Being fairly new to London, it’s sometimes hard to meet new people or at least make lasting friendships. I set out to do something about this and now a month later I’ve had some great success, and wanted to share my experience so far…
I’ve been in SE London for almost a year and have made a few friends through jobs but with a partner who works away and family at the other end of the country I often find myself wishing I had a few girl friends I could meet after work for drinks, call up for a coffee and a and a gossip at the weekends etc (without having to pay £50 and sit on a train for 3 hours – as much as I will always do this to see my lovely northern friends once in a while, I can’t do it every weekend).
I remember as a teenager, as my poor mum will confirm, I always complained of not having enough friends – even when I did as school, college etc. And I was of the generation of the boom of Faceparty (if anyone remembers this!) and then Myspace hitting the scene – where ‘friendships’ where often online whether you’d met the person or not.
So… first stop – Google. Now after skipping past a number of slightly dodgy looking sites with lonely hearts style personal ad (you know you’re not going to attract the kind if friends I’m taking about) – I found a site called Meetup. Now this is pretty cool – it’s a global site with all sorts of meetup groups from sports to book clubs… to the slightly more bizarre – but there is something for everyone… almost…
I found plenty of girly friendship groups in central London but decided to take a shot at organising my own in my local area. All I had to do was write a little blurb and plan a place and date to meet – the site then sends out an emails to anyone registered as looking for that kind of group in that kind of area. Four weeks later I have over 60 members and 15 confirmed to come to my first Meetup!
Now I wouldn’t say I was an overly outgoing person – I’d never organised anything like this before and as much as I love to chat and meet people, am never usually the centre of what’s going on. I thought no one might turn up, I thought maybe they will but they’ll be completely weird. But… they weren’t and it was a success! 13 came – a great mix of ladies, different ages and professions which made for so much to talk about and great opportunities for more meetups to come.
So… I think this really goes to show that if you want to do something about a problem, a complaint, something you always whinged about – it is possible, often in the most unlikely ways. I went online to make a real live event and meet some real, friendly women, who are all in the same situation – looking for people to have a laugh, some wine and a piece of cake with.
“Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.” – Francis Bacon
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- Is there something bothering you that you’d like to change?
- Have you made friends in any unusual circumstances?
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