Making Friends is Hard

When I was a kid we used to watch reruns of friends while my mom made dinner. I didn't understand a lot of the tv show, but I did understand one major thing - I wanted my adult life to look just like that. Well mostly like that. I envisioned my life where I would live in a cool, hip, apartment and hang out with my neighbors all the time. We'd have our boyfriends over or if we were single we had have girl nights and rant about how stupid boys were. We'd spend way too much time at our favorite local coffee shop or local bar - and it would be awesome.

College felt so much like Friends and I loved every moment of it. I could walk down the hall of my dorm and ask to grab dinner with someone - and I have 30-40 people to chose from. When I moved into a house, I lived with 5 other girls and there was always someone over. I could text someone "want to hang out right now" and I wouldn't even have to send five texts before I got a yes. In college people were everywhere and I had so many options of who to be friends with. 

But then I graduated and it felt like everything changed. I moved down to LA and slowly started to lose touch with some of my college friends. As I started with InterVarsity staff I noticed that my Facebook friends increased but it seemed that my deep, meaningful friendships were slowly decreasing. 

Making Facebook friends was easy - making deep meaningful friendships was a whole other story. I was coming into a new place, a new church, and I was the outsider. No one in the church needed me while I desperately needed them. But there were times when I didn't want to put in the work to make new friendships because it was hard. It took time and I needed someone to process life with at the moment and I wanted my old friends back and only a text message away from hanging out. I didn't like how much time, how much effort it took make those deep friendships. So at some level I just stopped trying. It felt easier to be angsty when my old friends didn't call me back rather than put myself out there and meet knew people - to risk being judged or misunderstood by new people. I wanted things to go back the way they were.

But I couldn't do that any more. As much as I tried to stay in the past, I was moving forward (even if slowly) and so were all my fiends. If I've learned anything in the past four years since I've graduated is that making deep friendships once you leave college takes way more time. I don't have InterVarsity conferences or retreats to propel friendship intimacy forward with my peers. The people I interact with don't live down the street - they live on the other side of the 405 and that might as well be hours away. And even though it feels like ages, being at my church for a year and half is a really short time in the adult world. I'm right on track for where I should be in how well people know me. 

But that doesn't make it any easier. Because making friends as an adult is hard but that shouldn't stop me from trying.