As the saying goes, “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other’s gold.” My old friends are certainly the gold in my life. Many of them are the wives of the guys I went to college with, and their friends, by extension. I think it’s wonderful, and wonderfully lucky, that we all get along so smashingly. In fact, not one of the lovely ladies I’m friends with in CT or Long Island was someone I knew before I knew their husband or previous significant other. And yet, I count them amongst my closest friends. Their husbands are pretty great, too! The one close friend I have who is someone I met on my own is an awesome chick I met at my first full time job when I was 19 here in San Diego. And I wouldn’t trade a single one of them.

The question, as we get older, is how do we make new friends? Now that I’m 3,000 miles away from the majority of these women and men, I need to get out and make a new network of friends. This seems like a daunting task at times, as I balance a new full time job, training to teach online, writing this column, working on a novel, and spending time with my family. And so I ask you all for ideas, and I will try them and report back to you in future columns. We’ll call it “research,” but if I’m lucky, I might just find a little silver to add to my life.

Originally posted for Examiner.com at http://www.examiner.com/article/making-new-friends-2