A week ago Sunday, a group of women spread out on the sand at Sunken Meadow State Park for a morning workout most of them did not attend with anyone. That was the design. The class, the last stop in a summer series run by Self Love Social Club, was built for showing up solo: move for an hour with the waves in your ears, then stay for lattes, fruit infused water and conversation with strangers who arrived exactly the way you did.

Self Love Social Club is a Long Island pop-up community run by Lauren King and Jessica Federico, and its premise is one almost every adult recognizes and almost nobody says out loud: making friends after school ends is genuinely hard. The club's answer is a rolling calendar of small, planned-to-the-detail events where connection is the activity rather than the byproduct.

What the events actually look like

The club describes itself as a place where women find community and meaningful connection, and its calendar backs that up with variety. Recent gatherings have included full-body sculpt classes led by King, craft nights and tote bag painting, book swaps, bingo nights, a seashell social, and a recurring blind date style event that pairs up would-be friends the way dating apps pair up couples. The club has run that friendship matchmaking format at least three times.

This summer's headline effort was the Summer Sweat Series, three low-impact movement classes staged at destinations across the Island. One August evening filled the patio at Kismet Coffee Co. in Bay Shore with a workout followed by complimentary skincare treatments from local estheticians. The September finale moved to the beach at Sunken Meadow. Each stop came with curated swag bags, giveaways and services from Long Island small businesses, most of them women-owned, which has become part of the club's identity: every event doubles as a tiny local marketplace.

No membership, no commitment, no partner required

There is no membership fee and no standing obligation. Events are announced on the club's Instagram, where more than 8,000 people now follow along, and each one opens for individual registration with limited spots that have a habit of disappearing. Some are workouts, some are craft tables, some are just structured excuses to talk to people. Attendees range from women new to Long Island to lifelong residents whose social circles thinned out with commutes, kids or a move back home.

The pay-per-event model turns out to matter. A gym membership or a country club asks for commitment before it delivers a single friend, and joining anything as the new person is its own small act of courage. A one-off ticket to a tote painting night asks for almost nothing, which is why people actually buy it. If the night works, there is another one a few weeks later. If it does not, nobody calls to ask where you went.

That last group may be the club's real constituency. National surveys have tracked a steady decline in close friendships for years, and the pattern lands hardest on adults whose built-in social structures, a campus, a first job, a team, are behind them. What King and Federico have built is not therapy and does not pretend to be. It is logistics: a time, a place, a shared activity and a room full of people who all opted in to the same slightly vulnerable premise.

How to find them

The club posts upcoming events and registration links through its Instagram account, selflovesocialclubli, and its event pages. Gatherings have landed every few weeks through the year, from Galentine's celebrations in winter to beach workouts in September, so the fall calendar is the thing to watch.

For a reader who has thought some version of, I have plenty of people to text and nobody to get coffee with, this is the rare local story with a same-week action item. Follow the page, pick an event, go alone. Arriving solo is not just allowed. It is the entire point.