Anonymous asked: Advice for making friends, directed towards a socially awkward girl who prefers reading and scrabble to almost all other activities, in a relatively new college town?
Join a book club.
Before I moved to New York, I remember reading articles about making friends and they always said the same shit: join a club, take a class, volunteer! And I always thought, where the hell do these people live that there’s just an abundance of clubs and classes on your favorite topics?
No one realizes that all the people giving this advice live in New York, one of the only places on the planet where these are all viable options.
So, without more details to go on, here are a range of ideas depending on how big your town is:
- go to meetup.com and look for things that interest you (and remember most people on that site are in the exact same boat you are)
- check at your local library for a book club
- if you’re a student, get a job that will have you interacting with other employees
Making friends is certainly easier than falling in love, but it requires the same steps: get out there, meet people, and be willing to say, “hey, you’re cool, you want to hang out sometime?” It’s important to keep in mind that you might not meet your best friend at the local library book club - but you might meet a bookish woman who asks you to babysit, you babysit enough times that she invites you to her BBQ, her neighbor comes to the BBQ with her daughter, and that daughter ends up being your best friend.
As for being socially awkward, don’t let that you stress you out. Explore the Internet for even ten minutes and you’ll realize just how many people in the world would say the same thing. Even the people who appear confident and at ease give themselves pep talks before going to events alone. (Not that I would, cough, umm… do something like that.)
