Making friends when you’re a kid is easy. Remember when you were six, and one minute you were best friends with somebody because they liked the same things as you – and by the end of the day you were best friends with somebody else because you both had the same coloured shoes. Ah yes, those were the days.
Nowadays, it doesn’t always come so naturally. Over the years we’ve gotten a little more self-restrained, a little more self-conscious, and a lot less impulsive. In other words, we’re much too scared of saying or doing the wrong thing, out of fear of looking like an idiot in front of other people who would then reject our friendship. And it’s not reflective of some flaw in our personalities, or some innate inability to make friends; it’s just a part of growing up.
With that in mind, shouldn’t we each take a leaf out of our six-year-old-selves and start living a little more… childishly. Or to put it another way, a little less seriously. So to show you what we mean, here’s 3 ways of making friends when you were young and how to translate them over to today:
‘Give me a crisp and I’ll be your friend’
A classic example of playground trickery resulting in instant friendship. Of course, it was never about getting your greedy mitts on somebody else’s food, it was about getting somebody’s attention.
These days, you can’t exactly go around asking potential mates for a swig of their pint or a bite of their lunch in exchange for your friendship (they’d think you were mad). But you can do the next best thing, making yourself known.
Sharing your best felt tips
Finding a coloured felt tip pen that hadn’t run dry was always the most challenging thing about class (that and making sure you’re colouring stayed within the lines). So it was always going to be instant BFF’s when somebody shared theirs with you.
Hopefully by now you’ve learned to use a proper pen, but that shouldn’t stop you from attending to the needs of others, sharing what you have to offer in order to get to know somebody else a little better. In short, it’s your round at the bar.
Inventing stuff
If you were a girl, it was probably daisy chains and rose-petal perfume. If you were a boy, it was probably something altogether different and involved new ways of making the girls cry.
Either way, coming up with new and exciting things to do together can often form the basis of a longer lasting friendship. So the next time you’re out with a group of people, why not propose a future activity to experience for the first time together.
