Activities - theater, speech, choir, band. You have to work together outside of school hours for most of these and they should have plenty of both girls and guys. As you work on a play or go to a speech meet with people, you can’t help but get to know them and often become friends. At least that’s how it was for me.
So, there’s potential friends when you play tennis. And you’re around potential friends at orchestra. And there’s classmates.
Any kind of activity that you can do in a group or join a club is excellent.
Most of the young ladies that I met when going to high school and university came as a result of my playing Bridge and joining some bridge clubs. Very inexpensive. A lot of fun and a great way to meet all kinds of people (including girls). It was one of the best things I ever did while I was in school.
Tennis takes a lot of energy and you usually play with one person at a time. But with bridge, you can meet many, many people in a very short period of time.
Any other similar activities are a great way to meet girls - like dance clubs, outdoor clubs, in fact, just look up the various kinds of clubs available to you in your high school and university or college or wherever you will go after high school.
P.S. I would avoid any activities that involve sitting by yourself at a computer and playing a game or doing something similar for hours at a time. That won’t help you meet girls hardly at all.
Yes, as has been said by many posters here, you need to stop thinking in terms of “getting a girlfriend” and “dating” and instead concentrate on (1) making yourself interesting and attractive, and (2) getting to know other people, including girls.
Believe me, I know what your hormones are doing to you and your body is screaming out for sexual contact. But the problem is that you have only that urge and basically a fictional idea of what a girl or a woman or a girlfriend is as a human being in the context of a human relationship.
Get to know girls as people first, understand human relationships in general first, and then you’ll start to understand romantic relationships.
Good ideas. I will ask around at school about clubs and stuff like that and tell my parents about how I want to be more social and make more friends.
I will also continue to do what I am doing daily in school. Approaching girls in the halls, sitting at new tables, etc.
I was also considering maybe getting a job. Some on said that will help me learn how to talk to people (including girls) in a work setting. It will also help in saving up for college and/or in case I get a date.
This will also help to open my parents’eyes and understand that I am growing up and am not going to always be their “little boy”, so talking to them about dating won’t seem like such a big deal because they will think “Hey, he is a social guy, he is working a job, making his own money…why not?” So essentially, this is slowly gaining more freedom and independence.
So yeah, I will start with that. The one thing I don’t understand is how people “hang out” and how I should go about asking to leave the house alone to hang out (I do have a nice street bike so I will just use that for transportation for now).
And yay my new phone automatically does contractions.
You really don’t need to think about talking to your parents about dating. That’s seriously not something that has to happen, not as an “event,” anyway.
I don’t mean now…I meant more like if in the future I get a date. But for now, like you suggested, I will not focus on “dating” specifically and instead for a while, focus on being more social in general and talking to girls as people.
The plot is thickening. I’m beginning to find your home life less quirky and more alarming, but it could be worse- your friend isn’t allowed to hang out at all?
More positively, it doesn’t look like you have to search too hard to follow the advice you’re getting here. You’re partway there already.
For example:
You’re in the school orchestra, right? If so, stay with it, and if your last couple years of HS orchestra are anything like my HS band experience, you will have happy memories indeed. Lots of potential good friends are there with you, working on the same music and sharing the same experience. I imagine there are some great girls there as well. I can’t imagine you could function in orchestra without communicating with your comrades, and becoming acquainted by osmosis, so just continue to be social and sociable. Take all your opportunities to do that, without nervously/anxiously making it a project.
You will learn how to hang out by doing it, and who better to do it with than these folks?
Since you play violin, you would benefit from listening to all the great songs that have beautiful violin parts, or lines for other strings/keyboards/etc. that a violin can mimic. Also, you already know where the notes are on a mandolin, though you would still need to learn chords and strumming. There are a variety of models and styles (and prices) available. Your first instrument is usually the most difficult to learn. Hell, guitars are string instruments!
Musical skill is very attractive. Don’t hold me to this, but I am tempted to start recommending a long list of music to you. To start, watch the video for REM’s “Losing My Religion.”
Doesn’t all this make a bit more sense than talking to people more or less at random? That’s a good skill too, and others have mentioned it’s good to avoid too much tribalism, but when you already have things in common, it’s a lot smoother.
I will tell you guys something. The biggest problem I seem to have is not having anything to talk about. And to be honest, this is not only a problem I have with girls, but everyone except my friends and family that I know well enough.
If I just had stuff to talk about it would make it so much better.
If you are developing interests and skills you might have stuff to talk about.
Go out and do something that WILL give you something to talk about!
You must care about something: the environment, the needy, stray animals, whales, chess, music, tennis! Just get into it.
Now is the time of your life that you should be trying out as many things as possible. Take up an instrument, learn another language, maybe someplace you’d one day like to visit? Chase the next adventure that presents itself, no matter how small. Go everywhere, taste everything. Stretch yourself, challenge yourself. Undertake something you’re not sure you can master.
Get out of your head, and into the world. You cannot learn to swim from a book, sooner or latter you have to leap, from the safe secure land into the water. If you want to excel at living life, you need to stop thinking about it and begin taking baby steps toward actually getting out there and living it!
This is in part because you’ve got low self esteem and you feel pressure to come up with something “interesting” to say or else it’s not worth saying. You don’t think your normal opinions are good enough. Either consciously or subconsciously, you’re censoring yourself because you’re afraid that if you just say whatever comes to mind it’ll be ridiculed.
Maybe it’s with good reason. Maybe you don’t have anything to say. Maybe it’s better to be ignored passively than dismissed actively.
Again, these are things that you have to work at yourself on a daily basis. The advice isn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff. Read some books. Join a club. Play a sport. You should at least know what to do intellectually without so much effort from the SDMB collectively. The real obstacle is going out and doing it.
We could describe to you the mechanics of riding a bike a thousand pages over but the only way you’re ever going to ride that bike is if you go out and ride that bike.
I do think it’s sad that you’re not having any fun. Very sad. I think if you said it to your parents that you’re depressed about:
- not having any friends
- no girls want to talk to you - even on a non-romantic level
- not having any social interactions whatsoever
- the prospects of college and if you’ll ever normalize
- having your development stunted by not driving
- and that all these worries are interfering with your schoolwork
they might reconsider their parenting style in a big way.
Or they might just tell you to stop reading the dope as we’re poisoning your mind.
Yeah, I am going to tell my parents about how I am getting bored by not having any friends and want to be more social. So the first step I am going to take is enroll in some clubs and tell my parents about it.
Eventually, I also want to be able to hang out and leave the house independently which is something I will talk about my parents after I have successfully done the the first thing, which is get involved in some after school clubs and volunteering.
And I will definitely bring up the driving issue when it seems fit and when it comes time to talk about college, I will tell them that it’s silly of them to expect me to be coming home every 1-2 weeks (okay I won’t say exactly that, but you get the idea) and that I want to move out for college. But these are things that I shouldn’t be worrying about too much yet, but it’s something that will definitely be on my radar.
Hopefully doing these things (the first one) will give me stuff to talk about. And you’re right - I should read a little more. I hardly read and it’s probably part of the reason I am having problems socially.
I think the other problem is I don’t follow pop culture at *all. *I don’t know anything about celebrities, movies, or even the music (I only really listen to Indian music) here. Okay, well I know a little bit about the music because there was a time where I used to listen to a lot of modern American music and used to play that singing game a few years back. But I am out of touch with that too now. I don’t know - pop culture does not interest me at all, and I don’t watch movies or TV or listen to music here at all. Watching sports is completely out of my interest.
The above, I think, is probably the most detrimental to my social skills as it’s probably the most contributing factor to me know having anything to talk about. But the problem is that none of it really interests me so I am not motivated to start following pop culture, except maybe watching movies. I could start with that because I like watching movies.
EDIT: Wow. So now you see how out of touch I am with everything. No wonder I am so alienated. It’s like I almost don’t even exist in this world.
You know what, you don’t have to be interested in celebrities or pop music or television or movies. But you have to be interested in something. You study violin and play in the orchestra. Do you like that? Are you interested in orchestral music?
I please want to stress that I think it’s a bad idea to try to set up a showdown with your parents either over driving or having to visit frequently when you’re in college. You’re just going to build up resistance on their part. When it comes to college, let it just be a fait accompli. The first few weekends, there will be too many activities for orientation and such—you won’t be able to come home, etc. It’s three years away. Don’t make it into a big showdown now.
In most cultures you would already be married.
Wow. Is that really true?
Yep, especially before 1900.
Check this old folk song:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trees_They_Grow_So_High_%28folk_song%29
Look at modern (after 1850) life expectancy, and remember that is was much less for most of human history:
http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US39-01.html
People married and had kids very young in the old days.
Yes and no. That perception is exaggerated. I mean, look at the second example on this list of common misconceptions. High infant (and maternal) mortality skews life expectancies very low. All the senators in Ancient Rome were in their fifties and sixties. The average age of first marriage has risen and fallen over different times and places, and for men it was often several years later than for women.
Yes, but it is nonetheless true that most people did not live past 35 until fairly modern times, unless they were kings. A visit to an old cemetery with old gravestones will show you. many died at 3, 5, 10, 22.