When you only spend months at a time in a place, how do you make and keep friendships? Growing up, I moved halfway through middle school and then again halfway through high school. By all means, this should’ve been social suicide. I missed the crucial times when friend groups would shift and merge, so by the time I arrived, I felt a bit like a floating asteroid in the outer orbit of a galaxy. Through primary school, there was this strong sense of always lacking. That I could never match the emotional depth or in-jokes of friends who had known each other for years.
Getting to uni, I thought this problem would be over with, but my last year has been fragmented into months of travel: summer research, then back on campus, then across the globe to Japan/Australia. Except now that I’m older, this problem of transience has been a lot more manageable. Once you’re a capital-A adult (not at all), you can just do things.
You can host events, camp, learn dance together, go on road trips, travel to a foreign country, or just do SOMETHING BIG.1 Without the years of of gradually building up familiarity through proximity, the only way to make close friends is by trading effort for time.
A TOTALLY REAL AND RIGOROUS THREE STEP PLAN
Find people you like, the people that spark some sort of joy deep in your soul
Figure out how close you want to get with them & where you fall on the scale of time/effort
Do the things!! (see Fig. 1 for ideas)
If you’re looking for more ideas, a key feature is how much you’re truly engaging with the other person. Walks can be low effort or they can be really intense. You can go through classes without having bonded at all. I’ve tried to order the graph by how much the activity forces engagement. After all, it’s tough to share a hotel room with someone and not learn something about them.
If some of these things seem too extreme, I would recommend taking the “low” effort events and gradually deepening them. Maybe open up more on walks or invite someone to a class where partnership is required (dance, team games, etc.) This isn’t some set formula (that would be a little odd), but a general framework of how to make friends on shorter timespans.
Oh, and dating too
I think most of what I just wrote was half inspired by this tweet from
that lives rent free in my head. Not that I have enough experience to know whether or not he’s right, but it’s definitely worked for making friends. Maybe it’d work for dating too, but I’m not the right person to ask.So maybe, be less casual?
Now that I’m just about wrapped up, I’ve realized that this is just a specific instantiation off of:
Oh, and if anyone would like to plan a 3 day trip to Montreal with me, you know where to find me :)
These have all been battle-tested by me!