In 2004, our family moved from an active, treasured community to a new neighborhood in a new state. With two freshly minted five-year-olds and a one-year-old, as well as a husband who worked long hours as a member of the USAF, I spent significantly more time starved for adult conversation than satisfied from it. I missed my friends terribly, but I figured I’d make new local ones. All I had to do was roll up my sleeves and put in the work required to place myself in proximity of others.
How long could this take? I thought to myself, chock-full of hope and positivity.
Not long, I assumed.
Yeah, I assumed wrong.
I extended invitation after invitation, only to be met with lackluster responses. Everyone around me seemed to already have their people, and they had no time in their schedules or interest in their lives for new people.
One evening, while I was especially sad and missing close-by gal pals somethin’ fierce, an idea popped into my head. When my husband returned home later that evening, I shared this bit of brilliance with him. In an effort to find friends, I would make a sign that read “Desperate Woman Seeks Friends!” and hold it at the corner of our front yard by the street.
My husband stared at me wide-eyed.
“Are you really going to do that?” he said, tilting his head sideways.
“I just might!” I responded, drumming my fingertips on my chin in contemplation.
If this had occurred today, I could’ve created a social media post with a picture of me holding this Desperate Woman Seeks Friends! sign. But since this occurred in ye olden days before social media, holding a sign in my front yard would’ve been the old-timey way of accomplishing the same thing.
To be truthful, I was every bit of desperate to find another woman with whom I could talk and laugh and share troubles with in-person. Yet I couldn’t find one.
In an effort to find friends, I’ve swung the bat and missed the ball. A lot. I’ve faced rejection a lot. So what’s a girl to do when she’s plumb tired from trying to make friends but knows she still needs them?
She keeps trying.
Because the only surefire way to know you’ll never make friends is to never try to make them again.
If we want the real rewards that come with friendship, we need to get comfortable with an uncomfortable truth: Friendships, like all marital and familial relationships, require honest-to-goodness work. So where do we direct those efforts?
Here are 3 ideas that have served me well:
Show Up: I make a habit of showing up where women are likely to show up. And you can choose where to show up by thinking about an activity you enjoy and showing up at that activity repeatedly. Do you like painting or cooking? Join a class. If you enjoy working out, who do you run into at the gym that could be a potential friend? Do you have little ones? Could you take them to storytime at a library or Barnes & Noble? Or could you volunteer at your church? Crossing paths consistently with other people is often the first step to making friends.
Open Up: I’ve had people in my home who haven’t become good friends, but every good friend I’ve ever had has been to my home. There’s just something about opening up your home to someone that opens up your heart to them as well. And that lays the groundwork for a friendship connection to take root and grow. Don’t sweat how clean your house is or isn’t. As long as the other person has a clean place to sit down, that person won’t care about the rest. She’s just happy to have been invited over.
Pray Up: Elisabeth Elliot wisely said, “Prayer lays hold of God’s plan and becomes the link between His will and its accomplishment on earth.” You and I will never, ever go wrong in praying for friends because it’s God’s will for us to have friends. In John 14, Jesus states that if we pray in His name and in the Father’s will, we will have what we ask for.
“I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (14:13)
Praying in Jesus’s name gives power to our words while connecting our own hearts to the Father’s heart. And if Jesus walked this earth with friends, which He definitely did, it’s the Father’s will for you and me to have friends too. We may not find friends as quickly as we’d like or with the people we thought we wanted to be friends with. But we can trust that as long as we’re doing what we need to open up, show up, and pray up, He will bring us the friends we need.
I never did make that sign and stand in my yard with it, although I was thiiiis close. After all, I had the posterboard and the markers and a deep supply of desperation! As it turns out, right after that time, I met my friend Sherri because we both kept showing up at the neighborhood park at the same time with our young children.
You never know how or when God may orchestrate a change in circumstances for the better.
If you’ve had a difficult time making friends, I’m so sorry. But please don’t give up.
Do keep trying. Because there’s a friend out there who needs you.
Listen to Carol’s podcast with Kristen here.
Written byKristen Strong
Listen to Carol’s podcast with Kristen here.
Purchase Kristen’s book Desperate Woman Seeks Friends: Real Talk About Connection, Rejection, and Trying Again for the Friendships You Need here.
If you’ve ever been tempted to put a sign in your front yard advertising for new friends, scream or sob in frustration over a “friend’s” hot and cold behavior, or cringe at the memory of awkward friendship encounters, you can trust Kristen Strong’s decades of experience at regularly relocating and remaking friends to provide both solid hope and practical direction to try again to find the friends you need.
In Desperate Woman Seeks Friends, Kristen Strong offers her two decades of experience as a regularly relocating military spouse and one decade as a settled civilian to address head-on the crisis facing women today in startling numbers: an acute loneliness and isolation due to a lack of friends and community.
Often, social media will give a band-aid for loneliness, but looking to social media to be your only source of friendship is like relying on breadcrumbs as a steady diet for dinner: it won’t nourish or satisfy. Unless some of those online connections turn into real-life ones, they’re no substitute for in-person friendships.
It’s not just you. Making friends is hard! But it’s not impossible. Through tell-it-like-it-is talk and vulnerable stories, Kristen wants to help you be a good friend to others and to yourself through principles and practices that give life to your friendships. And she wants to show you that while friends may fail you, your Friend Jesus never will. You’re meant to have lasting friendships that feed your heart and soul—you are not the exception.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Carol McLeod Ministries
Featured Image by Elijah Crouch on Unsplash
