Tbh I just went on a date with a cool as fuck person and turns out all their roommates were cool as fuck and now I’m friends with a handful of cool people and sometimes we play tabletop games and shit.

I had tried making friends in all the normal advice ways (school, work, sports, clubs, g*mes, bars, hooking up and then just being friends instead, etc) but the way my ADD and depression swing in long arcing cycles kinda makes me disappear from social events or just existing in general.

Having a significant other that you hang out at home with kinda puts you in a position to hang out with other people around your own house so you don’t have to hit that (usually impossible while depressed) energy requirement to leave the house and be social.

Plus most of the friends I’ve made/kept have also had similar experiences with anxiety, attention disorders, depression, and energy/sleep issues so they’re pretty understanding if I need to just not wake up on my day off or something.

Childhood, college, work, going to see small local bands, DJing, hanging around bars or being a local in a little pub, just talking to people.

Lots of board game shops have events where people just come to play board games. It’s often easier meeting strangers if you’re all there already doing some shared interest. Likewise with outdoor pursuits etc.

A thing I don’t see mentioned very often is that most of my lasting friendships aren’t with the first person in a group I got to know, but one of their friends that I actually had more in common with. There’s plenty of casual friends or just acquaintances I hung out with a few times despite not having too much in common or clicking right away, only to then be introduced at some event or one night in the pub to their other friends and finding I really hit it off with one of them.

Working graveyard at a convenience store. I live in a bottle deposit state so I get a lot of unhoused people coming through. I became friends with some of them. Two of them I’d call my best friends.

Just school, now I’m done with school for now and all of them are virtually gone :) I’ll go find some after covid and try to see my old friends though it’s fine