Discussion The brutal reality of making friends as an adult.

[Anxieyote]

I have seen a few users recently lamenting their lack of personal success when it comes to friendships. I wanted to add my two cents, because it's also something I've struggled with for a long time.

The first indication you get that making new friends as an adult is going to be difficult is when you ask people for advice on how to make friends as an adult.

If they say, "I don't know" that's probably the most honest and direct answer you're going to get. Most normies without any developmental disabilities find friends naturally throughout the course of their life. They meet them at work, they meet them at school, and they have enough social experience to maintain these friendships for years. They've also been actively networking throughout their teens and 20's with apps like Facebook and Snapchat—doing regular check-ins with the people they want to take with them into their adult lives.

A helpful way to look at it is through this hypothetical:

Imagine there are hundreds of boats in a harbor. Resources have been running low on the mainland, so everyone is shuffling onto these boats to find a new place to settle. For whatever reason, you have not been able to secure a spot on any of them. You watch helplessly as all of the boats trickle out of the harbor—until there are no boats left.

You know you're going to die if you stay on the mainland, so you craft a sailboat with what little experience you have, and set off.

Eventually you run into the larger ships, and cry out to them from your tiny sailboat. "is there any room for me??" you cry out desperately. "Find another boat." they shout down to you. "There's no room left."

You can try sailing next to the larger ships and asking for help, but you'll be met with a lot of rejections and "I don't know what to tell you"'s. The fact of the matter is, most of the spots are filled, and no one can fit you on their ship.

Social circles operate very similarly. If you haven't established your ride-or-die friendships early on, chances are, the people who would have filled this role for you have found other connections already.

Finding friends will be like firing shots in the dark; which isn't too far off from what a lot of desperate people do. I knew a coworker who wasn't having success with finding a girlfriend, so he sent out messages to hundreds of different girls—preferences be damned. He called it the shotgun method. "Due to the law of averages, eventually one of them is going to agree to go on a date with me." he said.

It's a very sad situation to be in. It was kind of a musical chairs thing, and we were the last ones standing. Most of the people I meet aren't willing to fit me in. They already have a group of friends, a girlfriend, and a family to meet their social needs.

 

[motel rooms]

I don't know how big your town is, but it's probably not impossible for you to make friends with someone atypical. Us crazies are everywhere & some of us want real-life friends.

 

[Snake of Eden]

In my community, it is near impossible to establish friendships beyond certain point as 99% of people will have families to care for by the time they are adults. Anyone who is a cookie cutter like me will end up left out and being seen as weird just for not starting a family of their own. I envy other places that have people like myself which makes it easier to relate to them. I hate most people however, i dont want anything to do with them as much as they dont want anything to do with me.

 

[LADY007]

I have seen a few users recently lamenting their lack of personal success when it comes to friendships. I wanted to add my two cents, because it's also something I've struggled with for a long time.

The first indication you get that making new friends as an adult is going to be difficult is when you ask people for advice on how to make friends as an adult.

If they say, "I don't know" that's probably the most honest and direct answer you're going to get. Most normies without any developmental disabilities find friends naturally throughout the course of their life. They meet them at work, they meet them at school, and they have enough social experience to maintain these friendships for years. They've also been actively networking throughout their teens and 20's with apps like Facebook and Snapchat—doing regular check-ins with the people they want to take with them into their adult lives.

A helpful way to look at it is through this hypothetical:

Imagine there are hundreds of boats in a harbor. Resources have been running low on the mainland, so everyone is shuffling onto these boats to find a new place to settle. For whatever reason, you have not been able to secure a spot on any of them. You watch helplessly as all of the boats trickle out of the harbor—until there are no boats left.

You know you're going to die if you stay on the mainland, so you craft a sailboat with what little experience you have, and set off.

Eventually you run into the larger ships, and cry out to them from your tiny sailboat. "is there any room for me??" you cry out desperately. "Find another boat." they shout down to you. "There's no room left."

You can try sailing next to the larger ships and asking for help, but you'll be met with a lot of rejections and "I don't know what to tell you"'s. The fact of the matter is, most of the spots are filled, and no one can fit you on their ship.

Social circles operate very similarly. If you haven't established your ride-or-die friendships early on, chances are, the people who would have filled this role for you have found other connections already.

Finding friends will be like firing shots in the dark; which isn't too far off from what a lot of desperate people do. I knew a coworker who wasn't having success with finding a girlfriend, so he sent out messages to hundreds of different girls—preferences be damned. He called it the shotgun method. "Due to the law of averages, eventually one of them is going to agree to go on a date with me." he said.

It's a very sad situation to be in. It was kind of a musical chairs thing, and we were the last ones standing. Most of the people I meet aren't willing to fit me in. They already have a group of friends, a girlfriend, and a family to meet their social needs.

Covid is very bad for making friends. You can seek clubs and interest groups that match your interests.. But I don't trust going inside with groups right now. We moved to another state 2 years ago and that was my plan. We used to belong to a computer club. Still waiting to seek out a group.

 

[Simba]

I can relate alot to your post. I have PDD-NOS (Autism) and i can talk to others but im not as great at maintaining friendships etc.. i always feel like that the older i get the more later it gets to have friends/partner n so on.. is like you wanna join in to group of friends n they may say hi to you or whatever but maybe they're just pitying you or what not or just being nice n but behind your back they be like "ugh person X is a weirdo!" and then someone else might say "ya but they don't/barely have any friends.." and then the other person be like "ugh whatever"... Idk or like maybe laugh at person X behind back idk ...

 

[WearyHSP]

@AnxiousSchizoid: Interesting analogy. I find that to be true, especially the older I've gotten as people coupled off and had families and I remained single. I had less in common with everyone moving forward in their lives (I didn't get on one of those boats.)

I'm not atypical in the agreed upon definition, but with childhood trauma, my life experiences are extremely atypical. I rarely find a person who has any depth and curiosity enough in which to find resonance. To add to that, I'm an extreme Empath. It's a hardship being around people who wear a mask, since it's palpable and painful for me - I feel all the phony stuff. I have no interest in having a veneer of a relationship in the ways I witness others.

I'm lonely and have lost my friends because of my chronic illness and no doubt, because of my PTSD that people just can't wrap their heads around. Generally, people want a friend who is light and easy. But also I'd say, they don't want someone who challenges or stretches them, or who makes them uncomfortable just by being themselves. I feel I'm not doing justice with my words here - ( I have a neuro-immune illness.) I'm trying to say that some of those people on the larger boats aren't people you'd really want to have relationships with. Or, If I speak for myself, that's what I've found. It's a constant disappointment that the people I meet are generally shallow and inauthentic, as my nature is all about connecting with others.

I guess I can say, "I hear you." And, I think HotelBeaneathGround's comment seems plausible.

I've done a lot of groups (MeetUp as an example) to pursue my interests which has a better chance of making a friend if you both share a common interest.

 

[SuicideM4n]

Já sou adulto e só tive dois amigos em toda a minha vida, um deles com quem não falo há anos e o outro apenas inicia uma conversa para fazer perguntas sobre algo

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

Obviously I didn't really get to experience a normal, healthy childhood, but this is what I picked up on watching from afar as the weirdo no one wanted to play with. During childhood, there are lots of opportunities to learn new skills and interact with others in environments where there aren't layers upon layers of social complexities and expectations.

As children, most people are given the freedom to explore their interests, to chat openly about them, and express thoughts or feelings in a non judgemental manner. Adults are meant to encourage and support that budding confidence.

If you miss out on these pivotal, formative moments, you're just fucked. Rarely are there any opportunities during late adolence and your 20s to fumble socially and recover from it, to try out new things, to experiment, to dip your toes in the water with relationships, etc.

You reach a point where your only means of socialisation is work, and that is a dreary, listless existence. It's equally dreadful to be surrounded by people with loving families, wide friend circles, and devoted partners. I've missed so many starting guns, and you come to realize, with each successive shot fired, your chances to catch up only continue to slip away from you.

I didn't get to do any after school activities as a child. I can count on one hand the number of sleepovers I went to in primary school. No one invited me to their birthday parties or their grown up drinking events in high school. I never got to go on a proper date as a teenager. There were no friends to go out with on a Friday night. Teachers belittled me consistently and I received little support from the staff at my school.

Those are things you just don't recover from. Even before I was physically ill, the knowledge that I was an autistic freak with no place anywhere transcended everything else. Everyone else around me at university is having the time of their lives, going to nightclubs, partying, making memories.. I don't even have anyone willing to sit next to me the one day of the week I'm in a lecture hall.

It just feels like there is no way to meet people platonically as an adult. Sure, there's dating apps, but that's a whole other can of worms. Everyone seems to have formed their tribes already, and you don't have the endless opportunities that younger people do, like sports and music lessons, theatre, and so on, because you're already expected to excel at skills and pursue them professionally.

Even when it comes to interest groups, these sort of things are sparse. Unless you're at university, they're pretty rare. My main hobby, or what used to be it, has pretty much no traction where I live nor in the surrounding areas. It feels impossible to meet anyone unless you have preexisting connections that you can piggyback off of.

 

[TooConscious]

Friends come and go.
People generally aren't loyal, they will betray you.

 

[Squiddy]

Most if not all of my irl friends I've made have forgotten about me

 

[WonderingSoul]

Wow. I just wanted to say that was a really eye opening analogy for me because when I look back in my life, I barely had any real friends. So I'm grateful you posted this.

 

[summers]

Most of the friends I've made as an adult were people I worked with. Lately, almost all my new friends are gay or trans, as they typically don't have kids, and live the same materialistic, hedonistic lifestyle I do (not a blanket statement, just the circle I run in).

 

[Sleepdrifter]

This is very true sadly. The chance to make friends vanishes around 22-23, and by 25 you may lose every relationship, even most of your relatives. What's worse is that no one is honest about this. Our family moved around during my most essential years so any real chance to have friends was taken away. It's horrible.

 

[Angst Filled Fuck Up]

I always fell into relationships quite easily, going to the bar with my brother or meeting someone from online, but I could never form platonic friendships. So at 37 I have zero. After high school I pretty much ghosted all my old classmates and just wanted to be by myself. I liked being with a woman but beyond that, I never had any interest in people in real life. It made me uncomfortable, feeling like someone could just contact me for whatever reason. Having to maintain friendships always seemed like a drag and I still can't do it. As others have said, there's no opportunity for it anyway, at my age and being a neet.

 

[netrezven]

Having nice people around and having some fun together, i think it's not that hard. But i do wonder what value those relationships have. I wouldn't trust people that i simply go with on a party or something. Ya, having chat, sharing some basic stuff, it's not bad. It's just that outside of this party, nice chat bubble, i do see the stupit side of it, like no one actually cares for each other. That's how i feel in such relations. It's not necessary to be truth or the reality. But in such a company if someone is about to shot me, asking where i am, they gonna point me out without thinking twice for a second. I say that as a methaphor.
It might be rare, 2, 3 time a year, but i do feel on top of the world, when my real friends are around.
Also having a wife, kids, job, today's way of living makes it complete hell on men. Like you can't go out with friends, drink, smoke or flirt a little bit, cause you wife will be sad at you, cause she doens't know how to be happy, except for demanding stuff from the only person that falls for it - you. I know lots of people there, some times i'm there too, but i just go out :)