As a military spouse, you will have many opportunities to practice making friends. We continue to share stories and ideas based on how other military spouses have made friends, excerpted from our book:

A new book, “The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore” by Marla Paul, is also full of great ideas. Paul first wrote an essay about how difficult it was to make new friends with her own move from Dallas to Chicago. When the essay ran in the Chicago Tribune and later in Ladies’ Home Journal, the response was overwhelming. Women across the country wrote in with similar experiences. Using feedback from many of those women along with interviews with top friendship experts, Paul started writing a monthly column on the subject. That column turned into the book. It’s a great resource.

It’s great to see how others face the same kind of friend challenges that we all have sometimes — from rejection of our overtures to having a clingy, too-needy, or negative friend to having friends who never take the initiative.

Here are some tips from these books and other resources:

Create Your “Agenda”
Military spouse Kathie, a “recovering introvert,” uses an agenda to help her step into any new situation where she doesn’t know people, and even to help her start meaningful conversations in situations where she may simply not know people very well. Before going into a coffee or military ball or a conference, she takes the time to come up with her agenda. Taking a minute to think about who will be at that event, she comes up with three bits of information that she has to share that might be of interest to people there, and three bits of information she looks others people to volunteer.

“I don’t always need to use my agenda,” she says, “since sometimes great conversations just happen. But when we start talking about the weather, this gives me a topic to introduce that just might trigger a more purposeful conversation.”

Use the Agenda Idea for a Great Unit or FRG Coffee it’s a great way to get everyone talking in a purposeful manner — extroverts and introverts alike

Here’s the actual flyer copy from one of Kathie’s unit coffees. Their group used this a couple of times a year to spark resource sharing and conversation. Feel free to tweak it to fit your group and location. This would work well in a new neighborhood as well, as a way to get neighbors together to connect and share.

“The Monthly Coffee: Good food, great company (and, yes, let’s admit it, getting to check out other people’s homes) . . . and most importantly, great resource sharing.

So, join us on___at___You can come empty-handed, but you have to bring two things in your head (and you might want a pen and paper handy). This will be an opportunity to give and get great resources.

Here’s how it works: knowing who will be here –– military spouses who include working women, stay-at-home moms, childless women, young women, women of a certain age, military, nonmilitary, women who have lived in this area for awhile or in an earlier assignment, women new to the area. You come prepared with one resource (or more if you like) to share and one to ask for.

For example, for me, I’m happy to share:

1. A great and reasonably priced place to buy large and small pots for your indoor and outdoor plants, and, 2. An even nicer place than Ruston Way to enjoy long walks along the water. And resources I’m looking for: 1. Best way/place to sell antique furniture, specifically a couch and chair, and, 2. Favorite local nurseries.

You get the idea. Here are other possible categories to get you thinking: best free thing to do with kids in the area, best cheap eats restaurant, favorite Washington state ferry route, best home décor store, best military lodging deal in the Northwest or Hawaii. If we find time to share just one resource per person and to get one resource for each person there that evening, just think of all the great resources we’ll all discover.”

Next column (Part Six) we’ll share more resources and ideas from our book. Stay tuned.

(the earlier columns are archived on military.com at http://www.military.com/Opinions/0,,HightowerScherer_Index,00.html)

Excerpted with permission from Help! I’m a Military Spouse — I Get a Life Too! How to Craft a Life for You as You Move with the Military (2d Edition released April 2007 from Potomac Books, Inc.)  by Kathie Hightower & Holly Scherer. For more information on their writings and workshop go to www.militaryspousehelp.com