Raina Cohen

And then there's, okay, you found somebody who you want to be friends with.

They're a group of people.

How do you make them, how do you like end up becoming friends?

And then it's once you've become casual friends, how do you become really close?

I recently went to a party that I felt like was a very interesting example of a way to solve that first search problem.

So there were a few of my friends who had kind of realized that they wanted to widen their social circle because they would go to a party and all their friends were friends with each other, so they were locked in this circle together.

And they held a party that they called Three Degrees, like the six degrees of separation with the Kevin Bacon thing.

And the rules were if you were invited, you were asked to bring one friend that the hosts didn't know.

So that was the second degree.

And then that person was also supposed to bring a friend that the first guest didn't know.

So that's the third degree.

And it meant that 2 thirds of the party were people that the host didn't know.

And also because there were a lot of people at a remove, it made it more likely that you're going to meet new people.

So that's a way I thought was really interesting for how you can encounter new people.

Or you could do a version of that, I think, at a dinner party with eight people, in addition to

all the sort of standard things that people will advise because they make sense, like going to do some sort of activity that is oriented around community.

Like for me, that's swing dance.

It could be a religious community, something where there is a place where people are going to be and you're going to keep seeing them and inevitably you'll strike up conversation because you keep seeing them.

So that's kind of one way to deal with the search issue.

And then in terms of how do you make friends from people that you find, I would recommend trying to make the first move.