How Do I Have More Friends In Texas Than Ohio Or NC Combined? A "How To" for making friends.

I've always struggled to make friends. In high school the same people you went to first grade with were the same people you graduated with, except the occasional new person or person who moved schools. I developed a reputation early on for being "annoying" and carried it throughout my school years. Sure, I had friends throughout the years, but the friendships would ebb and flow and I never really felt like I fit in with any of the cliques. I finally got a best friend freshman year of high school, but even though we're still best friends today even our friendship was on and off.

In college, I planned to join lots of clubs and intramural sports to make friends, but I moved in with my roommates who were all pot heads, became a pothead, and then didn't have much interest in doing anything else. I had closer friends than high school, but it was still a small group and even then, they weren't the greatest of friends. There were definitely some good ones I was lucky to find, though, a few keepers who I'm still good friends with today.

When I moved to Texas, I didn't know anyone. Jakob had a friend from the Marines who lived here and so I became friends with his wife, but she worked full time and I found myself extremely lonely. It didn't help that within a month of moving here I had gotten pregnant, and the pregnancy had caused my depression medication to quit working. I tried to make friends through Bumble BFF, but it didn't really work. I'd either end up texting them for a week or two then it fading out or we just never hit it off.

When I finally switched medication and my mental health stabilized, I was dying to make some friends. I was in a Facebook community page and posted in it looking for friends. Out of the many people who commented on it, I found one friend. We hung out at the park and quickly realized we shared a lot of the same values when it came to parenting and life in general. Even though we've only hung out twice, (due to our busy lives and conflicting schedules) we have a really strong connection, and she is definitely one of the closest friends I have in Texas. When I told my husband that she was one of my closest friends he replied, “haven’t you only hung out once?” And from an outside perspective, yeah it sounds wild that someone that I’ve only hung out with a few times could be such a close friend, but I learned that friendship is about spending physical time together, it’s about sharing emotional time.

In the post I had mentioned I was pregnant, and someone commented inviting me to join "MOPS." I had never heard of this before and had no clue what it was. When I asked the person explained "MOPS" stood for "Mothers of Preschoolers." I thought they'd misunderstood, I explained I was pregnant with my first I didn't even have a baby to bring much less a preschooler, but they said it was open to mothers with children of all ages.

I was so nervous walking into the first meeting, but I immediately felt welcomed. Even though I was 6 years younger than the next youngest member, and 10 years younger than most of them, that didn't matter. I was a mother, and that's all I needed to be to fit in. Living in Texas, it also helped that almost all of them were conservative with the same values I had as well. We bonded almost immediately over our distaste for Biden and the mask mandate. Now, I routinely talk and hang out with many of the moms and am even a Discussion Leader for this upcoming year.

The other thing I did, besides post in that Facebook group, was join a church group. My church had a mother’s group so at 10 weeks pregnant I drug my husband along to their Friendsgiving. Again, everyone was 5-10 years older than me, but I felt welcomed. We were all mothers, and all Christians. Since then, I've done the Bible study with them, as well as participated in many of their get togethers. Pictured below is the baby shower they threw for me.

When I first moved to Texas, I felt so hopeless. I thought I'd never make friends, and now I have more friends here than I had in my hometown or in college. The key to making friends is joining groups that you have a vested interest in. I didn't think that was really possible after college, I thought clubs were only a school thing, but they certainly exist. I'm sure this isn't the last time that Jakob and I will move towns, or even states, and now I feel confident that I'll be able to make friends anywhere I go. There are mothers everywhere, and there's Christians everywhere. It just so happens that both the groups I'm in, my church group and MOPS, are Christian mom groups but those are the two most important things to me so I'm grateful both my groups have those at the core.