Lessons on Friendship: Don’t Give Up

Full disclosure: I’ve always been jealous of those people who have a small group of best friends they’ve had since middle school/high school/college. A posse of people they have done and continue to do life with, in the form of dinners, vacations, holidays, etc.

This is not how I’ve made friends. I land more in the ‘this is my friend’ realm, picking up friends at random stops along the way of life. I have a best friend from HS, from my first day of college, from sorority, from my first ‘big girl job’, etc.

Remember that I’m an Enneagram 2w3 – the ‘hostess’ (more Enneagram posts coming soon–promise), so people are my love language and I love making friends. I got married in 2012 and moved from my beloved Raleigh, North Carolina, to a small town in Southwest Virginia, I moved away from my community and many of my best friends. I was excited to (finally) be married and living in the same state as KPW, so I focused much of my attention on our marriage and getting acclimated to a new environment but was anxious to make new friends.

I’m a people-pleaser and making friends comes naturally to me…or so I thought. I still remember complimenting a girl on the spin bike next to me on her pearls (“oh hey, she has on pearl earrings, I have on pearl earrings, we should be friends”) and her curt ‘thank you’ as she turned away and never spoke another word to me. I was desperate for friends but couldn’t for the life of me find people that wanted to be friends with me in return.

I was looking for an early 30s newlywed with a proclivity for monograms or pearls, and I had moved to a small college town where that ‘model number’ of friend was in short supply. To complicate matters, I was working from home full-time, limiting my pool of potential new friend candidates. All this led me to regularly sitting at our kitchen table and crying during supper and KPW asking me if I wanted him to quit his job and move me back to NC (the answer was no). It’s worth nothing that KPW had an established friend group and they were very welcoming but I was determined to find my own friends.

About 6 months after relocating, I was getting my nails done and the nail tech asked me a very innocent question about friendship; I dramatically proclaimed, “Why doesn’t anyone want to be friends with me?”  From over in the corner, this sweet girl piped up and said, “I’ll be friends with you”. She wasn’t joking.  She also wasn’t a 30-something newlywed with a love for Lilly Pulitzer.

She was a senior in college who was studying marketing and getting ready to graduate. We exchanged numbers and went out to lunch the next week. Katie became a friend (and eventually introduced me to another girl who became another one of my most treasured and dearest friends (Hi LJG!) from our time in VA) and also taught me a very important lesson about friendship.

My life in NC was full of friendships of convenience (working in an office) and with people in very similar life stages (church small group, friends from college that had also moved to Raleigh, etc.). This was not an option in my new sleepy little Virginia town, so learning to adapt and appreciate the effort of making friends was like dating – I needed to put away my ‘ideal friend’ checklist.

Please note that I didn’t learn this lesson overnight. The church KPW & I attended launched home groups the summer after I met Katie and we signed up to lead a group. I asked our pastor if I could host the ‘young newlywed small group’ and she graciously told me that I would get to host the ‘Tuesday night’ group – anyone who was available and free to attend on Tuesdays would be in our group.

This worked out to be people from 21 to 65 — single, married, divorced, student, etc. That was 2013, but we still send Christmas cards and check in on our friends from our first home group. When we moved from VA in the winter of 2015, I cried buckets of tears to be leaving our sweet community of treasured friends.

My biggest practical takeaway – try to move past what you think a friend should look like and take a chance on people in different seasons of life from you. Some of my most treasured memories from my time in Virginia are lunches with a friend who had high school kids and walking laps in the indoor mall (Blacksburg winters are no joke) with girl from my gym who had just graduated and was attending graduate school. One of them 15 years my senior, one nearly 10 years my junior. It’s also worth mentioning that if I had given up after my first few failed attempts at making friends, I would have missed out on a lot of really great people and experiences.

Listen, I could talk about this topic for hours. We’re closing in on 1,000 words and I’ve barely tiptoed into what I want to say. I mentioned this in my morning show today – friendship was the number one most requested topic of discussion for the blog when I polled for content.  

Everything from finding community to making new friends, managing moving, prioritizing and nurturing and caring for new and old friendships (not to mention how to handle infertility and friendship on both sides of the equation). I’m excited to continue to dig into this topic in the coming weeks and months. If you have any specific things you’d like to chat about – send me a note!

xo,

KNW

PS: In case you missed the BFF survey, I can’t recommend it enough. You don’t have to be “BFFs” to answer these questions. They’re great icebreakers and get-to-know-you topics!