fi+pinalove-arvostelu parhaat oikeat postimyynti morsiamen sivustot
She was lonely. So she started a club to make friends, and 35,000 people joined
Article Tools
Holly Cooke wasn’t a fan of weekends. Whenever Friday rolled around, it was a reminder that she had no one to spend her spare time with.
« I was super isolated, » said Cooke, who relocated from Stoke-on-Trent – a city in central England – to London in 2018, when she was 22. « I moved here knowing absolutely no one. »
She had high hopes of going to restaurants, bars and the theater, but she didn’t want to do those activities alone.
She began to understand why London is sometimes considered a particularly lonely place to live. Finding friends was hard. She grew so desperate for company, she said, she eventually found herself Googling: « How to make friends in London. »
The search proved mostly futile, though she did check out some friend dating app spinoffs, like « Bumble BFF. » There, she found a few other women who lived in London and were also lonely. She was seeking women friends, specifically, because « we really need to look out for each other, » she said.
Cooke spontaneously decided to create a Facebook group called « The London Lonely Girls Club, » and invited the people she connected with on the apps to join. She then asked everyone to meet for brunch.
« It was so vulnerable, » she said, adding that she asked a friend from out of town to come in for the brunch, in case no one else showed up. « Saying that you’re lonely and you don’t have people around, admitting to that was really scary. »
Cooke was pleasantly surprised when five women showed up and they all got along well. The success of the first meetup proved to Cooke that she was not alone in her loneliness, and that she could help others in the same situation.
She decided to start planning meetups every few weeks, and word slowly spread about the Facebook group. Now, five years later, the London Lonely Girls Club has more than 35,000 members.
