So I moved back to my city after 7 years where my family lives.
It’s been 2 years but I never really enjoyed people here. Mostly people I met were from my previous circles, family, school friends and their partners.
I always thought something was off and maybe over time I will figure things out but it was just not happening.
Yesterday I went to dinner with my partners friends and damn it was whole different vibe. As if it’s a different culture. I really enjoyed talking and was genuinely interested in next meeting.
Resparked my joy in meeting people and I guess I was with wrong people and there are people who are out there who vibe match with me but it’s so hard to find them.
Meeting other people’s friends groups (as you described meeting your partner’s friends) is a great way to shortcut that awkwardness. Its not just that someone else has done the hard work of filtering folks out, but that people are just on better form when with friends. Part of the problem of making friends in random social events is most people are either a bit awkward or putting on a social ‘mask’, which makes it harder to actually identify the people you’d like once you got past that.
My wife social circle has a bunch of people who entered as someone’s partner for a whole, but stayed friends with us after they broke up (even if there was a delicate period post-split where we hung out with them both, but never together).