How to meet & make friends after college / Your experiences with Meetup.com and other similar sites

In My Humble Opinion
21

The fact of the matter is that it is usually a lot more difficult to meet people after college. The “Real World” isn’t like school where a bunch of strangers who are all the same age are thrown together and have regular activities. People in the Real World typically have their own lives and friendships and interests.

Generally the way you make new friends is the same way you made friends in school. You join regular activities (like a kickball league or karate class or whatever) where you are with the same people repeatedly over a period of time. Eventually you get to know those people.

Throwing parties or inviting people out also helps. Basically as you get to know people on a superficial level through work or other activities, you go out with them for drinks or host a party.

Web sites or events designed to meet other people are ineffective IMHO because a) you usually don’t build a lasting friendship after one meeting and b) they mostly attract other losers who also have no friends and that’s not much to build a relationship on.

Also it’s a lot more difficult if you are introverted. Sort of the same way being good at football is difficult if you are lazy, small and weak. You are trying to do something that is in opposition to your natural tendencies and abilities.

And yes, a big part of the OPs problem is a “female thing”. All the things the OP described as reasons not to be friends with her boyfriend’s friend’s SOs - overbearing, passive-aggressive, just plain horrible - that pretty much describes how every woman describes every other woman. Women just don’t like hanging out with each other.

Most guys prefer to hang out with other guys where we can be ourselves. We tend to only hang out with women when we want to bang them. Otherwise we would just hang out with a dude.

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And I can see you’re super popular and very well-liked.

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I used to work with msmith37 a long time ago and introduced him to these boards. He is a pretty cool person but cocky in real life like he is here. He is probably still popular in that guy’s guy kind of way. I would hang out with him if he lived here still and always liked him.

What he speaks is generally the truth though. Women really do generally hate other women and it is a pain in the ass to even be around them in groups starting young but especially when they are older and the wagons have circled. The undertone of aggressiveness makes many men uncomfortable. I can see how it would be a problem for women to break into existing social circles and I have heard plenty of horror stories about it but also some successes.

I am a little weird in that I like having female friends individually and always have. Good looking is good but that doesn’t matter even if I would “bang” them if the circumstances were different. I just like smart females that are well put together and not delicate little flowers who think everyone is secretly plotting to rape them. There have to be more people like me out there so don’t discount some men.

I also wanted to say that you are one of my favorite posters by far as well Zsofia and I would hang out with you if you ever wandered up here. I don’t want to see two people I like get snippy with each other so I thought I would share.

24

I managed to remember to re-connect with high school friends after we all finished college, and went to some of their parties. They had regular halloween and new year’s eve parties. They invited their “old friends” and “new friends.”

Then a bunch of “old friends” moved away and the only people at the parties were their “new firends.” Then, the hosts moved away!

But thanks to Facebook, I am actually pretty friendly with my friends’ friends.

Wednesday I went out with this girl who is a FOAFriend who had moved away. She brought along a new friend who, before moving up here for grad school contacted the FOAF via OkCupid to meet new people in this area.

Friday I went to a get-together at the home of a FOAF. Actually, my friend in this case is the wife of a kid I went to grade school with. I hadn’t been very close to this guy or his wife until everyone else moved away and we found ourselves to be the only ones left in town from the original group. Anyway, I don’t really know the FOAF who had the party friday but I went and it was fine.

I guess my advice is just to network through your old friends to find new friends. I’ve found that if I like a person, I tend to like their friends too. If the person moves, their friends who stayed can fill a void.

Also, don’t turn down invites for a while. Even if it is to do stupid or boring stuff. The point is to just be with people. Pretty soon you can extend an invite to those people to do something you are interested int.

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That is so sweet of you to say, Shagnasty!

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It’s funny, because when I was a child and then a teenager, I would have to have made a concerted effort not to be surrounded with other kids. All I had to do is walk out the door and there they were. Whoever I ran into might not be my first choice to hang out with, nor I theirs, but there we were.

And it was really easy to “fall in with a bad crowd.” Where are the bad crowds to fall in with on Meetup.com? The closest I see are the “9/12” or “The Rules of Attraction” groups.

I think the problem is that as kids, at worse we were obsessed with status for it’s own sake, so if you hung out with an uncool group you at least could claim credit as the coolest among your subset. After college, the need to earn money entered the equation, and we found ourselves in a world of people best illustrated by this Onion Op-Ed

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Thank goodness we women have you here to explain to us what we are really like. All this time I thought I loved my friends and missed them terribly – thank you for showing me the light.

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I am interested in this thread because my daughter finished college and moved 4 hours away. None of the Catholic churches seem to have a young adults group. She is the youngest of the people where she works, and the only single one. She likes her job, loves her house, but comes home and sits by herself. Day, after day, after day. She can’t figure out how to meet anyone, and her neighbors seem rather unfriendly. She’s lived there since May and they don’t even do the neighborly wave if they’re in the yard when she comes home, or gets her mail, or mows the lawn. I even suggested she visit a Protestant church sometime because they seem to be friendlier. I don’t know what to tell her. I hope I get some ideas on here.

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Uh, I’m 23 and Zsofia is 30, so I hardly think that the wagons are circling. msmith37 is basically like a real life version of the guys on The League. “Upper middle class white guy cocky about the low six figures he makes.” Shit, I think I just wrote an Onion headline. Not everyone finds the “guy’s guy” popular or even tolerable.

On top of that, some of us wimmens are (shockingly!) secure in our looks, humor, and personality. Not every, or even most woman feel threatened by other women. I hate when the lowest, most caveman-like beliefs get casually tossed around this board like we’re all at $1 well drink night at the Cantina.

Pai325, is there a college nearby? If so there’s probably a Newman center there. I’d tell her to actually email someone at the church. If she’s in a suburb, tell her to find the biggest church. Overall numbers are way down, especially of young people (let’s all refrain from why this may be) but the big churches tend to have active young people groups.

Classy. I have six fantastic friends from high school; we played on the same sports team for ten years. They will be bridesmaids at my wedding, and I will be at theirs. I harbor absolutely no jealousy or resentment towards them. One of their fathers died recently, and suddenly. Even though we don’t all keep up with each other every single week, she knew we’d be there for her, and she leaned on us. We sent the biggest bouquet possible, signed from our old team nickname. We love her.

One got engaged recently and asked me out to lunch (her internship was in my city over the summer). She confessed she was rather upset that he proposed before she had graduated, as they had agreed upon. She was even a little embarrassed that she was the first of our group to get engaged. Maybe your idea of the typical woman is to grab the other’s hand and cry foul that her rock’s not larger, or that she should have been the first, but that’s not the mentality I or any of my friends approach life with. In fact, one friend became a dick-measurer through college and we’ve dismissed her from the group.

As for not being friends with my boyfriend’s spouses or SO’s, that’s just hilarious. Did you not read what I said about the one who forgot her BC pill, didn’t tell him, and then begged me to secrecy? Do you think I should be friends with a crazy liar like that? Or the one who told me they were having kids in the next 2 years - when they weren’t even engaged yet? (I found out about that one the hard way). Or the (same as the kids one) who stuck a fucking wedding dress in their joint closet, to passive-aggressively hint at a proposal?

I also have one close female friend from each college I went to. Most of my close guy friends have dropped out of the picture because they didn’t get to bang me or were friends of ex’s. That sounds like their problem, not mine. I’m talking about meeting new people - of any gender - since my friends have all graduated and dispersed.

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Are you a reader? A lot of bookstores organize book discussion groups.

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It has been really difficult for me, especially here in a small town. If you don’t have kids and don’t go to church it can be really hard to build a social circle outside of work.

The best thing for me has been Facebook. If you’re really proactive about adding everyone you know, adding new people that you meet, and even adding interesting-sounding friends-of-friends, you’ll probably find more kindred spirits than you realize. It also makes it far easier to get people together to do things.

It still may take a while, and you have to take a lot of initiative, but I now have a lot of good friends locally that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

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I know, right? “I miss having close women friends!” “That’s prolly 'cause you hate other women and want to grind your stilleto heels into their kneecaps. Especially if they’re better looking than you are.”

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I had the same problem after college; this all sounds so familiar and I really feel for you. Unfortunately, I don’t think my solutions will help you, but I’ll share them anyway.

After graduation, I stayed in the same city (Providence), and gradually, my college friends moved away. I made some friends at work, but those friendships were short-lived for various reasons. Five years after I graduated from college, I moved to NYC with two college friends. A bunch of my other college friends also lived in New York, and I met more friends though them. I also started posting to the SDMB. This was around the time that there were a lot of Dopefests in NYC and elsewhere, and a bunch of us became good friends through the Dope. I met my husband here.

Three years later, I moved to FL and I had the same problem again. I had no friends here (other than my husband), and my work friends were really just “work friends.” This time, my solution was to have kids. Now I’m the organizer of a moms’ group on meetup.com and I’ve made lots of friends that way.

So my solutions to the problem were a) move to a place where I already had friends (and where there were lots of young, single people like myself), b) go to lots of Dopefests and c) have kids.

34

This makes me sad. :frowning: It’s such a common problem. The local library might have activities, book groups, movie nights. Could she take up knitting? I’m sure the yarn shops have gatherings, especially for newbies. Is there a YMCA that offers swimmings, activities? Is there a group that goes walking, hiking, on bicycle trips? Taking a course at community college? Doing some kind of volunteer work? At least it will get her out of the house and mingling with people. My daughter volunteered at a county museum, selling souveniers and running the slide projector. Also volunteered at an animal shelter. She made a couple of friends, older than her, but they share a lot in common.

35

Thanks Shagnasty. That’s nice of you to say. FWIW, I’m only about half serious about 90% of the stuff I say.
But in all seriousness, **lindsaybluth **and Zsofia are missing my point. Even if a significant number of women are as I described, that is going to dramatically cut down the number of potential candidates for friendship. While you might be eager to make friends, they may not be. And a lot of people (men and women) just sort of suck anyway. That narrows down the pool further.
The problem is also complicated by the fact that you are in what appears to be a serious SO relationship (no I’m not suggesting you end it). Single people tend to stick with other single people while couple people tend to hang out with other couples.

The ideal situation is that you find a group of couples where the women are all friends and the men are all friends, but that almost never happens. Usually the dynamic is that either the guys or the girls are all friends linked together by work, softball, college, whatever. They tend to drive the events. The SOs may be friendly, but they tend to be the “plus one”. And in **lindsaybluth’s **case where the SOs seem crazy unpleasent, that kind of sucks.

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I did this a lot in college and met some great people from neighboring schools and in very different majors, people I otherwise wouldn’t have ever met. Problem is everyone is now gone and my co-workers are in their 40’s. I had a great coworker who I hung out with outside of work - and he decided to move to Florida to live near his girlfriend and with his brother. But once I meet even a few people, DoctorJ, I’ll take your advice and be very proactive about adding everyone on Facebook. I used to do it as an afterthought, but now it’ll be at the forefront of my mind.

I still don’t think significant numbers of women hate each other. But lots of people do suck. I think about the thousands of people I met in college while on the boards of two student groups with 200+ person memberships, through internships and classes and everything else…and people really suck. Lots of people are boring or dumb or religious. Zsofia and I can’t waste precious stiletto dust on those types.

The second paragraph is true. I joined a big “20-something” Meetup group and was “greeted” by three people asking me to join them bowling Friday night (two were guys hitting on me, one was a girl in a similar situation). I could have gone, but I’d rather have spent time with my SO. I gotta start making time for friends, especially since he’ll be off in law school and we’ll be apart for 3 years next fall.

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No Newman Center in my daughter’s town, but there is a Y. I am trying to encourage her to just go do something. Maybe a Y membership (or a card saying I’ll pay) might be a good Christmas present.

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No problem. Its one of those things like the The Nasca lines. People that live among it consider themselves to be experts on it but it is only the outside observer who can see the pattern instantly. Women are usually great individually. In semi-closed groups, it a completely different story.

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Disclaimer: I haven’t been in school since 11th grade.

The only helpful advice I have is to be *the first to be friendly *, and act interested in people’s lives in all the varied situations you’ll find yourself with others. Even people you don’t know at all, or don’t really like, or don’t have any common ground with - occasionally you’ll grow to like them or find a way to enjoy spending time together without obvious shared interests. My theory is that it rarely hurts to have someone like you, and even if you don’t like them much sometimes they’ll introduce you to someone who’s awesome.

This is coming from someone who’s pretty asocial outside of work, and intensively protective of her time and space. If you’re someone who can’t defend themselves against people imposing or pressuring for more closeness I urge caution.

I’ve had potential friends coming out my ears ever since I implemented this strategy. Unfortunately I don’t actually want to be friends with most of the people I’m friendly with and I’m a bit pressed for time what with all the people I know, but at least I’ve able to weed out some awesome and close friends from the crowd, over the last few years.

I also think you should reconsider trying to meet and befriend peers. I’m 25, partnered, have been working for a living for 7 years now, and have several dogs which tie me to my home. I’ve found it’s people in their 30s and older that have lifestyles that mesh the best with mine. Most people my age are still in their heavy-drinking phase which I’m not interested in.

Meeting people is really not hard. We’re all surrounded by people, you just have to draw them in. Just the other day I bonded randomly with a very nice lady who lives in my neighborhood, I just happened to strike up a conversation with her on the street (I asked about her iris, she asked about my dogs and told me about hers, next thing you know we’re finding out her daughter and my boyfriend’s niece are friends and she’s a nurse, a career path I’m considering, blah blah blah. I’m sure I’ll run into her again, and she seemed interesting, we could definitely be friends).

I know quite a few people recently out of college with this problem - I think college can be such a complete and engrossing environment that you have to relearn how relationships function in the real world…

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I have to agree that it’s difficult to meet people that make you think “Wow, I want to make an effort to make friends with that person.” Especially as you get older (yeah, I’m all of 28).

Speaking from personal experience, I’m closer with my girlfriends than I am with my guyfriends, but I have fewer girlfriends in general. Also my experiences with having a “group” of girlfriends have never ended well. I do have a close circle of girlfriends from college but there are only five of us. I have a close friend from childhood, another from grad school, and another from work.