How To: Make New Friends

Since I moved here (a whole 3 weeks ago) I’ve been wondering how in the world I am going to meet new people. Everyone I knew back home I met through school and had pretty much grown up with. Well, school is over now and I am in a completely new place. I left all my old friends in MS. I had even briefly considered taking some random class at Vanderbilt just to meet people. But that would mean I’d have to do extra work, and I think it’s safe to say that y’all know I don’t volunteer (let alone pay) for extra work.

So, maybe the third best discovery I’ve made in Nashville so far has been meetup.com. It is a social networking site, similar to Facebook, that allows people to meet new people with the same interests. I found out about it one day last week while talking with my insurance agent, of all people. You find groups that cater to your interests and join them. For instance, I joined a hiking group and a group just called Nashville Girls in their 20s because it sounded like me. Then the group organizers plan Meetups where anyone who wants to gets together and does something fun. The hiking group gets together and goes on hikes. Nashville Girls in their 20s gets together for bar crawls or 5Ks or whatever girls in their 20s are up for doing.

Now, let me be clear: This is not a dating site. There is minimal risk of creepers lurking behind their computer screens waiting to make their move to do… whatever it is they do…

Most people I’ve seen on the site are new to town and looking to meet new people and make new friends. It’s pretty legit.

How do I know? Because I went to a Bar Crawl Meetup on Friday. About eight girls met at the Hard Rock for dinner and pre game. Dinner was a good idea because it gave us all a chance to talk and get to know each other before heading out to the loud bars and gettin’ our dance/drink on. It was a pretty cool experience. Almost like an instant group of friends because, for the most part, we all got along and seemed compatible.

I clicked with one of the girls pretty well and we went out again Saturday night. Despite it being miserably hot, we had a good time.

Then about 5 of us met up at one girl’s apartment pool and hung out there most of Sunday before going to dinner and exploring the bars around hipster town. AKA East Nashville.

So far, we can kind of tell who out of the original group will be friends because we have been the ones going to all the little get-togethers, which is totally fine with me because they seem to be the really outgoing ones that I tend to get along with better anyway. We do have another Meetup tonight to talk about our group doing the Color Run later this year and some of them were out of town this weekend and couldn’t make the hang outs, so I’m hoping we can add a couple more fun girls to the regular group!

Meetup.com. Use it. Love it. Thank me later.