Can we take a few minutes and talk about findings friends in a new place?

I know I talk about this a lot and you’re probably tired of reading about it, but here’s the deal or the dill as they say in the Mountain West, you don’t have to keep reading. I on the other hand have to keep writing, because I am sure I will find myself needing to find friends again some day and it will be comforting (in a laugh/cry) sort of way to know that I’ve actually walked this path before and thrived.

So we’re in a new place. It’s lovely, there are trees, trees, and oh did I mention trees? It’s not the same temperature as the sun here, don’t get me wrong it is HOT but not Texas hot, so all in all life is good.

Except… That we are in the awkward phase where we have to make new friends.

Ok I guess we don’t actually have to make new friends, there are hermits that live alone without contact with regular people, but since we had friends in our former life it seems like we should continue that same habit.

Anyway so we’ve passed the phase of being so new that we can use that as an excuse for making friends and moved on to the “dating phase”.

If I haven’t said it enough already let me say it again, I hate, like in all caps, HATE making new friends.

It’s not that I don’t like people, I’m learning to accept that I’m an introvert who needs friends, it’s just that I hate the process of making friends.

It’s so awkward, like first date awkward.

You put on clean clothes, invite people for dinner, hope they show up, plan dinner, clean your house, I mean the list of things you have to do to make friends is so long (obviously longer than the items  listed but you get the point). And you do all this while wondering they’re going to like you.

After talking to a number of people, I’m pretty sure the anxiety over meeting new friends is universal- all ages, genders, socioeconomic groups, and ethnicities feel some degree of apprehension about meeting new people.

Think back to your first dates, you made an extra effort to make everything seem awesome so there would be a second date (or not). The same concept applies when making adult friends except you often have 3-4 uncooperative wingmen.

I laughed the last time we had people over for dinner because I mopped my floor right before they came.  Mopping was extremely important to me, it was as if the future basis of our friendship with these people was somehow based on the sanitary level of my floors (for the record my floors are clean 90% of the time, I wouldn’t eat off of them because that’s weird, but you could). I’m pretty sure no one cared about my floor, just like I wouldn’t care about someone else’s floors. No one is going to judge me if I look tired, didn’t wipe down every inch of the kitchen, or forgot to replace the bathroom soap, I wouldn’t judge someone else on any of those things, but in my head those were the important items.

I think we (and by we I mean I) focus on those nit picky things like mopping the floor and replacing the soap because they’re easy so easy to fix and because I totally judge myself on those things,  but let’s be honest, if you had to check all the boxes for someone then no one would have any friends, social contacts, or head nod acquaintances we just wouldn’t.

There’s something about messing with your hair for an hour before a first date, and scouring your  bathroom (which no one will ever go in) before having new people over that is use to deflect from our real fears- what if they think I’m boring, stupid, not funny, etc. Let’s get real, I can fix the floors but I can’t fix boring, so the floors it is.

As I was being an insane person the last time we had people over, I thought “give yourself a break!”, sure you want to be a cleaner more put together version of yourself, but you also want to be yourself!”

So here’s the deal, I didn’t give myself a break, but I strongly considered it and for me that is a huge step in the right direction. As I was not giving myself a break I thought, “this too shall pass”, and it will. When we first move to Austin we did the exact same thing and let me just say by the time we moved five years later I wasn’t mopping floors or putting clean clothes on when friends came to play (most of the time). By the time we left we’d reached the friendship phase where it is what it is, you know the good, the bad, and the ugly and there’s really no use in mopping the floor because they already know it all (but for the record I probably had mopped the day before because clean floors are a thing I do).

*I hope you got the reference to the Garth Brooks song, it’s possibly my least favorite country song of all time but I just couldn’t help it.