2.5M men 'have no close friends'(telegraph.co.uk) |
2.5M men 'have no close friends'(telegraph.co.uk) |
For the most part I've made peace with loneliness and being by myself to the point that it's not crushing, but the emptiness of not having anyone close is always there. I think the problem - or at least my problem - isn't necessarily a lack of basic social or people skills, but an inability to escalate from casual acquaintance to close friend.
Sorry for the stream of consciousness post. I guess I just wanted to say that I relate to this article, and I don't know how to fix myself.
Looking at facebook and seeing people with hundreds of so-called friends will give the wrong impression. Of those hundreds, nearly all will have no interest in the ups or downs of life. A "like" to some bullshit picture of your dinner or of drunken vomiting on your SUV hood is not friendship, but for lots of people, they think it is.
I've been acquainted with hundreds of people, even being close and going out to bat for them. But, with literally 2 or 3 exceptions, not one person has ever stuck around and shown what I'd call true friendship. As soon as things got tough and I could have done with some support, they were gone - stopped answering phone calls or emails, type of gone. Talk about being kicked when down.
But, looking around, I saw that this was not me being singled out for shitty treatment. It was actually pretty common and even normal. And it makes it really difficult for people going through tough times; I've known people who were plunged into despair and depression at being abandoned and even shunned by people they trusted.
Despite it not being trendy (or, nowadays, politically correct), find out if there is a local church (or whatever equivalent matches your background) that seems sensible (shop around and avoid fringe extremes!) and has some social events. You may not find people who will become lifelong friends (almost certainly not) and you may even disagree with their views on many things, but if you shop around, you should find somewhere you at least feel welcomed and supported in a way that you appear to need just now.
I don't think you need fixed. A little bit more life experience and perspective that you're not so different after all will help.
Currently I have a pretty active social life - I rarely eat alone, I have a wide circle of friends and date fairly actively (I am still single though :/). I think the best way to break out is to make a habit of trying to do things you haven't done before. Whether it's some athletic pursuit (tennis, rock climbing, etc.) or maybe getting involved in your community (volunteering, religious groups), modern society offers plenty of venues for meeting people. You say you're in college so for you it might be as simple as joining a club.
Now even though I have ample opportunity to be around other people, I still choose to be alone some times. After a day spent with a group I usually need an hour or so alone to "recharge" - I guess I'm just naturally introverted.
Finally, allow me quote the following poem by Walt Whitman.
To You.
STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me,
why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?I've identified that one of the characteristic of women interacting is a asking questions in an unprompted sort of way. Something I consider to be "prying", and yet it opens up other conversations which deepen the relationship.
My current position is that I was never exposed to good role models for building relationships with other men, and childhood homophobic sorts of taunts actually sensitized me to a notion of being "too close" to someone. While my wife has no trouble at all saying "love you" to her friends, my early programming makes that really hard for me with my male friends.
The process of building friendships is a process of developing trust and vulnerability, something which is hard to do outside of shared life threatening experiences. At some level in my younger days I always felt I was in competition with the other men around me. How do you make yourself vulnerable to your competitor? You don't of course. To get past that I've had to reassess a really large chunk of the structure in my brain about evaluating my own success and understanding whether or not I was under or over performing on my internal metrics of success.
Bottom line for me is that unpacking all the threads that were hindering my ability to make close friendships walked me back to kindergarten. That is a lot of unpacking to do :-)