Making Friends is Difficult

I don’t know why it just hit me… But I realized just how difficult it is to make friends as an adult.  I would like to blame modern technology for that problem: everything is a click or a swipe away… if we don’t want to see something we block it… Phones have voicemails, everything has a hashtag… You know the drill. 

Can I say that I don’t like that? It’s all so icky to me.

Having so many modern conveniences has made us lazy. I took an unofficial poll from some friends, coworkers and customers of mine and I found that an overwhelming number of them said they don’t have much of a social life because they don’t have many friends. Now, maybe it’s just the group of adults I associate with, maybe my acquaintences are just over worked and under socialized, but then I went to the Internet. 

I found that the app Bumble (normally known for looking for romantic partners) has a new section for making friends. According to their Apple Store app description: “Bumble connects you to people around you.  After two people mutually opt in by swiping right, they’re added to each other’s ‘hive’ of connections. The woman has to say something first within 24 hours or the connection disappears forever. For same sex connections, or friendships, either person has to make a move within 24 hours before that connection disappears.  … Each person can extend one connection a day for an additional 24 hours. Bee social!”  

I wish I knew someone else that used the BFF side of Bumble instead of the dating side. I only know one person that uses the dating side, and he’s let me play with it before… It’s a little like Tinder, and I think Tinder is disgusting.  I decided to give it a shot, so I downloaded the app, signed in with Facebook (they swear they won’t ever post to Facebook)  and made it to the page where you add a profile picture and… I got stuck. Everytime I selected a photo, cropped it and hit save the picture went into cyber space and I had to start over. So, alas, I’ll try again in a few minutes with that project. 

In the meantime I read an article by Huffington Post that gave some tips for making friends as an adult. These tips included some unhelpful tips like: get out of the house, engage with people, and take risks. None of that seemed like it applied or would be helpful to me.  Thankfully, there were some helpful tips mixed in there, too: start with acquaintances, follow your passion/ develop your hobbies, and join a club. The last few tips seemed like actual, real people tips, but I still wondered how I managed to take that knowledge and use it for something! 

So, as I pick my own brain and decide if I can’t develop some of my real life friendships a little bit further I just have to know: is anyone else feeling like this? Everyone I know is dying to make new friends and they’re all just struggling to go to work, take care of their lives/homes/families and when it comes to making friends they just don’t know where to start and even if they did they don’t have the energy to do it.

I told my best friend the other day that I need the friends with benefits version of a best friend and she looked at me like I had grown a head and said, “you mean…like a friend where the benefit is having a friend?” And I felt like a big dumb. 

That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope everyone else is doing splendidly this warm summer morning!