Lately my email has been acting up. The important stuff has been going in my Spam folder and all the junk has materialized in my inbox, so to go through my email I have to sift carefully as to not lose anything significant. Any day now I expect some awesome parenting magazine to contact me to write for them because they realized my talent. In the meantime I also want to make sure I get my Target emails with the weekly deals.

There must be a rumor on the internets that something happened to my husband because today I received a bajillion promotions for dating websites. I didn’t open any of them, but it got me think

ing. No, not about that. I mean, there are so many sites out there dedicated to bringing people together romantically. In today’s society our time is completely consumed with finding our soul mate, significant other, bed buddy, whatever.  Once that is done and over with, and you are settled down, what do you do?

We have all just invested a very large portion of our lives to finding romance, but we have no clue how to make friends (the kind that you don’t go to bed with). Ok, so maybe I have no idea how to make friends. But because I don’t have many friends I spend a lot of time online reading others’ blogs. And it seems one of the things they gripe a lot about is also their lack of friends. So apparently I am not the only one. My first solution is that we just all become each other’s friends and there, problem solved, but somehow I think there is more to it than that.

At what point did we forget how to make friends? Or did we never actually have a grasp on it, but found ourselves so often in the types of situations where friends were made that no one realized how unskilled we were? And how hasn’t anyone made a site for finding friends (yes, I know adult friend finder exists, and that is NOT what I had in mind)? I am willing to bet if someone built it, not only would a lot of people come, but it would also eventually turn into a multibillion dollar industry. Why aren’t I getting on that right now? I am hosing my blog through blogger, do you really think I have those types of web skills?

But seriously, making friends is a difficult and daunting task. A lot of the same tactics used to find a date are involved, except we don’t have as much practice at it. You put yourself out there, get together with an otherwise stranger and try to find some common ground, while also attempting to impress them enough for them to want to be your friend, but not so much as to intimidate them.

Now that I am putting this in writing I see what a balancing act it truly is. No wonder more of us don’t have more friends. Making them in exhausting. To all the friends I have somehow magically managed to make, thank you for being there and not making me go through this on a regular basis.