Friendship “Dating”.

We all know how hard it can be to make meaningful friendships as an adult.

When I was in my early 20s, living in a new state, it felt impossible. I struggled a lot with FOMO as I watched friends from my hometown go off to college or continue their lives while still being connected with one another. When I moved back to my home state, I was disappointed to find that a lot of my connections weren't the same as they had been before.

Luckily, the ones that mattered were the ones that lasted.

And as time has gone on, I've managed to make a handful of friendships that feel as though they've been lifelong. Suffice it to say, I have about five friends that I feel at home with.

I feel so incredibly blessed to have so many bright and beautiful individuals care about and love me as much as I do them. I never thought I would reach this point in my life where I would feel secure in who I am as a person and find my own idiosyncrasies to be worthy of love and respect.

The right people will love you for you, and friendship can be found in the most unexpected places.

For instance, I used to have a sisterhood with two of my coworkers before I left my old job, and we couldn't be any more different. I'm a mentally ill, profound, dark-humored empath. My boss at the time was a nerdy artist with a love of killing things and smut. And my other coworker was a sexy, hood, take-no-shit, secret sweetheart.

I think what pulled us together was our willingness to be real with each other and the boundless support we offered one another through our different rides of life. In one year, we'd seen some of the best and the worst shit in our lives, and I wouldn't have wanted to go through it with anyone else.

At my pet store job, I met a girl whom I still love dearly. She's earned the title of best friend. She is such a light, organic, empath of a person—she always leaves me better than she found me, and not a lot of people can do that.

This is a friendship I wanted but was wary of failing. But we both put in the work to maintain it and watch it blossom.

How lucky I am.

I also have three friends that I've been friends with for over half my life. Two of them were my best friends—like, sister level.

And this is where friendship gets complicated, because sometimes the people you thought would be in your life forever... aren't.

I believe the three of us were put in each other's lives to challenge our belief systems and to infiltrate the other's foundation with compassion for experiences we would have never had otherwise.

They're both devout Christians—which I definitely am not—but I've been able to challenge them with my own scientific and spiritual beliefs. They've helped me through some of the hardest times of my life, and they knew me better than almost anyone.

And now they're not in my life anymore.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing friendships like that. It's not as clean as death, even though one of them DID DIE, because the person is still out there living their life. You can't point to a funeral or a date or a definitive ending and say, this is when it happened (I mean, I can for Morgan). Sometimes there's just distance. Sometimes there are choices. Sometimes life changes people in ways you never anticipated. Sometimes a relationship reaches a point where loving someone and having them in your life are no longer the same thing.

I don't think that makes those friendships meaningless. Quite the opposite.

I think some people can be incredibly important to you and still only be meant to exist in a particular chapter of your life. They helped shape me. They loved me. They challenged me. They saw versions of me that very few people ever got to see.

And I miss them.

That's probably one of the hardest parts about friendship as an adult. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still grieve the people who aren't there anymore.

I can genuinely feel blessed to have the friendships I have now while still carrying the absence of two people who once felt like sisters.

Both things can be true.

All of that aside, besides my immediate coworkers, I usually don't see my other friends that often. Usually when I do, it feels like an event—so it's not always a super natural time because there's so much to fit in.

And being honest, you already spend 40 hours a week with coworkers, so doing the mundane with them can feel oppressive. We do go out! And it's fun! But it's not all the time.

And maybe that's part of what happens as you get older.

You lose people.

People move. People get married. People have kids. People change. Sometimes you change. Sometimes friendships that once felt permanent quietly become memories.

And even when you're lucky enough to have a lot of wonderful people in your life, there can still be spaces where someone used to be.

This is what made me decide to turn to friendship dating.

I wasn't looking to replace anyone. I just realized there were still parts of my life I wanted to share with other people, and I didn't want to sit around waiting for those spaces to magically fill themselves.

So I chose to do this in the form of an app called Bumble.

If you haven't heard of it, it mimics Tinder in the fact that you swipe right on people you're interested in and left on people you're not. If you both swipe right, you've created a match.

Now, I can't say for others what compels them to match with me when we usually don't even get past the “Hi, how are you?” stage. But when I'm swiping, it's usually based off of a first impression from their profile photo and then, secondarily, by the interests listed in their bio.

The cherry on top is if we have the same music taste, which you can find from their Spotify linked below.

Another factor is distance. I usually try to match with people who are in my area because I want friends 10 to 15 minutes away that I can go to the gym with, get coffee with, smoke with, and do more of life's mundane tasks with.

I've always wanted a friend to sing with, to make art with, and to go on adventures with—but these don't all have to be the same person!

The older you get, the more you begin to accept that one person doesn't have to be your everything.

You can have a gym friend, a nature friend, an LGBT friend—and so on and so forth based on your interests.

As long as I've been on the Internet, I've always really enjoyed connecting and talking to new people. Granted, the Internet can be sketchy sometimes. However, all of my Bumble dates have so far been safe—other than when I broke my wrist roller skating on the very first meet-up. sweating emoji

As you can imagine, meeting with new people to be friends is just as awkward as online dating or blind dating. People are always going to look different without the filters and with depth of field.

If you're lucky and charismatic, you should be able to survive the talking part of the meet-up long enough to safely go home.

Speaking of the talking part, my least favorite thing about cultivating online friendships is the small-talk phase.

This phase comes shortly after the “Hi, how are you?” phase.

I don't think I've ever experienced anything as draining as trying to come up with topics to talk about. It's amplified if you're juggling multiple conversations where you're putting in 80% of the effort, or worse, you get tired of the small-talk BS and just quit replying to the “Hi, how are you?”s completely.

Also, due to Bumble's UI, it's not as intuitive as an instant messenger, so it's likely you'll miss potential matches or have conversations drift off-grid.

You also don't match with everyone you want to, and dope-ass people are just gone in the ether for eternity.

Because the catch with Bumble is that you can't message until you match, and whoever swiped right first has control over the conversation. This feature is borrowed from the dating side of Bumble, where men cannot message women first.

It's infuriating when you know you would make a great match with someone but are unable to show them your conversational skills and personality.

So, long story short: this is a tool that has some success, is relatively safe, and is free to try.

So far, I've met six people off of Bumble, and a couple of them I would see again. I haven't had an astronomical connection that feels 100% meant to be, but I'm still looking for the pieces I'm missing.

Maybe that's the weirdest part of growing up.

You can have people you love deeply and still have room for someone new.

You can miss the people who left without wishing the people currently in your life away.

You can be grateful for the friendships that stayed while grieving the ones that didn't.

And you can keep looking.

Not because the people you already have aren't enough, but because life is fucking huge, and there are still people out there you've never met.

Maybe one of them is waiting for a swipe right.