Not good enough friends that I’d feel comfortable calling out of the blue and asking if they’d like to go to the movies or dinner. On the other hand if they were to call me asking for assistance with something, I’d definitely offer my help. I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking for help from them though. Reading this, it does seem rather odd, doesn’t it?
My wife and I are both in the focus-on-each-other camp. It’s not something that came about intentionally but rather it just evolved that way. There’s just not a huge amount of time for me, outside my job, that I want to go find new people to hang out with, when I’ve got a wife at home. Such time as I have to be alone, I need. I don’t have enough, though I’ll have to make more when I start school in the fall. There, I’ll definitely be working on projects with other students–and it will almost all be online with people whom I never see IRL.
Which brings up another point, namely that some people are satisfied with the contact that the Internet provides. It may not be an ideal replacement, but message boards and the like provide many of the same opportunities for casual chitchat that one also finds in pubs and other places where people gather IRL.
My husband doesn’t need friends. He has one buddy and me, basically. I, on the other hand, like my friendship relationships. I don’t have as many as I used to, but I’ve become good friends with his sisters and his ex-wife is my best friend. I go out with the gals but I only have a couple that are really close. I don’t have to be in a super-tight relationship to call someone a friend.
This is a very strange question. No, I answer politely and make a little more small talk as appropriate, but that doesn’t make us friends, it doesn’t even make us friendly neighbors, it makes us polite neighbors.
You seem to have the idea that “no friends” is the equivalent of extreme misanthropy. I would define things differently myself. A friend, to me, is very different from a polite acquaintance.
In my own case I have my SO, and his friends. They seem to like me but if we broke up tomorrow I would probably never see them again (and wouldn’t mind all that much). There are one or two people at work I am very friendly with, but we never socialize outside of work so I wouldn’t call them friends either. In one case I would like to be better friends because I like him as a person, but we have next to nothing in common. I have a hard time finding people who interest me, who find me interesting, and who have space in their lives for someone like me. I’ve also realized I’m not very good at doing those thoughtful things for other people that tend to cement new relationships into friendships.
I once had someone whom I didn’t like very much tell me out of the blue that I was his best friend. I had to stop seeing him, the whole thing was too disagreeable. I’m not sure what that says about me, if anything.
I agree, but being polite is a stepping stone towards having friends, I was wondering if those who feel they have no friends try to avoid the possibility of getting friends by being impolite.
Now that is scary. Was the person who did this the sort of person who you would think has no friends. The social incompitent type who exudes negativity.
What I’m really getting at/trying to understand is those people who are socially capable and yet say they have no friends. If people really chose not to have friends, and go out of their way to avoid picking up friendships. Or if they just stick to one overriding friend (often an S.O.). If they just are indifferent to the whole idea of having friends. If they are affraid of the responsibilities that come from being someones friend. Or other reasons …
Dittos. I see friends as someone you are comfortable enough to call up and chat out of the blue. Haven’t had a friend since high school, by that definition. It’s not because of a lack of social skills… it’s just a lack of desire to get to that level of closeness with anyone. My ex was/is very good friends with his ex. She’d feel comfortable enough to wake him up in the middle of night to complain about a mouse problem. I can’t imagine being comfortable enough with anyone to do that, not even my Mom.
No, there were other people in his life (whether they were friends or not it would be up to them to say). I found him disagreeable, and maybe other people did too, but not because he was socially inept or actively negative.
To speak further on this, I consider myself to have no friends outside of my SO. I consider this to be a failing on my part, due to being too self-absorbed (to simplify greatly), but it is also something to which I am relatively indifferent. I get along with myself pretty well, and with other people pretty well, even if they don’t seek out my company much.
I have no friends. Through most of my life I’ve been an extreme loner, spending all my free time reading or watching TV and never feeling any need for human contact. I never even felt the first pangs of loneliness till I was 28; don’t know what caused it, but that was around the time my hairline began to recede.
Since then, from time to time I’ve developed what you might call friendships with people I met at work. (Always women; I’ve never felt comfortable around other males and have never been inclined to hang out with them.)
We’d go to a few movies together, hang out a few times, but invariably she’d just stop responding to my emails within a year or so and “fall off the face of the earth.” Every single time. I take this as meaning I’m quite boring – which I wouldn’t argue with – and not fun to be around. Eventually, I just gave up and stopped trying to develop casual acquaintanceships any further.
I’ve only ever had one romantic relationship, a long-distance one in late 2000 with a woman from Wisconsin, but we were just incompatible in important ways and broke up amicably in January.
I suspect I may have some form of autism or Asperger’s syndrome, but I’ve never been diagnosed with such.
I’ve accepted the fact that I’m just going to sit on the sidelines and observe as the years pass by. Still get lonely from time to time, though.
Yes Social Phobia is an illness that in exetreme cases can result in the sufferer losing the ability to form any sort of social relationships.
I had a classic best friend growing up. We had every class together from preschool to graduation day senior year of high school. If he didn’t feel like taking his girlfriend (now wife) out on a date in high school, he would call me to take her out for the night (loose lines drawn of course although some nudity wasn’t out of the question). We had threesomes and foursomes (no guy on guy stuff. I am straight thank you very much). He was also a bit of a psycho and helped me develop into some things that disturb me now. He was always the instigator and I was the follow through guy. He would come up with the crazy, dangerous, or illegal stuff and I would find a way to make it happen. I left my rural Louisiana home at 18 to be the only one in our high school graduating class to go to college. He stayed home to run his father’s business and making good money while becoming an alcoholic. I was at school studying my ass off (while becoming an alcoholic too) and we never spoke again until two years ago when I went to visit. It was nice and brief and that time is far gone now.
I have always been so particular about people it makes it very hard to be friends with males. Some of the few former male coworkers that I actually liked are members of this board now but we never speak IRL. Most guys bore me very much and I don’t want to be around them. The very last thing I want in a friend is to feel that I am propping them up in an overall way. No thanks. The hiking easier if you go up the mountain without someone on a tow line. The males that I am attracted to as males most likely would fit the profile of a serial killer quite well.
Most of my friends in the last few years have been female and it presents problems because I am married and most of them are married. My wife knows my track-record and wouldn’t mind if I took an attractive coworker to a nice dinner but I have experienced problems on other fronts in the past so you have to hide stuff even if you aren’t doing anything.
Friends are like gifts. If good ones come, be thankful. If you get crappy ones, just pass them off on someone else.
Sometimes they die. I’ve lost several friends that way. It happens more often as you get older.
I have friends now but about 6-10 years ago I had none. At the time though I was seriously mentally ill and didn’t know it and felt I couldn’t relate to people and had alot of shame.
I’ve always been a loner though, so I can function fine w/o friends but I always have a few people I can converse with or choose to go out with nowadays. Alot of people like having me as a friend, so its not hard for me to form friendships. But at the end of the day I am my own best entertainment, best emotional support and I enjoy my own company more than anyone else I’ve ever met has come close to being able to do for me.
I have acquired some friends in the past few years, rather unintentionally. They are the best kind of friends–I can completely neglect them for months and then one of us will call or IM the other and we will talk for a while; whatever. They are smart and interesting, and, best of all, out of town.
I have no desire to have friends I must maintain on a weekly/monthly basis. I have plenty of family and get plenty of social interaction through them. I considered everyone I worked with at my last job friends, but wasn’t crazy about the idea of doing a whole lot outside of work with them.
My husband has about 10 really good friends that he has had since he was a little boy. The thought of that exausts me. Frankly, this message board pretty much fufills my social needs, though I have good social skills IRL.
Outside of my brother, I have no friends. I’ve been diagnosed with Asberger’s; I don’t really get people very well, especially in person. Plus, strangers make my skin crawl; I’m usually more interested in getting away from them, not making friends.
Fortunately, I like being alone.
I don’t really have friends either - outside a few family members who live far away. Where I live, I have no people whom I could call out of the blue or socialise with, like going to the cinema or something. But it seems you are looking for people who actively avoid other people, and I don’t. I’m not shy about talking to/with people, but somehow I never seem to get it quite right. I’ve been told by others that I appear aloof and a bit eccentric, but I’m not really sure what I do wrong, because I try to be friendly and welcoming. Feels like I’m a bit out of sync with most people and that it puts them off. I have no idea what to do about it though, except for keep trying. Thankfully I enjoy my own company and I’m rarely bored. I always seem to have some project or interest going, and there’s the Internet too.
I went through a period in adolescence where I had no friends. I know a lot of teens think they’re outcasts, but in my case it was true; it was the result of a very unfriendly social atmosphere that started when I was in grade school and worsened over the years, combined with a very screwy family situation. I got up, I went to school, I came home, I ate dinner, I went to bed. Seriously.
It wasn’t until we got actual internet access when I was in my late teens that I started to be able to forge relationships with other people. It was very frustrating before that, especially as some of the people were geographically very close, but me being too young to drive and my mother being exceedingly paranoid (we weren’t allowed to so much as sit in the front yard when we were growing up – never mind walk half a block to the house of someone we knew from school) meant I had no opportunity to talk to anyone outside of school, and school was my least favorite place in the world at the time. Having no friends was my choice, but it was a case of choosing the lesser of two evils.
I also got a lot of odd messages about people and how you’re supposed to behave towards people who were trying to make friends that it took me a long time to shake when I moved out for college. It took me years to realize that always refusing any polite offers of food or drink when invited over to someone’s house was actually very odd; my parents complained incessantly about my sister’s best friend eating them out of house and home every time she came over, and I internalized it. So, not having friends is sometimes a matter of never really knowing how to make them.
I consider myself to have quite a number of friends now, including a lot of people I’ve ‘met’ over the Internet, whom I have never actually seen in person or heard on the phone, but whom I have known or known of for long enough that I wouldn’t hesitate to meet them for dinner or drinks, all by myself, if they happened to be in my town. Money isn’t generally brought up in these friendships (since everyone is pretty aware that I haven’t got any 
) but the hardest thing I ever had to learn to do is ask for help when I’m having a hard time, and my real friends are the people I can call or IM and tell them when I need company.
I’ve always called myself a “sociable loner” in that I like having friends to visit/do things with, but I also have a large loner streak where, if I didn’t seem them for awhile, it wouldn’t bother me very much. My relationship with my two best friends from college is a good example. Plus there’s also the 40 miles between us which makes any day-to-day kaffeklatching impossible.
I’ve always had a difficult time maintaining friendships. A lot used to have to do with my work schedule (I did overnights for 10+ years), which made any type of socializing nearly impossible. After awhile I gave up because I rationalized what was the use of even trying to make friends if I’m never around?
These days my work schedule is a bit more manageable (Present Employer doesn’t have overnight bakers), so if I wanted to to make friends, I now have the time. Problem is, everybody has either moved or had kids or whatever. I’ve got a lot of acquaintances (coworkers, etc.), but no real nearby friends except for my husband. And we’re 24/7 caretakers for my mother. Oh well.
Here is my theory:
Most of your close friends you make during childhood up to until you graduate high school. These are your “friends from back home”. These are the folks you are friends with even though you don’t see each other for ten years.
After graduating high school, everyone goes their separate ways - college, work, military, etc. People either stay local and maintain their high school friendships or go off to college where they will make completely new friends. There is a transition period where you come back and see the old gang but generally by senior year you have your “college friends” and maybe a group of close friends from high school you still keep in touch with.
And that’s pretty much it IMHO. People make “work friends” and I suppose they can become close if you work at a place for years and years. But for the most part those friendships tend to be more transitory (in a Gross Point Blank kind of way). People who have a lot of college and HS friends they still keep in touch with somehow seem more grounded. Then again, a lot of those people might still be in touch because they all went to community college together and now live in their home town as plumbers and policemen and teachers and such. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s kind of a limited life experience.
I actually did work with Shagnasty, which I hope doesn’t make me a serial killer. He actually is fairly normal IRL.
I disagree with this. I had no friends in HS outside of one girl who I ate lunch with (who wasn’t allowed to “go out and play” outside of school due to a fucked up homelife), and no friends in college outside of my ex-SO (who I am not really in contact with anymore); I didn’t really make non-Internet friends with my own interests until I ran away to the city. And these aren’t work friends, either. Sometimes I feel a little disconnected as I don’t have much of a history with my friends having only known them for a year, but history can be made as much as it can be relived.
I don’t know why I’m posting except to say that even if you didn’t form the so-called “important social bonds” in HS or college, that doesn’t mean that you are doomed to be friendless for life. I find that to be a defeatist attitude.
I can see how that can happen. I have friends, but very few live near me, which can be difficult and sometimes makes me feel like I have no friends.
In my case, it’s a bit of what msmith537 mentioned. I have a good friend from high school and a large group of close college friends, but they’re scattered all around the country. Work friendships have tended to be transitory. When I lived in NYC, I made a fair number of friends (many from the SDMB, in fact). However, since I’ve moved to Florida, it’s been harder to make friends. I think it’s partly a function of being a bit older – so many people my age are already either married or parents or both and have their own agendas – and partly due to this area just being less conducive to socializing.
So my “other reason” would be moving to a less social place in my early 30s, where/when fewer people are looking to make new friends.