How to Make Friends in Vancouver (Or How to Get a Cat to Wear a Hat)
I’ve been living in Vancouver for almost two years and the most common thing I hear from people who have moved here, is how hard it is to make friends. Now as the name of the title suggests, it’s not impossible to get a cat to wear a hat but if it does it won’t last long and the state of your hands after, will be a mess…Never mind, I was never good with analogies. None the less, the task of making new friends when moving to a new city, especially in your thirties, is hard everywhere. But why it seems to define Vancouver is quite complicated.
I have lived in three different cities, including Vancouver twice. I was born and raised in Calgary, I spent two years in Vancouver while a student and then lived for six years in a smallish town outside of London, UK.
Anyone who has ever visited Calgary will tell you how friendly everyone is. And part of that,is because you have to be. It can literally be life and death. If you don’t help a stranger whose car has broken down in -30C weather, they could die. You don’t shovel your elderly neighbour’s walk, a potential slip and fall, could end very badly. It’s a trait that goes across Canada and even dates back to the early settler days, where a person would leave their cabin open so anyone needing a place to stay could do so, as long as they replaced the fire wood – because they could freeze to death otherwise. This isn’t so much a problem in most of Britain or America, stealing people’s stuff generally sucks a lot but they usually aren’t four thousand kilometres from the nearest town and thus might not be able to replenish their supplies. So kindness in most of Canada is a survival mechanism. Also there’s not that many of us in the second biggest country in the world. It’s best to stick together otherwise no one’s getting that bear to stop shaking the tree they’re hiding in.
Vancouver on the other hand wasn’t the best place to land in the late-1800’s but the weather was comparably mild in comparison to the rest of Canada. Though there was still no getting away from the bears. Vancouver has it’s own ‘rough’ weather to deal with, RAIN. It rains an awful lot. I’m pretty sure, using the empirical evidence of how many umbrella’s I’ve lost, that it rains more in Vancouver than it does in London, England. I would say it’s just very cloudy in England, whereas Vancouver gets a bit of sun every few days. And the heavy rain is a big deterrent for socialization (not to mention the mass addition of Netflix). People actually seem to hibernate here. Which seems so strange to a Calgarian, where hibernation might actually make sense but in Vancouver you can still go to work and the grocery store without too much pain but hauling yourself to a pub, lots more effort. In Calgary you have to make a lot of effort to get anywhere so driving twenty extra minutes to make friends, isn’t a lot.
Living in England, the pub is a huge part of the culture. Some of the pubs have been around for much longer than Canada has existed. Drinking after work, any day of the week, from five o’clock till midnight, was a fairly regular occurrence in Guildford. Now I’m older and likely couldn’t last that long but it that doesn’t mean it isn’t still happening. In Vancouver, I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve been out past eleven. Vancouver has an interesting history of drinking, which may explain the lack of pub culture. Back in the 1920’s and even into the 30’s, once prohibition had ended in Canada (it lasted from 1917-1921 in BC) public drinking was largely regulated. Drinking at home was fine, but as detailed in “Liquor, Lust and the Penthouse,” in the 20s only ‘private’ clubs managed to skirt the laws, as they weren’t open to the public and therefore allowed people to drink outside of their homes. Separate drinking rooms for women, no music or even billiards, were all restricted if alcohol was in place. In fact, in 1949, the police raided a nightclub for serving alcohol. Because really, we only go to nightclubs for the ambiance.
So could it be that due to the history, the pub, and therefore social drinking, isn’t part of Vancouverites culture? This is a city that only last year introduced happy hour. Vancouver is not a cheap city and the government controls of alcohol sales. They set prices and anyone selling alcohol such as restaurants and cold beer and wine stores, buy at same price as normal customers at LCB buy. Therefore it is way cheaper to drink in Alberta in a bar than it is to drink in B.C. Though this seems to be happening all across the country, Macleans had an article last month about the decline in bars and pubs. Apparently a lot of Canadians are choosing to have the company of their computer over a bartender. And some would argue, you could still make friends, sitting at home rather than in a bar, apps like Wiith, the Tinder of new friendships and Meet-up allows you to meet with people with the same specific interests as you.
It’s raining and the pubs aren’t popular, surely that doesn’t mean you can’t make friends! For a city full of people from other places there’s always a shocked silence when someone tells you they were born and raised in Vancouver. Despite this there seems to be an inherent clique-ness to anyone’s group who has been here for more than a few years. This could be because Vancouver’s a fairly transient city, so people don’t want to put in the effort of making a new friend and allowing them into their group just to be dumped when they move to Montreal the next month.
The other aspect of this is the growing decline of people in my generation not having families. With houses over a million dollars and three-bedroom condos being as rare as a three dollar beer, it’s expensive to have a family here. In addition people aren’t having babies anyways. This is a very new phenomena, a huge population of people without kids. It used to be that once in you were in your thirties, you’d make new friends with your kid’s friend’s parents or through baby yoga or pre-natal class. Now there’s a growing population that doesn’t have that outlet and when they lose their friends to a baby, it’s difficult to meet new ones (short of joining the baby yoga class as well, but bringing your cat instead of a baby might be slightly creepy and dangerous!). Instead Vancouver is filled with dogs but again, this is becoming a problem as most places won’t allow you to rent with a dog (this is illegal by the way). So we can’t even make friends at the dog park unless you borrow your friend’s dog (they’re busy with their million dollar houses full of babies anyways).
All of this leads to a pretty sad picture of making new friends in Vancouver. But this is all in the traditional way. We don’t buy music anymore, we don’t watch live TV and we start dating online first, so why should we still be trying the old way for making new friends? Now don’t get me wrong I have made friends since I got here, very nice, very lovely people. It just wasn’t as easy as it used to be. But aren’t all the best things not easy? Just think of the reward of when you finally get the picture of ‘Hat Cat.’
So find a friend app, join a hiking group, buy an umbrella and rent a dog (or a cat in a hat), otherwise stay at home and get really good at solitaire. I hear they even have an app for it.
Originally Posted - Mar 1, 2016
