Once you’re out of school, finding friends and spending time with them falls by the wayside to work, family and other obligations. So, tell us, how did you stumble upon new friendships? And more importantly, what do you do to keep them going strong?
Maybe you organise a game night once a month with your pals, like I do? Perhaps you do barbecue and beer every now and again? Or maybe you go on a trip with your buddies every year? Share your experience and tips below. You might just help out someone who’s struggling. Isolation and loneliness is plaguing all generations, so it’s important to keep social and connected with the people you care about.
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One response to “How Do You Find And Maintain Your Friendships?”
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Personally, I’ve found that I have a decreasing pool of “real” friends because the real world demands of life pull people away. I typically don’t do group activities with friends very often simply because we can never (or at best rarely) coordinate more than a couple of us at the same time. So I’d typically pick an activity that different friends like and we do that when we can. I think it’s also necessary to be active about catching up – if you haven’t heard from someone in a while then call/text/visit them. They could be sitting at home wondering why no one ever rings too.
eg: One friend loves marvel movies so whenever a new one is out we make it a point of catching up and seeing that. Another friend is a footy fan so every few weeks we watch a match and so on.
I do find that internet gaming and just discussion forums leads to interesting (faceless) friendships. It’s possible to have every bit as serious a discussion with people online as face to face. And in some ways you can form a genuine friendship since it’s untainted by things like appearance, it’s entirely based on communication and mutual interests. And of course it’s possible to meet up with online people in real life once (if) you feel comfortable doing so.
On a related note, I’d love to know if there are good “friend” apps. Think something like “tinder” but to meet someone to have a beer and talk sports with not for sexy times.
We leverage the internet to our advantage. Have a Hangout of mates that play MTG, we use to shoot the breeze and arrange get togethers for play. Have another we’re using to arrange the trip to PAX.
My groups need to be two things. Open and understanding. Open to arranging things to do, understanding that occasionally we dont want to share an event or we’re sharing it with others. Anything after that can be worked on (batshit crazy anti-science beliefs) or mitigated by the type of event (movies vs games day).
Since having a baby it has been harder to go places, so we’ve been hosting more – this culminated in an open house BBQ lunch free-for-all where any and all were welcome over the course of the day, meaning people could arrive/leave as was convenient.
We also used to all get together for a meal at the same pub on a semiregular basis, arranged via text a few days before. Attendance was always no harm, no foul.
I started a tabletop gaming club after high school as I drifted apart from my high school friends. We ran public demos to start with and I found a whole bunch of people of similar ages that I had a lot in common with, including my eventual wife and my best man. Ive now known most of these people for 10+ years and cant imagine my life without them.
As for maintaining, most of us now have kids and full time jobs but we still meet up most Mondays for a game of something or just to shoot the breeze and maintain a group chat in Facebook. The nature of the hobby means you need to meet people face to face to play and that keeps us interacting and involved.