“She and her friends are cooler than us,” one of my friends joked when referring to another girl’s circle. “They do a lot of fun stuff together. We don’t.”
My friends and I are now 30 and older, making her statement sound a bit schoolgirlish. Still, I understood what she was saying. Our girlfriend experiences were getting quite boring. Though most of us lived in different cities, when we did get together we didn’t make remarkable memories. Sleeping or lying around watching old reality show reruns isn’t anything worth talking about. Shamefully, most of the time we were too tired to get dressed to get out and do something. So, what do you do when your friend circle is a boring one? Should you find new friends and make new experiences?
Let me begin by saying, I love my group of friends. We’ve grown to be more like sisters who’ve had each other’s backs for more than 12 years, but lately, we don’t do much as a group. It irritates me. We don’t travel together. When we are in the same city, we typically follow the same mundane routines. Our crazy-fun experiences together stopped about five years ago. And there isn’t an excuse for the halt in fun. None of my friends are married nor have children. “We just don’t like to do anything, anymore,” one of my friends concluded. I disagree.
We all like doing things, but we don’t make an effort to do them. We all say we want to experience new things, but no one comes up with any ideas. We’ve become lazy. The tiredness and mundaneness from our personal lives have seeped over into our friendship. Something needs to change.
If you want to experience more in life and have your girlfriends beside you along the way, do more planning. If you’re a professional who has a hectic work schedule and other responsibilities, plan in advance. It’s not advisable to simply ditch your longtime friends because they aren’t as much fun as they were in the past. Instead, create new experiences with them. Then, if they still don’t want to do anything out of the box, find new friends.
But making new friends as an adult is much different than when you were in middle school and even college. You aren’t around individuals who have an excuse to meet new people. You aren’t in the same classroom or dorm. You don’t immediately become friends because you sit by each other or walk the same route. By the time people have hit their late 20s and 30s, they usually have a core group of friends and aren’t as open to meeting new besties; but it’s still possible. And you don’t have to necessarily spill your life story to new acquaintances and make them your replacement BFF, but it is okay to share experiences with them to do more exciting things if your core friends aren’t down or around.
I’ve learned two things after my friend said our circle was boring: I have to create more fun experiences with my core group of friends by planning more visits where we can actually be in the same city. Then, come up with new things that we can do. I’ve also become more open to the idea of making new friends who are already doing some of the things I would like to do on a regular basis.
Ultimately, your group of friends are a reflection of you. After all, birds of a feather flock together. And you can’t just chalk up your newfound boringness to being a responsible adult because plenty still enjoy life and do exciting things with their friends. While everyone’s idea of fun varies, you and your friends should agree on creating a routine that allows you to have new experiences. My friends and I are still trying to work out our schedules to ensure that we make time to visit each other consistently; but in the meantime, I’m meeting new people and creating new memories. No harm in that.
