At Camp Social, where grown women return to girlhood, friendship has no preamble. Within 15 minutes of meeting eight of the campers from Cabin 3, I learned this: In their 50s and 60s, they have no use for the menstrual discs in the camp swag bag; one of them found online dating so depressing after her divorce that she’s given up entirely; when they laugh, they pee a little; they feel like they’ve known one another for years, even though most of them met last night.The campers signed up for this weekend-long adult summer camp for exactly this purpose—to make new friends. On August 21, more than 400 women, some as young as 21, some older than 80, arrived at what usually is a children’s sleepaway camp in the Poconos to spend the weekend bunking in twin beds in log cabins, climbing the ropes course, developing middle-school-level inside jokes, making friendship bracelets, and performing choreographed dances at the flagpole to Cher’s “Believe” and Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” Everyone at Camp Social, regardless of age, is referred to as a “girl.” The camp promises to recreate a childhood experience so that grown-ups can bond with one another as easily as they might have as kids. I signed myself up because I wanted to know what kinds of adults would go back to summer camp and how seriously they would take it.Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticMy new home for the weekend with more than 400 possible friends-to-beThe girls of Cabin 3 were all in. When they were younger, they told me, making friends did feel more straightforward. But then they got jobs that kept them late at the office, or their kids grew up, or they stopped drinking, and the friendships they’d made with other parents or neighbors faded. They began wondering: How do you meet new people? Where do you go? None of these women ever really thought they’d end up at an adult summer camp, but they saw ads for it and thought, Maybe I’ll give that a try.Which is how they found themselves at breakfast in the mess hall, cross-talking at Gilmore Girls speed, comparing notes on their adult sons, laughing when one revealed her favorite prank—taking a picture of her cleavage on the disposable cameras passed out at weddings. Over the hollering, Jackie Prendergast, a retiree who smiles so wide she shows both rows of teeth, told me that Cabin 3 has decided that its mascot for the weekend would be the flamingo. When a flamingo loses essential nutrients, as it does when reproducing, the pigment begins to drain from its feathers. With time and nourishment, though, the pink returns. “We’ve lost our color, but we’re going to get it back,” Jackie said. Ten minutes later, we headed to archery.Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticThe vibes were, indeed, good.The night before, Camp Social’s girls had gathered in the barn for a dance where a band (all male, all handsome) played Prince, Michael Jackson, and Bruno Mars covers. Liv Schreiber, the camp’s 29-year-old founder, took the stage in her Camp Social shirt. “Welcome to camp!” she shouted, then launched into an ecstatic speech about the weekend ahead.If anyone’s job could be described as “friend maker,” it is Schreiber’s. She is the type of person who skips more than she walks, makes it a point to memorize campers’ names, and, as I witnessed when we met up in New York City before camp, can form a real connection with strangers in a coffee shop in 10 minutes flat. She was working in real estate when she launched a viral matchmaking Instagram account and a matchmaking-party business, which morphed into events for adults to meet new friends. She opened Camp Social in 2023 to relive her own sleepaway-camp experience and to give women a place to meet. The waitlist, she told me, now runs north of 60,000 people.Adult summer camps have been cropping over the past couple of decades—one even dates back to the 1970s—but many of them are co-ed and have the feel of either Club Med in the woods or an all-out bacchanalia. Schreiber’s is one of the only all-female options with an explicit friend-making focus. Bubble letters on the camp bulletin board read, You Haven’t Met All The People Who Are Going to Love You; the camp’s tagline promises that “99% of campers arrive solo and 100% leave as friends.” To get the crowd riled up at that opening camp dance, Schreiber asked, with genuine enthusiasm, “Who wants to meet a new friend?” Hundreds of hands went up.Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticMornings at the flagpole included choreographed dances to Cher’s “Believe” and Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”That “99% arrive solo” isn’t technically true. Mother-daughter duos and friends arrive together, and returning campers offer wisdom such as: Get to the Soffe-shorts distribution early to get your size, do not miss the Saturday pool party, and be sure to lean back right before the water slide spits you out into the lake.Even so, Schreiber has designed the camp for people to make new connections. Before arrival, campers received a guide titled “How to Camp Social,” which encouraged them to reconnect with their childhood self—the person “who made a friend at the playground in four minutes flat, who didn’t ask if she was too much or not enough.” The camp’s “10-Foot Rule” says that if you’re within 10 feet of another camper, you should smile and say hi. Bunks are grouped by age, but other than that, women are encouraged to make friends outside their generation. The counselors (all female) are trained to be welcoming, Schreiber said. They dance with campers at mealtimes, cheer when someone reaches (or tries to reach) the top of the rock wall, and shout out “Camp Social?!”—a cue for campers to circle their hips and respond with a Kool-Aid-Man-style “Ohhhhh yeaaaahhhh.”Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticThe girls of Cabin 3Who needs this kind of help making friends as an adult? Before I arrived, I’d wondered how many socially anxious people I might meet. Maybe the shyer campers were making themselves scarce, like Cabin 3’s mysterious tenth bunkmate, who kept to herself, or the girl in my cabin who disappeared when we all got ready for Saturday night’s camp disco. But most of the women there seemed capable enough of making friends; they were just in a moment in their life when opportunities to find those relationships felt scarcer. Compared with men, whose friendship skills are more often lamented, women do typically have more friends and are less likely to be severely socially isolated. But having a lot of friends doesn’t necessarily mean that a person’s social needs are getting met, and overall, rates of loneliness between the genders are roughly the same. The women at Camp Social were new mothers, grandmothers, empty nesters, divorcees, widows, and retirees; pretty much everyone was going through some kind of potentially isolating life transition. The average camper that weekend was 39-years-old, an age when many people are taking care of kids and aging parents, which doesn’t leave much time for friendship.For some attendees, camp simply functioned as a three-day lake vacation they didn’t have to plan—where they could do yoga on a paddleboard, attend an outdoor screening of The Princess Diaries, and drink signature camp cocktails. Last year, Schreiber told me, one woman in her 80s did nothing but archery the entire weekend. But many of the women I met came in order to feel like girls again, maybe with the hope that that would make friendship feel as easy as it did when they were kids.For Cabin 3, Camp Social seemed to work a spell of quick intimacy. Of the cabin’s 10 girls, eight of them moved as a pack. (The ninth had come with her daughters and was spending time with them; the tenth I could never track down.) On the way to archery—along the lake and past the cabins, the pickleball courts, the pool, and the ropes course—the girls speculated about how someone would even use those menstrual discs, and Sandi Sullivan, who works for a construction company in Chicago, considered transforming her camp-branded bandana into a halter top for the camp disco, like the one her mom made her in the ’70s. When the archery instructor approached the group, he asked Vicki Petroski, a recent retiree, if she’d be a five—as in the fifth person on the range. “No, I’m a 10,” she replied. The girls cackled. The instructor blushed, and they cackled even louder. (Unlike the counselors, the camp’s staff members—who run the archery range, lifeguard the pool, and referee the camp Olympics—all seemed to be handsome 20-something men with British, New Zealand, or Australian accents.)Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticJackie Prendergast, a flamingo regaining her color“In my 20s and 30s, I never would have talked so openly with other women I’d just met,” Jackie told me. It helped that Cabin 3 had all reached the age where, as Linda Gryn, a business-owner from Pennsylvania, said, “We no longer give a shit.” Some of the girls rarely speak about sex with their friends back home, but here, thanks to Vicki, whose daughter is a sex therapist, somehow every conversation seemed to come back to it.The group was too busy for awkward pauses, anyway. The girls danced: Linda, who had been a majorette in high school and dated a football player, watched the dance instructor like a hawk during morning flagpole routines. They painted (okay, while drinking mimosas) at the paint-and-sip. Vicki went tubing for the first time in about 30 years. “Everything I did was 30 or 40 years ago,” she said. “When I turned 60, I said, Fuck it, I’m having fun again.”Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticVicki Petroski and I survived tubing.But being 60 is not always as fun as being 10. At the afternoon pool party, as girls from Cabin 3 and I waved at Vicki, in line for the water slide, Christine—the most reserved in the group, a sensible lawyer with a sensible black bob—came over to me. (She is perhaps so sensible that she asked me not to use her last name.) Going to an adult summer camp at all, let alone by herself, was not usually her speed, she said, and she already has a close group of friends. But recently, the man she’d been with for 40 years “decided he didn’t want to be married to me anymore.” One night, he said “I love you” before bed as usual, and then the next day, he told her, “We’ve had a good run, but I’m ready for the next chapter of my life.” A good run? Christine remembered thinking. I thought that I was happily married. Her adult sons were trying to stay neutral; she was trying to be okay with that.Just then, Vicki went down the slide. The red-and-yellow half tube shot her multiple feet in the air, and we cheered when she emerged from the lake, grinning. Her curls were matted; the purple face paint she put on for camp Olympics was running down her cheeks.Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticThe water slide was a hit among campers.Somehow, as the evening set in, everyone still had the energy for karaoke and the disco. The girls in my own cabin, all in their 20s, were getting along well, but if Cabin 3 had reached the peak of camp friendship, my cabin was still in the “friendly roommates who ask about one another’s day” stage. As we got ready to go back out, one bunkmate did my makeup; another, who had been to Camp Social three times, told me the “vibes were off” at the pool party this year because it was overcast. At karaoke, while other bunks performed as a group, we bobbed our heads and drank our alcoholic “Bug Juice,” garnished with gummy worms. Meanwhile, Cabin 3 was on fire. Sandi, whose camp-branded bandana she wore tied up as a headband after all, raged to Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” At the disco, they danced in sequins and jumpsuits to the songs that had been on the charts when Linda was in high school.Then it was Sunday morning and time to go back to real life.Nancy Walecki / The Atlantic“Y.M.C.A.” at the discoBefore the last morning flagpole, campers swapped Instagram handles and phone numbers. People seemed to have made friends, although a couple of younger girls I spoke with told me they definitely had not. They were ashamed that, even in an environment set up for friendship, they hadn’t connected with anybody. Those who had made friends wondered whether they would see them again soon or if they’d be only “camp friends.” When I asked my bunkmates whether they thought they’d stay in touch with anyone, one of them said rather ominously, “Only time will tell.”Nancy Walecki / The AtlanticGoodbye, Camp Social!But over breakfast, the girls of Cabin 3 helped one another download WhatsApp and started a group chat. Since then, they’ve been trading photos of the shirts they had tie-dyed and group pictures from the disco. One of the girls, Jacqui Moore, had painted a flamingo at the paint-and-sip, which has stuck as the group’s symbol. “Keep your pink coming!” Linda wrote in one message. Three girls who live close to one another in Pennsylvania are planning to get lunch. Others might join one bunkmate walking a marathon. (In accordance with their flamingo theme, they say their team name would be “The Flockstars.”)They probably won’t come back to Camp Social, though: The camp served its purpose. Maybe these women will get together annually to share the secrets they can’t with the people they see everyday. Maybe they’ll have a ball at Jacqui’s 60th birthday party. Maybe, like their other friendships, these will fade too. For now, they’re planning a reunion for next year. Greece—or maybe Moab?—could be nice.