No Man Is An Island
But sometimes it's good to pretend you are.
I texted some of my friends about meeting me at a bar to watch the Germany-Spain game on Friday. I hadn’t really planned on going out to watch it, but I had the day off and figured it’d be fun. None of them were able to make it, but I went anyway. I sat down at the bar with a gap of one seat between the only girl up there and me. Within a minute, we started talking to each other.
Shortly after the game started, I heard a guy behind me heckling one of the Spanish players in German, so I turned around to make a comment to him. We started talking about how we had both learned German in high school and college. An hour or so later, I found out that not only did he attend Ole Miss, we shared a German professor, overlapped a few years at school, and knew some of the same people who lived in Dallas.
When the Germany game was over, I decided to stay for a bit of the France match. I ended up talking to a guy who had a condo in New Orleans and to the two women next to him. They were married and all in on France, because one of them was actually French, so we all went in for Les Bleus. I had an absolute blast.
None of that would have happened if I’d decided to watch the game at home because none of my friends could make it to the bar.
“Isn’t going somewhere alone really weird?”
I’ve never been someone who felt like they really needed company to do something. Sure, it can be a little awkward to sit at a bar or a restaurant alone, but there are worse things in life.
I spent a few days in Berlin by myself when I first went over there in college. It didn’t occur to me to feel weird or be worried about being by myself. It meant I could spend all the time I wanted taking pictures without worrying about holding someone else up. I didn’t strike up a lot of conversations, but I never felt like I was missing out on anything because I didn’t have someone else with me.
My husband works away from home for long stretches, so I’m very accustomed to having to choose between doing something alone or not doing it at all. I go to the movies alone, I go to concerts alone, and I even go to bars to watch sports alone!
“Yeah, that seems super weird, I would hate that.”
It’s certainly not the only way I choose to go out and do things, but I have almost never regretted a choice to go do something without having someone else with me. Why? Because you almost always make new friends1 when you do it.
When you go to a bar to watch sports, or to a concert, you’re going to a specific place to do a specific thing that everyone else there also came to do. You have a built-in conversation entry point. You already know something about everyone else there! All you have to do is talk to someone! Even better if you talk to someone else who’s there alone, because they’re probably hoping someone will talk to them too.
This is how you make friends.
When you were in grade school, if you entered a new school mid-year you were up against the fact that everyone had found their group already. It was harder to make friends then because everyone already had their friends. But entering at the start of the year was like a cheat code for making friends because the groups were yet to form.
Adults have a much harder time making friends because they spend so much time at home or at work. We mostly make friends because they’re people we don’t hate that we spend a lot of time in proximity to. But we also don’t often put ourselves in situations that lend themselves to making new friends. You have a friend group. You go out and do things with the friend group. The end.
When you venture out into the world without your existing friend group, you open yourself up to the chance that you might glom on to someone else’s group, or form a brand new group of solo folks!
It’s also good to feel awkward sometimes.
When I was in Germany in college, the program we were in had us talk to someone from Australia who had moved to Germany years before to give us a bit of an insight into what the next month had in store for us. I knew about the bottle deposit system2 and the 24-hour clock, so I wasn’t really expecting to learn much from her.
What she said at the end really stuck with me. She told us to enjoy every moment of awkwardness and to hold it with us. It’s so rare in our daily lives that we feel truly out of our element and we should treasure those moments when they come to us because we’re experiencing something new.
Experiences that leave us feeling a little awkward or out-of-place are moments that allow us to grow a little bit. It means we’re flexing muscles that are weak or out-of-practice. It’s an opportunity to confront a challenge, acknowledge it, and make the most of the situation.
I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t beat a little faster when I walked into the bar on Friday, but by that point, I’d done this so many times that I had faith that it’d all work out. I had an excellent afternoon and met some fun people, and even if I never see them again, I’m better off for having spent the time I did with them.
I also think there’s a really good argument to be made that you you can have a good conversation with a stranger and leave it at that. Not everyone has to become a lifelong friend.
But I did not realize that there were machines to get your bottle deposit back and that led me to hold up a line in the supermarket and I was completely mortified to have done that.
You are a brave little toaster. I appreciate what could come from going alone, however, I believe I would self-implode and everyone would see the awkwardness on my face. I can certainly go places alone but not without something to read to keep to myself from feeling alone.
When I lived in Dublin, I did some solo traveling to Vienna to watch my brother play in some goodwill basketball tournament thing. I met some pretty cool people at the hostel who insisted that I come out with them. I'm better now, but back then I was so reticent to meet new people. I really appreciated that they saw me and wanted to hang, and then encouraged me to come with them.