child-free has become less taboo over the years, some DINKs still feel judged, and roll their eyes at the stereotype.

“People seem to think that dinks are wandering around with Gucci handbags and spending all of their money and time frivolously,” Lorimer said. But she siad she spends a lot of her time on work, charitable causes, and supporting her friends.

“One of the best things that I found about being child-free, particularly by choice, is that I’ve been able to be a lot more sympathetic to my friends who perhaps aren’t child-free by choice,” she said. She’s not judgmental of friends who are struggling to conceive or who question having children at all.

While it’s much harder to have frequent interaction due to diverging lifestyles, Alexander sees the “smaller value” in friendships. She’s ok with having a friend solely to go paddleboarding with or to a cookbook signing, and she’ll also try to invite those friends to bigger bonding experiences, such as trips.

“I’ve had a pretty easy time making friends, because I’ll kind of just allow it to build,” she said.

DINKs might have to figure out where they belong in their parent-friends’ lives and in their communities, but they’re also paving the way for the future.

“As conventions change, individuals will be able to adopt sort of a new model of what social life looks like among individuals who have smaller families and who choose to not have children at all,” Carbino said.

Lorimer, who has two godchildren, said she and her husband work “very hard” to stay involved in their friends’ lives. They always bring back presents from trips and make it a point to be involved in special occasions.

In turn, they’ve received deep understanding right back. “We choose to be child-free, and we’ve always been really honest about that with our friends,” she said. “We’ve been very fortunate that our friends have taken the time to understand why we wouldn’t make the same decisions around children that they are.”