Category: Socializing
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The easiest, and often best, way to make friends is to befriend an “includer”
Okay, I almost hesitate to write about this topic right now, because I know a lot of you are gonna read it and be like, “What the fuck? He’s basically telling us it’s all luck.” But I want you to read carefully and see what I am and am not saying. I do think having…
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Making friends isn’t an easy or mechanical process
Okay several weeks ago, I told you I was going to compare finding friendship to a salesperson generating leads. But when I sat down to write this, I realized I knew nothing about sales except what I learned from Alec Baldwin’s speech in Glengarry Glen Ross, and I remembered that that movie is literally about how…
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How to get invited to parties =]
Many self-help books have an essential superficiality that’s revealed in their opening chapters because they go on and on with caveats and general principles, and they never get down to the nitty-gritty of what you, a person sitting alone in front of your computer, can do right now to help yourself out. So I’m actually…
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It’s hard to _try_ to make friends; what’s more productive is to find situations where friendships will form naturally
Awhile back there was a New York Times article that said, essentially, the key to making friends is “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.” And, personally, I’ve never found a better summation of the issue than that. Trying to make friends…
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Don’t listen to all the terrible clickbait friend-making advice out there
Most clickbait advice is written by people who’ve never actually tried it. Either that, or they’re terribly unobservant. That’s the only explanation I can give for all the articles you’ll find if you google “How do I make friends as an adult.” Don’t click through! Don’t even give them the satisfaction! All of those articles…
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The first step to gaining friends is to stop hanging out with people you don’t actually like
Loneliness activates some panic reaction in us. We don’t sit back and think, “Hmm, what do I do?” In fact, we often don’t think about it at all. That’s because the implications of loneliness (“I am so worthless that nobody could possibly love me”) are so catastrophic that if we were to confront them, we’d…
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I’m not an expert in making friends; I’m an expert in fighting loneliness
Yesterday I closed by writing about loneliness. Now, I could wax poetic about the nature of this loneliness, but one of my favorite passages in all of literature (it’s from Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal) puts it much better than I could: Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You…
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How to make friends as an adult (even when you’re not particularly interesting, attractive, or charismatic).
So far as I can tell, most adults have no roots in the area where they live. They didn’t grow up there. And, if they went to college, their college was in some other place. They often relocated to their current metro area either for a job, graduate school, or with the aspiration of…
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I’ve learned the absolute best way to get invited to parties!
Throw some. There it is. That’s the sum of my advice. But in case you need clarification, I love parties. I enjoy hanging out with my friends. I like intimate dinners and casual chilling. I’m even down with spending a friday night alone. But if I’m not going to parties and meeting new people, I…
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Trying to avoid feeling angry and bitter after having negative interactions with people
This weekend I became briefly irritated with a friend of mine and snapped at them. And when I walked away from the interaction, I felt appalled and angry and immediately started to try to justify my anger by thinking about all the ways that I was in the right and they were in the wrong,…