One of the biggest complaints I have heard from my friends who have graduated from college is that they are finding it hard to find meaningful friendships or relationships with people on a daily basis. Most of the people they interact with will usually be from their work or friends of friends they made during high school or college, but the pool is so limited that finding people with your own interests and hobbies can be hard.
In college meeting people was easy, especially when you lived in dormitories your freshman and sophomore year like many did at my school. When no one had any friends, everyone was willing to befriend each other and went back to those days of preschool where becoming friends with someone was as easy as saying “hey that’s a cool toy you have there”. Most people’s friend groups that they will end up having for life were literally placed across the hall from them on day one. College in general is a great place to find friends, especially in classes because you are with people of similar intellect and interests, working towards the same goals.
College was a time of literally meeting thousands of people a year by going to parties or just meeting friends of friends who lived in another building. However even in college you start to see the amount of people you meet drop off every year. Once you move off campus you really have your set friend groups and people are far less likely to bring you in after that point, but you still meet people by chance. Almost everyone I have become friends with in college was through mutual friends. It was a great time and now that I am leaving it, I am scared of what is to come.
The biggest problem after college is that the primary source of interactions you are going to be having on a daily basis come within your job. The demographic of your office is very different from your university where everyone was the same age and working towards getting a degree. In the work force people are in vastly different stages of their life, pursuing different goals and having completely different experiences than your own. So finding someone who is like minded and around your age can often be a daunting task, especially if you go to work in a new state where you have zero connections to any social circles. For example my friend went to go work in Nebraska while he has lived in New York his entire life and struggled finding people of age that he related to.
Having no one and being on your own is one of the worst things in this world, so having a friend is essential in life. We are social creatures after all and almost all of us needs someone that we can at least talk to. Had this been 50 years ago, life might have been much harder, but with the internet and smart phone apps, came the ability to find friends in areas that you are new to. In an age where a large percentage of people are finding their romantic partners online, it is no wonder that finding friends can be done the same way as well. I want to talk about a few ways of meeting new people that I have heard work for some of my friends.
The one I have heard people having the most amount of success with is meetup.com. It is essentially a site where groups can post ads looking for people to join in your area. If you are in a city there are such a large amount of groups that there is usually everything from a hiking group to a group of people looking for more dungeons and dragon players. They literally have almost every group you could imagine on meetup.com. My friend who is an avid hiker, ended up going to an indoor rock climbing event they were holding and now is good friends with two of the people he met there.
The hardest part about becoming friends with new people is sometimes just being in a social situation with them that isn’t weird or uncomfortable. Going might be uncomfortable at first, but just like that first college day, everyone is there looking to make friends with similar interests. I know I personally will be trying out the site when I graduate because even if I still have many of my friends from college, they are busy during the week and unable to hang out at night. If you have any other suggestions on how to meet more people, I would love to hear it as I think it is important for not only happiness but also mental wellbeing.
-Calaber24p