Making new friends

There is this high I feel from making new friends and connecting with new people that I have never experienced before.  

All my life I have struggled with friendships.  I have been shy and introverted.  I have hesitated to reach out to people and been terrible even about keeping in contact with good friends.  As a child, friendships didn't last and I'm no longer in contact with anyone from my high school days and the last friend I have from college, I haven't talked to in a couple years so I'm not sure how much of that friendship I even have left.

During my marriage, my husband was my main friend.  That's not to say I didn't ever connect with co-workers or with fellow choir members and after moving south, we did make friends with a very nice couple.  But overall, my social network has been very small and most of my social interactions were just my spouse and I.

I think part of that has always been internal.  I had convinced myself I didn't really need anyone and wasn't good at it.  After enough failed friendships, it felt natural to just give up and focus on being independent.

But I think part of that over the last two decades was also the nature of my marriage.  Since my husband wasn't willing to branch out himself and I always worried he resented my few outside connections (like choir), I think I felt some limits.  I'm not trying to say he ever told me I couldn't go out with friends but I always got the sense he would feel left behind if I did very often.  I even had a number of conversations with him about how I thought we would be better together if we invested more in some outside interests and encouraged him to find something to get involved in like I was involved in choir.  He always seemed dismissive of that.

And as this marriage broke up this summer, it came out that he wanted a wife who did even more with him which struck me as a bit odd since we do almost everything together.  If I had gone out with more friends, it would have taken time away from our time together as a couple which I think would have been healthy and strengthen our time together but I now understand he would have perceived as negative for the relationship.

So here I am today in the process of losing my best friend and the only relationship I truly invested in over the last two decades and I'm realizing I need more.  I'm realizing I need a much more expansive social network so that I'm not depending on one single person.  Making friends is no longer just a nice thing to do or a luxury.  It's actually a necessity if I want to come out of this in a better place.  So it is pushing me in a way I didn't expect and it is showing me I am far more capable than I give myself credit for.  And it feels amazing.

So I walk away from a baseball game with new friends in such amazing spirits.  And when I connect with my yoga instructor, it brings a smile to my face.  And when two colleagues sit down in my office for a longer social conversation than I would have tolerated previously, I just sit back and soak it in.  And then I start filling my calendar with things to do.