You've made a friend or two in the last 35 years, right?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I’ve been meditating on my brother, with whom I’m … not close. (I’m not not speaking to him, is the best way to describe the relationship.)

He’s going through some stuff, and I’m somewhat concerned about him, but I’m not going to suddenly feign a closeness to him that he’s given zero indication of wanting from me. His marriage of 20 years is not what it could be (I’ll be surprised if his wife sticks around indefinitely), and I’m thinking about where his emotional support will come from. His friends, I guess. He has two, both of whom he’s known since college. From which he graduated in 1971. AFAIK, he hasn’t made any real friends since.

That’s weird, right? In addition to being extremely sad?

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twickster, I presume you meant to post this in MPSIMS rather than Cafe Society…

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I just lost a roommate who sounds vaguely like your brother. He was basically a selfish, and self-absorbed misanthrobe with obsessive compulsive personality traits (hoarding and cleaning, respectively) who went to work to a job he barely tolerated and came home everyday by 6p.m. and that’s it. No wife. (Anymore.) No girlfriend. (In years.) No friends. (Except my father.) No hobbies. (Except cursing out other drivers.) No recreational activities. (Watching sports in his room alone.) Does not socialize. (Awkwardly.) Oh, he can come off nice at first, as he’s a nice-looking older man; he can be thoughtful and well-informed. But after awhile his basic contempt for other people, his tendency towards being judgmental, his germophobia, his annoying ass ritualized cleaning habits and territorial tendencies kick in and he does his level best to piss people off. He’s gotten markedly worse in the last ten years I’ve known him and I shudder to think what he’ll be like in another ten. My sister, who’s studying to be a psychologist, thinks he’s “weird.” He has two grown daughters I’ve never met as it appears to me they do not include him in their lives at all.

Hopefully your brother’s not this bad, twickster. It’s nice you’re concerned. Shows real filal loyalty. Unless he’s trying to change his ways and includes you in his life, you’re better off being an infrequent, polite and distant pillar of support. Otherwise he could suck you dry as he’s probably too old to change.

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:smack:

Sorry about that, Dex!

5

Of course! All my friends have been made less than 35 years ago!

The fact that I am younger than 35 just might be a factor . . .

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I haven’t made any lasting friendships in the last 13 years. I’ve made friends, in person and online, but they haven’t lasted for one reason or another. I wish I had more friends than I do but I’m not staying up nights worrying about it. Nor do I think it’s particularly sad. To paraphrase Roseanne, I consider myself a pretty good judge of people, which is why I don’t like many of them.

Bookmark this thread and ask me again in 22 years and let’s see if anything’s changed.

7

I can see how this could happen–hell, my mom is this way (though, to be fair, she’s got a couple of best friends in my sister and me).

It’s not necessarily weird. Some people aren’t really that social, and don’t make friends easily. Some people just don’t make friends at work, but have solitary hobbies, and therefore don’t make friends. Others depend solely on their SO as their best friend and constant companion. Sometimes, I think that if I didn’t game, I’d be in much the same situation as my mom; I’m painfully shy, and it’s very hard for me to make friends. The temptation to just depend on my husband for everything social-wise was pretty great when I first moved in with him. . .but you can’t really play Dungeons & Dragons with just two people. (Fortunately, through a thread on these boards, I met the bestest gamers in the whole world, so it worked out :slight_smile: ).

Also, if you’re not close to your brother, he might have friends that you don’t know about. Not everyone mentions their friends constantly.

If he doesn’t, though. . .hopefully, he’ll cope. But if he’s a solitary person, he might be okay with having few or no friends.

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Yes, I have. Just this last month, in fact. Yes, in real life, not on a message board. Also, some of my Doper friends have become real life friends. Having moved around a lot as a child, I never found it hard to make friends. Keeping them is another issue. The really close ones I no longer live near have all remained as my friends (and vice versa), but some others have fallen thru the cracks of time and distance and changing values and life stufff.

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Yep, that’s a pretty said story. The most antisocial person I knew was my first college roommate. I’ve mentioned her on this board before. She was germphobic and had OCD too. It was very odd… I could set, say, a book or a can of soda on her desk, and take it off a few seconds later with no apparent marks or droplets, and she could tell that I had put something on her desk. It was weird.

She also had some kind of binge eating disorder. I never saw a person eat as much as she did, nor did I ever see someone gain weight as fast as she did. It -seemed- like she gained 100 pounds, though probably closer to 50. She outgrew her clothes several times over in the first trimester to the point where the only thing that fit her was a single set of sweats. I learned to lock up all my food. She also never attended class… sleeping in all day long.

That poor girl was screwed up. She got kicked out for browsing through my stuff, finding my checkbook, and signing/cashing $500 worth checks to herself forging my name.

Like icing on top of the cake, after she got kicked out, she tried to have me and my other roommate arrested. For what, you ask? Well, she had put very bitch-centric bumper stickers all over the entrance door to our dorm, so the first thing my roommate and I did was to remove them. She tried to have us arrested for resultant theft. The policeman tried to read our Miranda rights and we raised such a big stink that he kinda said “never mind” and slunk away.

There ya go, a twofer: most antisocial person that dre2xl knew of, and dre2xl’s closest-thing-to-an-arrest-story.

10

Just last weekend I was talking with my mom, and told her that if anything ever happens to her I think my brother might become suicidal.

My brother is 33. He works as an airport security screener, and volunteers at the local fire department as an EMT. He has a 2-year degree (barely), and last fall he started working on his bachelor’s (then he took the spring semester off, but says he’ll be taking a class again this fall). And he has no friends. None. Except our parents. I’m not even his friend: he and I have always been very different, with little in common, and we don’t get along very well for extended periods. Sometimes I could swear we even grew up in different households, though we’re only 19 months apart in age. As a result we are not close at all, and usually I only see him on holidays/birthdays.

He hasn’t had a friend since grade school. He’s never been on a date, and neither my parents nor I are even 100% sure of his sexual orientation (and our dad is gay, so he could easily come out if needed). When our folks divorced he started seeing a therapist, who discovered that my then-13-year-old bro was suicidal – though he never made any attempts, as far as I know. Therapy continued through high school, and I believe that he is at least somewhat clinically anti-social. He talks to himself (in the crazy way, not in the way that we all do), his personal hygeine is very poor, his social skills are hit-and-miss, and he has never expressed any wish that things could be different.

The people at the airport and fire station tolerate him, because he’s not a bad guy and I guess he’s competent, but he is not an achiever and I think he gets little respect. To my knowledge he has never been promoted. He tried the Army once and was discharged during basic training, he has applied to every police force in a 20-mile radius and been rejected, and being an EMT is the closest he will ever get to being a firefighter. He has taken a lot of abuse and teasing over the years, including being thrown into a river when he was about 11 – and couldn’t swim. Nothing quite like coming home from school to find the police in your living room because your little brother almost drowned. These are just some of the stories.

He spends some time with Dad, but most of his time with Mom at her house. She’s still young (58), but she has a lot of health problems and it’s not inconceivable to think that she might die before she’s 70. Whenever it happens, if my father is still alive he and I will have to keep a close eye on my brother for a while.

(Wow, this is longer than I meant for it to be: sorry! I almost posted something similar in the “who really doesn’t have any friends” thread, but couldn’t get my thoughts together. They probably still aren’t together, but oh well.)

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I am just thinking aloud here, but wondering if this would be a chance to try a social experiment. Perhaps trying to get some of these people on the internet in something similar to SDMB (but, uh, not necessarily here).

My personal theory is that the internet has enabled many people to develop social skills in communicating that they might not normally have the opportunity to develop. One can ponder before replying, take your time in responding, re-read what was said or asked, and over time, learn the basics of interacting with strangers and creating friendships, of sorts, at least over the internet.

Many people are isolated, some geographically, some emotionally, and the internet seems like a perfect solution to this isolation, as well as a psychological lifeline for expressing fears and hopes.

Perhaps introducing some of these people to an appropriate on-line chat site might be a start in helping them develop some interactive social skills.

Just a thought.

12

In my brother’s defense, he’s not quite as dysfunctional as some of the other people described here, though he ain’t exactly a model of mental health, either. I guess I feel kind of “there but for the grace of god” about him. My parents had their problems, and some of them were genetically linked (both alcoholic, my mother also bipolar) – my brother and I both got the alcoholism gene; I got sober 20 years ago, he still drinks, though not a lot. I got the screwy brain biochemistry, and have been on antidepressants for several years; he did also, but a more extreme version, which he’s chosen to deal with by throwing more and more chemicals at it. (Which may be the source of some of the weirdness in his life right now.) My sister got neither the alcoholism thing nor the brain biochemistry thing; she was also the first of the three of us to do some therapy about the fallout of growing up in the household we did. She’s definitely the most “normal” of the three of us. I wouldn’t call myself terribly “normal” in any kind of bell-curve sense; but I’m reasonably well-adjusted and I actually do have friends. Several. Some of them quite good friends. No, really.

And what got me thinking about this, is, although I can do the hermit thing, and I’m never going to be super life-of-the-party outgoing, I’ve managed to acquire some social skills along the way, and I do manage to both keep old friends (I have a few from college, 30 years ago) and make new ones (most of my current social life revolves around people I’ve met over the last two or three years). And, in general, people who meet me think I’m “nice.”

I dunno. Not sure why I posted this. I’d just emailed my brother (just can’t freakin’ bring myself to call him) to say “Hi, thinking about you, hoping all is well,” to which his reply, in its entirety, was “OK but not great. Details are complicated – stay tuned. much love.”

Um, okay.

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Can you get back to being on better terms with your Brother? You haven’t given the reason for your current almost-hostility but maybe it’s about something so long ago that it can change. You mentioned his use of chemicals, do you mean illegal bad drugs like coke or heroin or just milder drugs, or just overusing prescription drugs from his doctor.
Is there something you can do together with him that wouldn’t be too stressful, and would allow you to get a better picture of his situation. Maybe he wants his marriage to work, maybe he really wants to split, maybe something else is interfering with his marriage?

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But actually, that’s vastly more response than you’d get from some people. And it basically invites a follow-up. By the way, does he have kids? I ask because a) they’re a substitute for friends, and b) they at least provide one reason (possibly) to stay in touch with your brother.

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Yikes, Bippy, that’s a huge can of worms. It’s not a matter of hostility on my part – more like exhaustion. Or acceptance. For many years I did think I wanted to be closer to him, and felt very hurt by his total preference for my sister over me – now it’s like, oh, thank god that emotional black hole isn’t pointed in my direction.

I don’t know exactly what I want here. I guess I want him to be less fucked up – or at least see some evidence that he’s doing something about his problems besides throwing chemicals at them. (And by chemicals, I mean doctor-prescribed chemicals – but a frightening mix of them, including thorazine, etc.) Apparently he’s finally seeing a therapist (not just a med-prescribing internist), and apparently he and his wife have been seeing a marriage counselor since last summer –

I dunno. It’s just so sad and bleak, and what I feel bad about is that I have zero interest in getting involved with his shit – it’s just way too late. I’m 51, he’s 57, we haven’t lived in the same house since 1963 (he went to boarding school starting in 9th grade). He thinks I’m a flake, I think he’s an asshole. A sad asshole, a pitiable asshole, but an asshole nonetheless. At some point you have to take responsibility for your life, yanno?

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Yes, he has a daughter (who will be off to college – in the Philly area, actually [they live in DC] – come fall) and a son who’s now 14. And who has all kinds of social adjustment problems of his own, astonishingly enough. (The super-bright need more social skills than “normal” people, not fewer!)

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Sorry, twicks! I wasn’t trying to compare brothers at all: I just meant to sympathize with your concern about his emotional support, but I started explaining why and it went all kerflooey. :slight_smile:

18

True, that. Well, still, if he’s an asshole, don’t fret yourself, that’s my advice. Don’t cut him off completely, but I agree that he probably represents a lot more complication than is healthy to deal with. And if he’s as described, it’s not so crazy that’s he’s made no friends. Seems pretty unsurprising, in fact.

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No offense taken. I can tell you know exactly what it means to kind of worry about your brother, but to lack the emotional connection with him to really, really care. Sucks, don’t it?

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There are two kinds of family: The one you are born into and the one you make.