making friends

On the way home from work tonight I was thinking about how to make friends. I'm going to be moving to Seattle within the next month and leaving behind everything about Portland that I love. I've lived here for six-ish years and I've made friends with all sorts of people, restaurants, and views. It would be pretty great if I could take them with me, but I know that's not possible. After stressing on this topic for a few minutes it occurred to me that it's really not that hard to make new friends.

In high school and college it was easy to make friends because I was thrown into situations with them. Sitting at a lunch table every day for a year with the same people will force familiarity, if not friendship. I'm still very close to my freshman roommate (we ended up living together in some capacity for four years). I'm engaged to marry a man that I met through an online dating site. But what's important isn't where I met them, but how well we clicked once we met.

So here I am sitting around stressing about meeting people in clubs, choruses, etc, or going out and trying new restaurants. I have to remember that everything and everyone that I'm attached to had to start out as something scary and unknown at one time.