sparkyoriental wrote:how does one make friends after graduating college? everyone i know has moved away :( now my only friends are through my bf and I obviously want to make friends of my own.
Find "magnet places" for the things/hobbies you truly enjoy, particularly those hobbies that you like enough to do on your own without your boyfriend. A magnet place is a place (usually a physical location) that draws others interested in a specific topic. Do you like drawing? Go hang out at the local museum and draw, or join an art class, or find anything remotely related to drawing and art and start going and talking to people. Do you like reading? Strike up conversations in bookshops or aisles of the library (i.e. graphic novel section) that have topics you enjoy. Go to book signings by your favorite author (I understand this is much easier in cities) and talk to people there. Join a book club of the non-Oprah or middle aged mom variety.
Fundamentally, you have to talk to people if you want to have any kind of direction in making friends. I dunno how extroverted you are but for me this was pretty hard at first, I've gotten better at it just by talking to random strangers more and more.
Basically, start with a hobby you are interested in ---> try to find places/groups in your town or city where there are others who are equally passionate about this thing ---> go to the place ---> meet people and be curious about them ---> make friends. Also of course it's possible to make friends randomly but you're gonna have a much higher rate of success if you find someone with a common interest.
Another thing that is interesting is how shared difficult experiences can form friendships or at least strong bonds. The military offers an excellent example of how bonds are formed in this way, as do fraternities that haze--whether you find them reprehensible or not, they work. In college you might have made friends in your classes just by staying up late with them hanging out and all griping about the work and how hard it was--and then making it out alive together. At least that's how some of my friendships started. Post college there aren't really the same opportunities to enter such shared difficult experiences (i don't count work, especially since at work people are at all different stages of their lives--some with kids, some right out of school, w/e. Depends on your industry and job and peers anyway), so i empathize. I think a lot of such bonding forms around learning something new in a group, so maybe try to find something that you want to learn and that is challenging, and embark on that with other people. I recognize this last paragraph has been fairly vague, but I hope you can take something out of the first couple paragraphs.