How to Make Friends

[Sam W]

How do you make friends?
This is a question that comes up a lot here at Scarleteen, so I thought a designated thread for it might be helpful for folks to share their experiences and advice.

One thing that's been helpful for me was to realize that people have there own friend-making speeds, and that mine is on the slower end (due to being quiet and still a little shy), so I need to not be frustrated with myself for not making friends immediately when in a new environment. But knowing that also helps me understand that making friends is something I have to be an active participant in, because otherwise it won't happen.

I've also found that doing activities that interest me is a good way to at least meet people who are nice and have at least one point in common that we can talk about (that was a positive side effect of going to a big college. There are clubs and meetups for everything, so it increased the odds of me going "oh, I like thing, and other people are having a meeting to discuss/watch thing. I should go.")

What about y'all?

[Atonement]

The biggest thing for me is to place yourself around people that you actually have things in common with.

I've always been a city girl at heart, but I've lived in small towns ranging from "sorta conservative" to "ultra conservative" all my life. As a pretty liberal minority who loves to wear traditional jewelry and talk about my culture and feminist issues and geeky stuff, I always felt pretty marginalized. And I took for granted that I just wasn't very good at making friends.

Then, 6 months ago, I moved to a big city. Almost immediately, I found a group of people in my program who were like me, and making friends was effortless.