I tried to befriend a friendless dude in college. Found out he was friendless because he went around asking women what their "cunt diameter" was. Even women professors!
I used to be the guy that knew everyone, introducing my friends to others, and others to others.
These days, I have maybe 2 friends.
The good friends I once had believe everything they see on Facebook.
I just couldn't anymore.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. Probably childhood abandonment, abuse, and neglect.
My poor mom tried, she really did. She was abandoned, abused, and neglected too. A lot of things that would have seemed absurd to a healthy person were normal for her so she tolerated a lot and expected a lot. She suffered so much as a kid that whatever idea she had about family, she was sticking to.
I have no close friends and I LOVE it that way. I wish I didn’t.
Being alone is my favorite way to be. I can’t move in any direction in life because of it. Fortunately my wife wants me to be a stay at home dad. She isn’t crippled like I am and she loves me anyway, thank goodness.
You are at least fortunate enough to have the type of love only your wife could give.
Everyone is broken in some way.
Some want to break others because of it. Some want to comfort the broken.
Your life is yours to live. You have someone who, it sounds, respects that. That's more than many could ever wish to have.
Algorithmic social media just ruins everything. Once twitter and facebook started pulling out all the stops to keep us on their sites instead of letting us use them as a starting point to connect and/or simply augment our existing irl relationships.
IDK man, the people with no or few friends tend to be weird but not really bad in any meaningful way: socially awkward, shy, odd interests, neurodivergent etc. Difficult to get to know, plain and simple. People with a lot of friends are often worse people, manipulative and/or have a transactional attitude to relationships
The people with no or few friends tend to be weird but not really bad in any meaningful way: socially awkward, shy, odd interests, neurodivergent etc. Difficult to get to know, plain and simple.
*Raises hand*
Yeah I'd like to think I'm not a bad person. I just have intense social anxiety. The only way I've made friends are when chatty people tend to talk to me and invite me to things. I've always appreciated when people do this, but then I just don't retain the friendship when I or they have moved across the country or when we've moved into different life stages (ex: graduating from high school or college or changing jobs). I'm fortunate enough to have a friend now who is just nice and talks to me. Prior to that I didn't have anyone for a while outside of my online friends. Some of us are really just terrified of other human beings is all.
Part of this is that I have always an intense paranoia of appearing too clingy, so I never invite anyone else out to do things. Notice how one of the commenters said they broke off a friendship because the other person was too clingy. Well I just break it off first by never engaging because I don't want them to think I'm too clingy or weird. Even now with the one friend I have I fear that I text too much or bother them too much or things like that. I try to limit myself and leave them alone but I never know where the line is between never speaking and between speaking too much.
So I just chill alone I guess.
Just be chill
I rarely do anything with people I know. I'm not a super social person and I tend to keep to myself. I tend to hang with people that I either know very well or that I work do something with.
Idk man, the people with no friends and the people with a lot of friends and even the people with a middle amount of friends seem to follow a standard distribution of personalities.
Some awkward people and some charismatic people just suck. Some awkward people and some charismatic people are awesome. But most of all, people are just kinda shades of in-between.
Yeah I don't think it's really fair for anyone to be generalizing people over the number of friends they have. There are shitty and no shitty people in both camps.
When I was in high school there was only one kid with no friends and he was racist
At least he wasn't the popular kid
Same. It was in the Tennessee suburbs so there was actually a lot of racism, but dude was like, Klan level racist, and that's just rude.
And when it's not any of those cases then that person has a horrible pattern of behavior. I've learned this lesson way too hard.
Two weeks ago, I saw the loner at the table of an event. Went to go talk to them because they were alone for a while.
In less than 10 minutes, they made a offensive joke that would have insulted half the people here, and complained about their living situation unprompted.
Idk why in imagining them telling a version of the aristocrat's and then saying, "So anyway, that's my roommates."
It’s the risk you take. I’ve met some of the most interesting people this way. If you go into it with an open mind and understand that usually it’s not going to work out, you’ll be better for it.
Happened to me a few years ago, started in a new office and one of the guys seemed cool so we talked more frequently. Ended up helping him get the apartment upstairs from me because his lease was expiring and carpooled to work. That's when the clinginess started, couldn't go half a day without him always texting or calling over stupid shit and borderline unhinged behaviors. I distanced myself real quick from him. The final straw was when he had asked what "village" my girlfriend was from in Brazil, then doubled down when I called him out for assuming she was from some uncontacted Amazonian tribe. "Well you havent been there yet so you don't know lol" yeah ok fuck you, dude. Haven't talked to him since, even though he still lives upstairs.
Anxiety sucks, or is there different reasons why I don't have irl friends?
Domain checks out
Yeah I'm deleting this. Not comfortable with what I said based off a "few people I know"
There are a lot of lonely people in the world. Too many of them deserve it.
I had a brilliant idea for a app during college. It connected self-identified lonely nerds with other self-identified lonely nerds. Like "Oh you like anime, here is this other guy, and here are five events you can attend together." I was hoping for that Zuckerberg money if this app was a hit.
I ran it through a test trial with a dozen pairings of them in my college campus to see if it had value.
And yeah, a lot of the feedback was that the other person was kind of annoying/intolerable. Which was funny when both of them said that about each other.
yeah, I'm the person 🙈
Can relate; have friend who I somewhat wish I never met
Just start pretending that you don't know him. Just me like "who are you?"
Just kidding don't do that
