Making & Keeping Friends

Making my friends as a kid is easy. They are the neighbors that you play with. The girls in your dance class. The people that sit next to you in class. College brings a whole new group of friends. Some are paid for.. Some are random roommates.. Some are in your study groups.. Some you just party with. As we get older, making new friends gets harder each year. I'm not saying that my old friends are not satisfying enough (because that is simply not the case! I love my friends but the majority of them live far away). When you hit your mid-twenties, where do you meet new people you actually want to hang out with? Maybe a gym class. Until one of you switches gyms or quits all together. Maybe church. But it is unlikely you will be in the same place in life. So that leaves one place. Work.

I have met many people I consider good friends at work. 8 years ago (8 years! That is crazy!) I worked with some of the best people I have ever known. We would go out for drinks weekly, text all the time, spend more time in each other's cubicles than our own at times and it was wonderful. Then I quit to go back to school, another friend moved out of state, another transferred to a different city.. So the story goes, distance separated us. When we get together it's just like old times. But those are few and far between. The job I just left in July, I had 2 very close friends. One I began drifting apart from prior to leaving as our relationships had changed. The second one that I would remain strong is dwindling as well. My new job I have met some awesome people. My best friend at work now lives 2 hours away. We talk basically all day as we teach the same thing and plan together. When we leave at the end of the year, I see another good friend becoming a distant memory. Why does this happen? Why are our friendships based on seeing each other on a daily basis? How do you meet good, real friends that you don't work with?

I think it becomes even more difficult when you are married. Single people think you're boring because you don't want to go to a bar at 10pm on a Tuesday. (Which, never in my life have I wanted to go out at 10:00 on a Tuesday). You also lose all hope of making a friend of the opposite sex. Unless they are gay. Either the guy is secretly trying to sleep with you or your husband not-so-secretly wants to kill him.

What about couple friends? Don't even get me started. Either I don't get along with the wife or my husband doesn't get along with the other husband. It takes too much energy to play Fake Jen all night or deal with Pissed Off Husband.

Articles say things like "do what you enjoy!" And "be yourself" and "think out of the box!" I have enough to think about on a daily basis. I don't want to think about what I can do to better myself to meet a new friend that most likely will not stay in my life long.

So where do you meet friends after 30?