Each fall, thousands of students around the globe are entering college for their first semester. While this new chapter in life has plenty of reasons to get your nerves kicking, there is one that most everyone I know has felt at some point or another: how am I going to make friends?
As it turns out, college is the best place ever for making friends. From roommates to floor mates, classmates to teammates there are going to be literally hundreds of people that you cross paths with daily who all have something in common with you. You just need to be willing to figure out what that something is and if you want to get to know this person better. By the end of college it is likely that you won’t be able to make sense of how you only knew these people that became your family at your home away from home for the last ~4 years.
My college crew, all but three of them had been friends since our freshman year!
Skip ahead to entering the real world. For some it is the week after graduating and others it may be a few months or even years depending on what takes place between school and adulting. Because it turned out to be so easy to make all new friends in a strange environment, doing it again in a city full of young professionals shouldn’t be too difficult, right? Wrong. Making friends as a young adult seems to be the hardest task, as least through personal experience.
When I left for college I knew a total of four people on my campus of 15,000. Three were girls from my hometown, all older than I was, and the fourth being my roommate that I met up with one time in Target and was beyond grateful to have gotten along with rather well. But now I talk to a handful of college friends regularly and it’s great! Minus the teensy detail that we don’t live close enough to grab coffee during a lull at work or run errands together after we finish dinner. Seeing my friends takes some work and seriously coordinated schedules, which happens less often than you’d think. Since my boyfriend grew up nearby and remained close with his friends from home, it’s been incredibly fun getting to know them and considering my friends instead of just his. But sometimes I just want to meet somebody new that is my friend. Writing this seems weird, but clearly I am alone considering there are now dating apps that have shifted gears so that women can befriend other women. Behold, Bumble BFF!
I have never downloaded or been on a dating app, save for when my friends send me screenshots of the guys they match or the weird convos they keep going out of pure entertainment. But I decided that this BFF thing might be worth a shot. In the app store you have to download regular Bumble, which made me a little bit uneasy if we are being honest, but you can set it into BFF mode before your profile is even done so you don’t have to worry about being in the wrong section of the app. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to just use my Facebook profile pictures, write a quick blurb about myself, and confirm my job and where I went to school BOOM! Time to start swiping.
Unfortunately for me, there have been a decent number of girls in my area on this app that I have connected with but none that I ever really chatted with enough to feel comfortable enough to suggest hanging out with. Most of the conversations I had were similar, starting off with how the other girl was new to the area or lived with her boyfriend and therefore was eager to meet people in a passive way. Chats about favorite coffee shops would come up or mentioning how cute the dog in one of the profile photos was (this was actually me, I always comment on dogs because I just love them) but usually within three days of some off and on forced chitchat it would just stop. Why? Well, on my end if I was busy and didn’t reply I felt too weird to do it a day after the fact. I answer my own friends after days sometimes because I read a message while walking and just forget about it. So why can’t I message a girl that is just like me by trying to find a new friend? Or why doesn’t she just message me again? Maybe it would help if I changed my bio to how I can be either really quick or incredibly slow with my phone and that I also am not afraid of the double text. All I know is that these things seems to fizzle out faster than, well, most of my friend’s actual Bumble dates.
This was my first ever conversation on BumbleBFF and this is the entire thing. Awk.
So, here I am. A user of BumbleBFF for probably six months or so now and no new friends to show for it. I promise that I am nice and laugh at bad jokes and never say no to a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, isn’t that what every girl is looking for in a new friend? I’m not entirely sure what the future holds, via friendship apps or not, but I do think that learning how to make friends will just take time. If you want to be friends I’m your girl, because honestly this post-grad life has given me FOMO about not having any of my own #squadgoals, and I just really need some more ladies to join me for brunch.
