Welcome to our latest columnists ..your new BFFs
YOU can choose your friends and not your relatives – but what happens when you can’t do either?
One of the defining moments of your 20s and early 30s can be a realisation that new pals, once a convoy of unplanned wild nights out and weekend shopping trips, don’t come along like buses any more.
Thanks to marriages, kids, mortgages and moving away for work, those old groups of mates are heading in different directions – and there’s no Google map to locate new ones.
According to the charity Campaign to End Loneliness, half of adults in Scotland say it’s been a “long time” since they made new friends.
In the age of streams of communication and dates at the swipe of a fingertip, you could be forgiven for assuming millennials have no need to leave the house and forge a friendship with someone we’ve never clapped eyes on before. You’d be wrong.
Yes, we’re nourished by the shallow satisfaction that comes with social media posts being met with approval and group chats pinging away all day long.
But we still crave the old-fashioned method of meeting new people, talking to them and learning from different experiences to our own, just like anyone else.
Making pals was simple when we were young, when bonds were formed over the shared love of boy bands and underage boozing in places we shouldn’t have been.
But, reach a certain age and those opportunities we once took for granted become few and far between.
After long days at work, we can find our spare time gone in trips to the gym, meal preparation or falling down the black hole of a box set, but it’s important to find the time for social contact.
Still, sometimes new friendships can creep up on us when we least expect it.
Working on the Glasgow Live website, we spend the majority of our daily lives together and have become a solid group of pals over the past year.
We’re a mix of ages and interests, but we’re proof that, through supporting each other during rollercoaster life events and bonding over nights out and office gossip, friendships in your 20s and 30s can be found in the places you’d least expect them. So next time you’re at that dance class, talk to the woman you always smile at, ask the new start at your office where they got their dress, maybe swap numbers with your new BFF from the nightclub toilet this weekend.
You might find a new travel companion for the next chapter of your life…
From marriage and mortgages to meltdowns and mischief, we’ll be supporting each other in the next stages of our lives, and sharing it all with you in our new column.
Friendships can be found in the places you’d least expect