Make New Friends, But Keep The Old

I’m not sure if you know that song.  “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.”  I’m also not sure if there’s more to it than that one verse, because that’s all I ever knew.  But it’s about old friends being the gold standard, but that you should also make new friends, because they’re pretty darn good too!

When we were kids, making friends was easy.  Well, somewhat easy.  Ok, maybe not that easy.  But at least the opportunities were more plentiful.  We had school, after-school activities, clubs, summer camps, and so on.  We had natural social activities that were meant for making friends.  So, while it can be scary to approach new people and make new friends, at least we had places that would allow us to do that.

As we get older, it gets more difficult to meet new people.  There aren’t as many naturally occurring “friend making” places for us.  Work, yeah, but sometimes it’s best to keep work and social life separate. And the ability to approach someone and simply say “Hi, my name is  ….” becomes more nerve-wracking.

After high school, and maybe even after college, we hopefully had our group of core friends to hang out with. So together, we would go out to clubs, and try to meet more people.  But did we really meet and make many lasting friendships out in clubs?  Probably not.  Or at least, not many.

And then, a lot of people that we were friends with when younger may have met their “significant others” in college or grad school or shortly thereafter.  So they went on to a different social arena.  The “couples” arena.  They may have hung out with us, their single friends, from time to time. But being a “couple” meant that the single friend was the “third wheel” and it became easier to hang out with other couples.  Then their kids came along and now the couples were “families” and they were spending most of their time juggling their kids’ social schedules.  So while they are still friends of our, they are more likely not the people we’ll spend most of our time with, if we’re still single.

So those of us who are still single find ourselves in a smaller universe.  At least it is smaller if we stuck just to our age bracket.  If we pushed the slider a bit in either direction, we could hang out with more people. That is, until they may enter the “couples” or “families” arenas.

But where do we go to meet others?  I am not really looking to go out clubbing.  It’s not that I don’t like to dance, but it hasn’t really changed from when I was younger and would go out clubbing. I wasn’t making new friends. If anything, I may meet some guy and maybe we’d exchange numbers and maybe we’d go out.  But I didn’t really make “friends” by going clubbing.

For me, thankfully, I found Meetup.com.  I have met so many people through that site who are new friends.  Good friends.  “Silver-on-the-way-to-becoming-gold” friends. People I love to spend time with!  These are friends of all nationalities, races, ages, religions.  What do we have in common (other than being members of Meetup)?  Well, we all probably want to make new friends.  Yes, we’re definitely keeping the old friends.  But we find new friends to spend time with, to experience new things with. 

I don’t think I’ll ever stop making new friends.  And my cache of “gold” friends keeps getting bigger!  So I’m getting “rich” with both silver and gold …. friends, that is.  Wouldn’t that be nice if it were also just plain old silver and gold?  But if I had a choice, I’d take the friends over the metals!  They are much more valuable!!