Meeting other people’s friends groups (as you described meeting your partner’s friends) is a great way to shortcut that awkwardness. Its not just that someone else has done the hard work of filtering folks out, but that people are just on better form when with friends. Part of the problem of making friends in random social events is most people are either a bit awkward or putting on a social ‘mask’, which makes it harder to actually identify the people you’d like once you got past that.

My wife social circle has a bunch of people who entered as someone’s partner for a whole, but stayed friends with us after they broke up (even if there was a delicate period post-split where we hung out with them both, but never together).