Friendship matchmakers: ‘Our generation is lonelier than others’

Last year, Juliette Sartori decided she wanted to expand her social circle, so she went on a coffee date with three people she had never met before.

“It went really well,” she said.

“We ended up speaking for two hours and I still speak to them today. We all keep in touch.”

Her friendship blind date was part of Dinner with a Stranger, the society Juliette and her flatmates started “on a whim” for fellow Glasgow University students who want to meet new people.

Juliette, 21, had moved to Scotland from the US to study business and management and said it was harder to instantly connect with others as she found people “had a wall up” and were closed off.

With students so plugged in and digital that they spend less time interacting with each other face-to-face, she didn’t have many opportunities to increase her circle of friends.

And so Dinner with a Stranger was born.

“We thought originally only 30 people would join,” Juliette says. “We just didn’t know what to expect.

“It’s an out-there idea and the name throws people off from the start.”

But 200 people – a mixture of undergraduate and postgraduate male, female and non-binary students – signed up in the first month and the society has continued to grow ever since.