Top: Gap (in stores, similar); Jeans: Gap; Necklace: c/o Our World Boutique (similar); Heels: c/o Lulu*s
Making friends in a post-college world is like dating in a post-college world. Just subtract the helpful resources like OK Cupid and Match.com. There aren't really online dating sites for seeking out a new best friend. Moving to a new city complicates things even further. All of the sudden, your cultivated friend group is hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away and you're in the center of a massive city, just wandering about trying to figure out how on earth someone makes friends.
There are meet-ups for people that like similar things, gyms, festivals.. but similar to dating - you don't want to creepily approach someone at a big event and request they be your next friend. It's weird. And horrible. And I think in our world that has done away with the social circles and calling cards of an earlier era, it's nearly impossible to get to know anyone awesome in a new city without lots of time on your side.
Yet, we've started to make traction. We were lucky enough to have the "hundreds of miles away" friend situation and still see our best friends that live in Seattle about once every three months or so (they're awesome enough to travel down to PDX). I've been able to make some really lovely connections within the blogger world and am starting to ease out into that blogger meet-up world to get to know people and find more ladies that brunch.
And then, we're also lucky enough to have Ben in medical school, and like all situations where 100+ similarly-aged people are thrown together, there is bound to be some kind of connection forged. We've been picky and choosy about med students. They're kind of an awful group of people - the surgeon-hopefuls, especially, with their stay-at-home wives just counting down the hours until the paychecks finally arrive. But the good ones are emerging out of the woodwork and I think we've finally gathered enough sarcastic and dry-humoured people to have dinner parties with. It feels good.
We've been in Portland now for almost a year and it's taken this long to find people that we can just text and ask "drinks tonight?" without planning some big ordeal that works to limit the amount of awkwardness of a first couple-date. I'm so grateful that we've finally found a group of people down here in PDX to glom onto and hang out with, but I often think back to the easy peasy days of college when there was literally a friend on every single corner. If you stumbled out of your dorm room, you could ostensibly make friends with any passerby and know that they likely had a lot of similar interests as you (your college being the main "in-common" factor). If you're reading this and still in college, cherish those beautiful times and just know they don't last forever and soon you'll be going alone to bars preying on people just to try to make them be your friends.