finding friends

[firecat]

inspired by snippy

for some folks, online friends don't fill the same social needs as in-person friends.

for those of you who have had difficulty at times making in-person friends, and have found ways to solve that problem, what worked for you?

Some things that have worked for me are

• inviting co-workers to a home-made dinner
  
• joining and organizing ongoing religious/spiritual groups (in my case, eclectic/women's spirituality/shamanic)
  
• participating in and organizing in-person meetings of people I knew from online forums
  

Things that seem to work for other people that don't usually work for me are

• parties
  
• bars
  
• volunteering (I love volunteering, but I haven't usually made friends that way)
  
• classes
  

Comments

[firecat]

For the benefit of people just tuning in, how did you get in-person friends thru Nanowrimo?

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Most major cities participating in NaNoWriMo have municipal liaisons (I was one for Toronto this year), who are encouraged to hold events for their local writerfolk doing the contest. Toronto is particularly, wildly social, it turns out. On the message forums, we are bested only by "The Bay Area" and "England (Excluding London)" in terms of overall posts, for example, both of which dwarf us in population, as far as I know.

Anyhow, during NaNoWriMo we go kind of nutty on the social events. We have an event about every three days starting with one about three days before November begins to one about three days after it ends. Even given that schedule (plus an extra one in the middle that was the day before one of the others, this year), our members scheduled numerous impromptu get-togethers throughout the month. We flip-flopped, with every other get-together being for group writing sessions, the alternates being purely social. We had about fifteen people at every meeting this month. We even had about seven or eight at the one that was held at 2am at an all-night diner.

(The previous year, the group was smaller: I'd say an average of six people per meeting, which were once or twice a week.)

We'd made a lot of good friends through it. I met two of my partners through NaNoWriMo, actually; I met clawfoot at the 2002 NaNoWriMo wrap party, and thespian during the course of NaNoWriMo 2003. I think a couple of the other local NaNo folk are dating as well. But even aside from that, many people made many great friends, and we didn't want to lose touch with them.

We've formed three communities to support that: The first is a peer-editing group called Edit This Toronto, for working on our novels off-season; the second is a board gaming group, since many of us seemed to be gaming people; the last is a monthly meetup.com get-together, to formally get everyone together to just hang out. We've almost all added each other to our LJ friends lists, too, so many other meetings get called now and then. (There's a burgeoning regular sunday Pub nite, and about once a week during the week the gang goes out for crepes.)

I've been very lucky to be involved with the group.