There are heaps of reasons why women find themselves in need of new friends and few of them have anything to do with being a failure. Family pressures, job re-locations and relationship break-ups can all leave women in need of a wider social circle.
Having moved 18 times during the past 25 years whilst caring for my special needs son, I know just how difficult it can be to make new friends. If only it was still as easy as when we were children and could just walk up to another little girl and say "I've got a new Barbie. Shall we play together?". Unfortunately, that kind of innocence and spontaneity disappears with age and making friends becomes far more dependent on circumstance and whether or not people in our immediate surrounds are willing to open up to newcomers. We become far more sceptical, weighing up the pros and cons of developing a friendship with those we meet and quite often, the stress of everyday living gets in the way of things.
After moving to my current home, I searched the net hoping to find a contact site that would help put me in touch with other women locally; others were surely in the same sort of situation as myself and in need of a friend finder. Do you think I could find anything? Sure, there were plenty of sites promising friendships but after browsing through them it became apparent that most "friendships" were male/female based and that wasn't what I was looking for. It's not that I have anything against friendship across the sexes even though I have doubts about the "lastability" of most, but women need women and it was women friends I wanted. Try putting "find adult women friends" in a search engine (I used Google) and see for yourself what the results are. "The world's largest sex site" and "find sexy, swinging people" are hardly promising, are they?
During my search I also found lots of articles offering advice on making and maintaining friendships. When titles like "make friends as an adult the easy way" stared out of the screen at me, how could I do anything but click on them? Maybe they held the answer. Perhaps, if I was really lucky, I'd find some information about some way of coming in contact with people that I didn't already know. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. What I found was the same old advice, over and over, all presented in pretty packages with different wrapping and ribbons to make them look new. My disappointment grew with every read.
It's all very well and good saying "Get yourself out there! Go to parties, relax and chat with anybody who looks friendly" but you've got to get yourself invited to the parties in the first place. Who's likely to invite you if you don't have any friends locally? Maybe I should've put an ad in the local rag: "Bored female needs parties to attend". I'm pretty sure I would've had some response but as with the search engine results, probably not the sort of parties I had in mind.
Obviously, there's some useful information out there, too. Joining clubs is a good idea and every area generally has a few to choose from. Look in the local paper or your library for slimming clubs, fitness clubs, walking groups, reading circles or anything else that grabs you. Join a couple and see what happens. I've gone down this route several times and while it's sometimes been fruitful, that isn't always the case. Some clubs are such that you go in, do what you've come to do and go home again without hardly exchanging a word with anybody else and others can be a bit cliquey. They're still worth trying though because if there's one thing that's certain, nobody is going to knock on your door and offer to be your friend.
Volunteering and charity work is another route I've tried and it's definitely one worth pursuing for those who have the time. I've developed many a good friendship over the years through charity work but it's something you'll need to offer a reasonable chunk of your time to. Maybe it's not the best solution for somebody who otherwise works full-time or who has a demanding family but if you're sat at home feeling bored, pop down to the library as they'll probably have some information on charities looking for volunteers.
Funnily enough, when you talk to people about their friends and how they met, it becomes obvious that very few actually develop friendships through their work. Sure, they have plenty of acquaintances there and maybe they go out for the occasional after work tipple but very rarely do they develop true friendships. This is probably because of the pressure that spending a lot of time together puts on a friendship and I think most of us know that should we fall out, our job, regardless of how much we usually enjoy it, will no longer be quite what it was.
Recent social developments have put more and more mature women into this situation of needing new friends. We move house far more often nowadays than was the norm twenty years ago, a trend that's led to women being separated from their families as well as their friends. Without a new social network to rely on, we can easily end up feeling very isolated and unhappy. I've often wondered just how many women there are out there who get up in the morning, put on a brave smile whilst they go about their daily duties, come home, close the door and, depending on their home circumstances, tend to the family's needs before settling in front of the TV for the evening. Hardly what anybody would describe as a stimulating lifestyle.
Divorce often leaves women in a semi-friendless situation, too. Again, a trend that's been steadily rising over the past few decades and one which leaves many women in a situation where most of her friends are his friends too. For these women it's often important that they develop new friends that are completely dissociated with their former life.
It's almost a paradox that whilst finding platonic friendships on the net isn't easy, umpteen million couples worldwide meet on the internet these days and more often than not, one part has to move many miles, sometimes even to a new country, to be with their love. I met my partner on the net but while it's one thing to up sticks and move to the other end of the country to be with somebody you love and want to spend your life with, nobody's going to do that to be with a friend. Those women who've left their homes to be with a partner may not be quite as lonely as single women in new areas but even if our partner is also our best friend, few of us are happy to spend all of our time with one person. In fact, according to marriage experts, for most of us, doing so would be like taking the express train to disaster.
I have some very good net friends who've been very supportive when I've needed them but as much as I wish they could, they'll never really replace real life friends who you can sit chatting with around the table whilst sharing a bottle of wine and a chow mein.
Friendships aren't just about having fun either; they're actually beneficial to our health. According to Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., when we're stressed, being with a supportive friend brings down our blood pressure, signals our adrenal glands to stop pumping out corticosteroids and all at once we feel unmistakably better. In fact, she goes on to explain that having friends to help us cope through times of stress may even lead to a longer life.
My own personal experience with the difficulties involved in meeting new people with whom one might develop friendships led to the development of my website,
Friends Your Way, in the hope of enabling other women to find new friends living in their own local areas.
Society has changed tremendously over the past decade or so and how we meet people has changed with it. Don't sit at home wishing you had more friends to share the good and the bad with - log on and do something about it.
