how do i get (female) friends?

i'm a woman (not a troon) and i had my last friend in middle school. i had no friends in hs at all. i ate alone at lunch every single day for those 3 years. so, i haven't had a single friend for 10 years, nada. i still have no friends but now i have a bf who feels bad for me, and he wants me to get friends. men are a bad idea because i think men generally always want more than friendship when it comes to female-male friendships, so i want to stick to only female friends 100%.

so how can i get friends? i finished uni and i'm jobless at the moment trying to find a job but not having that much luck. i'm also in europe so it's harder here (youth unemployment is very high in my country). so i can't find friends from work obviously, and i don't have much spare money to throw at things like hobby classes since i don't have a job. i'm kinda just out of ideas.

my hobbies/interests are: video games (pokemon, one mmo, dark souls games, casual lol, lots of random fantasy games and a few anime games too, etc.), drawing, reading, collecting music, and that's about it i guess. even online it feels hard to find friendos though. i joined this one girls-only guild in the mmo i play and making actual friends has felt impossible. there seems to be a strong inner circle of close friends and then a bunch of people on the outskirts who don't talk much, and i sometimes feel awkward since one of these inner circle top dogs seems to kinda dislike me/doesn't reply if i say something to her. and idk how to make friends in this environment. i've been in this guild for 6 months but i still can't seem to do much else than small talk sometimes. i want to try irl now.

pls give me ideas

Look online for some in-person social groups that fit your interests, like weekly pokemon tournaments or whatever. Nowadays they’re expanding quite a bit with increasing loneliness, so you won’t feel like an outsider intruding on some tightly-knit group. They’re often social butterflies though so be warned. Also just try visiting more places where people go regularly, like a gym or library.

>>33364723
i go to the library often but i can count on one hand the number of times i've seen young people chatting in a library. nobody talks there and it doesn't seem like a place to approach strangers randomly imo.

gym would be better but here i have some issues too ofc. i work out at home and want to start going to an actual gym, but the only 2 nearby that aren't too far away are: 1 big gym that will probably have other women, but it has like a 1/5 rating because they don't seem to have AC during summer (some public places here don't have AC bc outside of summer it's cold) and lots of reviews about bad air quality and the gym being too hot. probably a bad idea then especially in summer. the other one is closer and it's a smaller gym, but from looking into it a few times when i walked by, it seemed to be only older men, so i'd feel a bit nervous about going there. i need to think more about the gym situation basically lol. but thanks for your advice. i don't think my town has pokemon tournaments but maybe there other kinds of free events like that some times.