Member-only story
Why I Spent Last Night Panic Swiping on Bumble BFF
Thoughts on trying to make new friends as a grown up
The first thing I know about friendship is that I’m not very good at it.
You see, I have social anxiety. This means that my default mode of thinking is that people either don’t notice me at all, and if they do notice me, they’re annoyed by… I don’t know, exactly. My whole deal?
Among other obstacles to BFF-ship, my social anxiety makes it so I would never fathom referring to someone as a friend unless they do it first. And the thing about modern society is, we aren’t really trained to have the “define the relationship” talk with friends.
Like, imagine if I sat you down over coffee one day after we’d hung out a few times and was all “So… what would you say we… are?” You’d assume I thought we’d been going on romantic dates this whole time, wouldn’t you?
Of course, that imagined scenario presumes I’ve managed to hang out with a new person who isn’t my fiance, outside of work or the Internet, and on purpose. Those are some pretty massive assumptions considering the past two-ish years of a global pandemic that requires social distancing have robbed me of an entire young adulthood worth of progress re: social anxiety.
