Last week, my good friend text me a picture of Jennie Allen’s newest book Find Your People. I instantly started reading. It’s a short book—about 200 pages—and it dives into a lot of issues I’ve faced over the past couple of years, particularly with building community. 

I’ve always been more of an introvert than an extrovert — happy to hang out at home, read a book, watch Dowton Abby. But it hit me during the pandemic that I desperately need community. 

Pre-college, I went to school eight hours a day and then participated in some sort of extracurricular. By the time I got home, I wanted to be alone. 

But when I went to college, I wasn’t around people all day. I didn’t have the same kind of extracurriculars, and I had to rebuild friendships. After the first year of college and through the pandemic, I realized the importance of people. 

Now I’m wrapping up college in December, and starting the next chapter. Honestly, community is really important for me to find right now. I decided not to live in my college town for my last semester, so most of my close friends are further away. The community that I had built, while not disappearing, is going to look a lot different than it did. I won’t be 5 minutes from everyone I know.

Find Your People came at a really good time for me. It encouraged me and challenged me — a nonintrusive introvert — to reach out and be with people. The book isn’t a step-by-step on how to make friends. It’s a dive into what it means to build community. While it can be a little fluffy and less research-backed than some of my nerdier book favorites, it’s an influential book and I really did enjoy it.

Here are three of my most important takeaways: 

Spend time with people 

Some of my BEST FRIENDS were people I roomed with in college. We would wake up and work out together, maybe do our homework in the living room and end the day watching Gilmore Girls or Big Sky (our scary show) at night. We clocked hours together. 

In Find Your People, Jennie encourages you to really spend a lot of time together. I’ve seen that played for a couple years now. I’m simply better friends with the people I spend the most time with.

The University of Kansas found if you want to build friendships, this is how much time it takes:

• 40 and 60 hours to develop a casual friendship
• 80 to 100 hours to transition to being friends 
• More than 200 hours to become good friends

But, in order to get deep, you have to clock the time. In Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly she uses the analogy of a marble jar. Time with your friends adds more marbles to the jar: More time = more marbles.

Building relationships always takes time, though. To get to the deep stuff, you have to have the silly, the fun, the random hangouts.  

Be intrusive 

I try to be unintrusive in my friends’ lives. I’m not typically the initiator — I just assume that my friends are busier than I am so I wait for them to initiate a plan. Find Your People taught me to be ok with the uncomfortable parts of reaching out to people. 

Find Your People taught me to:

• Text friends to hang out in 20 minutes instead of a week in advance 
• Have more spontaneous events 
• Have regularly scheduled get together with friends

I know how precious it is when my friends call me randomly or ask if they can stop by. I know I love unscheduled walks and spontaneous time with my friends. I love regularly scheduled girl’s nights. I love when people text me to go out with them.

One of my worst fears is being intrusive. I don’t want to bother anyone, so I never randomly stop by a friend’s house or call without knowing a friend is free. And I don’t like that about myself. I’m glad this book called me out though. I’m ready to work on it.

Find friends like family

It’s important to build a family-like community. I’ve seen this modeled really well by my parents. 

Growing up I had, at the VERY least, five different couples my parents were friends with that I considered family. They always got together, did life together and stopped by randomly. I think part of the reason starting college was so hard is that I lost that extended community, the deep ties our friends made around us. 

Jennie hit it on the nose. Your friends can become like your family. 

As I look to graduation, to finding a community, I hope to dig deep. To build a community that is fun, goofy, likes to laugh, and have a good time. And also shows up when things are bad, when it’s time to cry, when I need help.