We all want to feel that someone cares about us. The little moments of our daily lives, especially the positive experiences, cause us to instinctively reach out to share them with someone. If no one is there to connect and share with, the meaning of our experiences, and therefore our lives, is somehow diminished. We shrug our shoulders, and move on. Without others to share our experiences, life loses its flavor. Even if we achieve remarkable career or financial success in our lives, if we have no one to share it with, it is a hollow victory.
The premise of this site is that we are social animals and born to need to feel connected to others in order to be healthy and happy. It does not matter if we have an outgoing personality or are quiet and shy. It does not matter what our gender, race or culture of origin is. The need to feel connected to others, to have close, personal friends, is universal and built into us at the deepest level.
Most of the ideas you will find here will be new to you. They are new ideas not because we never knew them but because we have forgotten them. We have forgotten that we need each other and why, forgotten how to connect with others and forgotten how to cultivate friendship and how to nurture it.
This site will explain what social wellness is, why it is important and how you can make changes in your life to improve yours. It will provide you with a new awareness of the many small opportunities throughout the day for you to increase the potential number of new friends in your life. It will explain how you can cultivate a healthy, growing circle of close, personal friends and have an active social life. It will show you how doing so will make you feel healthier and happier.
The application of the ideas you will find here transformed my life in the course of just over one year. At the age of fifty I found myself living alone, divorced, my children grown, facing weekend after weekend with no plans and no friends. I went to work every day, but as I did not have one single friend at the time, evenings were no different than weekends. I can still recall finding myself alone in my apartment, standing and staring out the patio windows one Friday evening as I considered another looming weekend, thinking that if this was the deal for the next thirty years – get up and go to work, buy the groceries, pick up the dry cleaning, pay the bills, take out the garbage, get up and go to work – that maybe I did not want to sign up for it.
I had hit the bottom before in my life and had always been blessed with the inclination and wherewithal to decide to figure it out and fix it. So that’s what I did on this occasion.
On a weekend one year after asking myself if I wanted to go on with my life the way it was, I had cause to be amazed. This weekend was very different from the ones I had grown so familiar to over the previous years. Instead of staring alone out of the patio window that Friday evening, I was at a friend’s house party with over twenty of my other friends. The truly amazing thing was that every one of them had met through me! How was this possible? What had happened?
Very simply, what had happened was that I had decided to find out how I had ended up alone and what I had to do to change it. Along the way I discovered that I was not the only one with this problem. A little research informed me that social isolation is epidemic in our western society and a growing problem world wide with people of all age groups. At that moment, I realized that if I could find a way to reach out to others and help them connect and make friends, that my problem would also be solved. That is how I ended up one year later at a party with twenty of my closest friends.
So what was it that I discovered? What had I done to create this change? Well lets start again at the beginning and define just what social wellness is.
