So you can start any group. It could be rich tennis players or poor owners of second-hand sewing machines or mothers with cross-eyed toddlers or women who wear only black or men who've just bought a computer who want advice but don't want anybody to know they don't know how to operate it.
If you want large numbers of business contacts you could go onto Linked-in. Very handy to have lots of contacts if you have a product or service needing that, for example if you have a new brand of home made chocolates or tee shirts or work in recruitment.
Lots of people advise you to get out of your home and join groups. But they have to be your sort of groups, and eliminate the contacts which won't connect with you. If you have a jobyou make friends with colleagues. If you have children at school you meet other parents.
Stranded in a new city, an overseas country, without a job is harder. For example, when I first went to live overseas I joined the social clubs for ex-pat women, yet they kept being posted overseas. On once occasion I was enjoying a lunch with a new friend I'd just met when she was phoned by her husband and told she was moving. When I made friends who lived permanently in the country, I had a base of people to call.
I found myself chatting to women who were keen tennis players or had babies. Their lifestyles did not fit mine. To them reading books was impractical, irrelevant, time-wasting second-hand living. It took weeks to discover that I got on better with women at book clubs who were empty-nesters or had family overseas and time for ladies who lunch and afternoon movies.
I needed a mixed age group, no point being the only granny with pearl bracelets, ming china and silk chairs in a group of young mothers wearing jeans and stained teeshirts with boisterous toddlers and dribbling babies. Nor the only active youngster who wanted to talk about a skiing holiday nor the only one who could climb stairs, and lived in a block of flats with stairs, amid a circle of bridge-playing pensioners with stiff knees and walking sticks.
As a young married I'd formed friendships with couples and lost all my single friends. So when I was left alone I was the spare third.
For me Toastmasters International has been wonderful. I can even accompany a family member - or lover - I should be so lucky - on a conference, check a website and go along to dinner with a group of people who welcome strangers and have a lot in common with me. I did this in Singapore, Shanghai and Thailand.
You would be have to be very lucky to meet anybody in a gym or even a hotel exercise class. But if you join an international sports group - such as the Hash Harriers runners, you can go to meetings all over the world. You know the structure of the meetings, you have the stamina or skills, the correct clothing, and you even know the international personalities if you go to an international conference or check out the websites.
Now, let's look at the social networks and dating sites. With dating sites, as with clubs, you may strike lucky first time, or you may hop about trying one after another, or join the lot straight away to see which works best.
What are the problems with dating sites? Complaints are:
a) That the people aren't real, just scams
b) That you get those who want to be too close - stalkers
c) Or those who never turn up at all
d) People aren't the stated age or whatever they claim
e) They don't really want to meet - just doing it for a laugh.
f) Nutters and weirdos
g) Nothing in common
h) Too time-wasting
Let's deal with each in turn.
a) You need a recent photo to show it's not a computer, nor somebody married man, nor somebody twenty years older.
b) You need an understanding of what you will do if it doesn't work out.
c) You could try asking the other person if they've ever not met up and why. They may not turn up because they misunderstood the day, time or venue, could not find it, got delayed and could not contact you, had a work or family crisis and could not contact you, decided against it and were too afraid to upset you because you seem controlling and angry and threatening. An effective way of ending a relationship is to threaten somebody who is undecided, cautious or nervous. (I'm being humorous and ironic as well as truthful.)
f) You could be on the wrong site. You could be unwittingly attracting the wrong type. A man wrote a profile in which he included what he thought was a standard joke: 'My job is so top secret that if I told you what it was I'd have to kill you.' He was astonished to be contacted by a woman who wanted him to kill her.
He didn't notice the connection. Neither did I - until I'd been thinking about this for several weeks. He'd actually advertised himself as a killer, and of all the women who read his profile, one suicidal or nutty woman was actually looking for that.
I am always astonished by the number of people who walk into airport security and joke,' I've got a bomb!' and wonder why they get arrested. Equally, huge numbers of men joke about how dangerous they are - the wonder why the reader or listener is wary.
I'll tell you why. It's because people listening think many a true word spoken in jest.
Other readers think that it expresses the writer's underlying fantasy. It's a not adequately disguised hostility.
Plus a self-centred lack of consideration for the reader or other party.
And when you are on line, nobody knows much more about you than what you say. If you write ten sentences and one is hostile, that's ten percent hostile. Even if you wrote a hundred sentences and one was suspect, the reader looking for a red flag, or a reason to say yes or no, has a cross in the no column.
If you didn't want to meet the unemployed, or the mean, you would avoid free sites and stick to those which charged money, or people who were premium members, or sites attached to magazines or newspapers read by certain industries, or read by the affluent, or read by the educated.
Distance lends enchantment to the view they say, and you may be dreaming that your ideal match is somewhere on the other side of the world.
However, if you want a date in the next week, you are better off contacting a dozen people in your home area and hoping one of them will be free to meet.
You have to consider whether to go for quality or quantity. One view says that you need a huge number of sites, and profiles, to get the right one, and a huge number of meetings to find the right one - and one who likes you as much as you like them.
Of course it depends how picky you are. If you are so lonely that you will take anybody who likes you, the choice is much easier. You just have to be sure that your quarry intends to stay, not to chop and change and move on.
