How to Win Friends and Influence People

I suppose it was inevitable but I never thought I would be afflicted. Along with procrastination and dry skin, the other major flaw of mine is a predisposition to hubris. Sure, I moved to another country, where I knew no one save my partner but I was naive enough to believe that within a few months (weeks if I’m being truly honest) I would be tottering around Munich with a bunch of brand new, shiny, happy friends. Forget #squadgoals, this has been my own personal goal since moving to Germany.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not picturing myself as Taylor Swift fronting a clique of über-femmes here. I was more thinking of having a group of friends that I could call on to visit the exciting bars I walk past on my way back from the grocery shopping. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Forming adult friendships in Munich has been more difficult than I expected and despite being in a happy, healthy relationship I often feel socially isolated in my new life abroad.

The question is how do you make friends as an adult? How did that even work as a child? Looking back at my school and university years I see friendships were allowed to form under conditions of opportunity and repetition. After all, I saw the same group of people often for years on end. During this period there was enough time to meet up with people, see who clicked with whom and repeat this enough to form a positive shared history, ergo friendship. But how do you do this without the melting pot milieu of an educational establishment?

The obvious substitute here is the workplace. Spending the 40 hour working week with colleagues is probably the closest thing an adult has to sharing 5 days’ worth of lessons with schoolmates, however, the two settings are not equivalent. There is a different dynamic in the work sphere, which involve hierarchies and professional boundaries. Such power differentials are often not conducive to friendship. It’s hard to bitch about the pointless tasks you have been set to work colleagues, when you know it could get back to the person who set you the pointless task.

So work may not be the most fruitful place to finding foreign BFFs. What next? Where does a newly fledged Münchnerin find their kin? Well, like most things these days the next step is usually the Internet. Whilst there may be no Tinder specifically for friendships, the web is a good starting point for finding places where like-minded people might meet. As a result I have been trawling sites like Meetup and Expatica to find groups that offer hobbies that interest me and hopefully contain a soul sibling.

The only problem is with so many different activities in Munich, I spend more time looking through potential meetups as opposed to actually attending them. Suddenly all the activities I pined for during university are once again on offer and it is up to me to decide, which ones to attend. Didn’t I always want to be a swing dancer/poet/political activist? But with only so much free time outside of work such commitments have to be well considered. Friendships form with repeated exposure and if every week I am cycling through another meetup group, that leaves little chance to strengthen existing connections.

But before we even get to that stage such connections need to form in the first place and this initiation stage is off-putting enough. Most of the time it plays out like the prom scene of a John Hughes film. There I am, heart-racing under dim lighting, entering a room full of conversing people for the first time. I scour the crowd looking for someone with a friendly looking face, who I can approach and join. Potential best friend is a long way off, at this point I just want to stop looking like a social leper. To face this fear time and again as whilst trying out different groups requires a fair amount of perseverance. Remember the alternative is a night in at home with pjs and popcorn.

Forging a friendship is remarkably like dating in that respect. You have to keep putting yourself out there, presenting your best self in the hope that someone will like you and meet up with you more often. The whole process can be exhausting. However, like finding the perfect partner it can be wonderful when it finally pays off and you find a good friend.

For months now I have been going through iterations of this sequence, fluffing past the language barrier to thrust my phone number at anyone I think might be even a vague candidate for a friend. It may feel forward at times, however, fortune favours the desperate. As such, I now have a small but wonderful list of people I can text and meet not just for group activities hosted through social media but independently too. Now I find Munich is even more my oyster seeing as I can call on a variety of people to come and explore different things with me. Conversely I also learn from them, gaining insiders knowledge from people who have lived here for longer.

I thought I had it vaguely sorted in the first few months: Flat? Check. Funky city? Check. But now with the bonus of a social circle and more people to share my experiences with, I feel so much happier.

I didn’t think it was possible but living in Munich just keeps getting better.