friendcrush

I am pretty positive I have more friend crushes than anything else, but I find them harder to pursue than dating crushes. There is no protocol for how to become friends with someone!
And especially when you meet someone and you think wow you're really cool/intelligent/interesting/nice and then you get too friend-shy and intimidated to ever friend-ask-them-out.
More often than not that isn't how it goes down, either, obviously. Usually you meet someone in a group of people and you see them at a show then at a bar then at a party then one night you're the last two people left or you're both feeling really antisocial at a house party and you wind up in someone's kitchen talking about life while everyone's getting wasted in the living room then it seems only natural to get a coffee next week when you both have to go buy your dry goods and spices anyway. It's a lot harder to just point blank ask someone on a first friend-date.

Somehow it seems creepier to be the person friend-asking-out than date-asking-out. Like you have more to lose almost? I guess because we're all so blasé and WHATEVER about dating (/we act as though we are) because we have to be independent women about it and not let some guy affect us! feminism 2010!! I mean whether or not that's how it actually happens is beside the point.


Simpler times when being in someone's class meant being pals and going to their birthday party and playing bingo (Am I wearing a scrunchie? I don't have any teeth in this picture)

Tangent aside, my point is that it's much harder to form a friendship with someone you think is cool than it is to go on a date with someone you think is attractive.

This year I became friends with a few of my friendcrushes and it's great. Actually I feel like I have made more friends in the past YEAR than I have since high school. Toronto for some reason is a really hard city to make friends in. I've had this conversation with a few people, both from Toronto and not, and something about the city makes it very hard to form a social network.
Or rather, get into an existing one.
I've lived in Toronto my whole life and I still am amazed at how relatively few people I know. yeah yeah I have 635 friends on facebook, and like everybody else can run into at least a pal in the market, but that's not knowing people necessarily. What I mean is how few people I can call if it's like 8 pm on a thursday and I want a pal to come over to watch movies.

Getting over that initial LET'S HANG OUT hump is hard! How do you do it?