I’m not a german fellow, but I have a netizen friend who feels incredibly anxious and wasn’t able to get friends in school, due to immense bullyings. They only have friends from the internet, and they have tried to socialize in a fishbowl event but they weren’t able to get a friend there as I feel it.
In my country there is an event organization called havervagy, which has a bunch of events, where everyone is spliited into 3-4 people sized groups where they can get to know eachother. Do you perhaps have something similar to this one in Germany? My friend lives in West Germany, closer to the border of Netherlands.
What are some of your friends hobbies? Sometimes it just takes time to evaluate the people around oneself. A hobby to keep the friend occupied while also offering the friend a platform to talk about could help.
Books? -> Read in front of others (maybe to them?) in some discussion rounds (book club?).
I guess they don’t like sports in teams, but what about sports in parallel, like biking groups? Driving through the mountains with some people.
Computers? The CCC, makerspaces, stuff like that. Go over on a visiting day, introduce yourself and talk/build/program.
Those meeting’s successes heavily depend on the chemistry between the people involved, which can change overtime. Either they get to know each other better and begin to understand each other, or the friend meets different people in the chosen place.
If nothing works, then it can be repeated in a different club/city. There has to be someone interesting around for them.
Yeah this was my initial idea to mention them, I hope they will give it a chance especially after trying that fishbowl event with 80 randoms. I’m too anxious for that dayum.
CCC reminds me: While it is a huge convention and the talks and crowds don’t feel personal at all, they always need volunteers in groups of 2-3 to watch the fire exits.
Maybe a thing they are passionate about needs small groups of volunteers? I’d assume that there’s always some downtime to talk to one another.
Yeah, it’s hard to get to know people that are running around. But you can sit by the workshops or the representatives of some clubs and talk to them. Helping out and being an “angel” always helps. Haven’t done that myself, so I can’t say how social this is.