Helping girlfriend make friends. HELP!

[Dan Cole]

I met a girl while traveling in August of 2006. We started to talk online a lot and became "boyfriend/girlfriend" within a month and started visiting each other back and forth. The plan all alone was for her to move from her hometown of Chicago to NYC to live with me. She did so 3 months ago and things have been pretty good. We got an apartment and a cat together and she got a pretty good job making quite a bit more money than she was making before.

The only real problem is that she hasn't had any luck making friends. She had a couple of people in mind that she could hang out with here but 2 of them ended up moving unexpectedly and one just sucks ( stole something from her ). She's tried pretty hard to meet people at work but hasn't had much luck. I told her she should randomly message some people off of Myspace who are into the same music and stuff she is, which she was totally against, but she tried it and that didn't yield anything.

I know from my personal experience, making good friends can definitely be hard and it's probably easier for guys. I mean I've lived in NYC for around 3 years and probably only have 5-7 friends that I think I'll stay in touch with 10 years from now.

Anyway does anyone have any experience with this? I'll admit I didn't really fully comprehend how hard it is to make friends and how important that is to girls at first so I didn't do much to help her. I was thinking that just going out to clubs/bars with her would probably help, but I thought someone might have some better advice.

Thanks