Tealeaf said:
Am I the only one who notices this? Making friends in high school wasn't easy, but it seemed like everyone wanted them. Everyone wanted people to spend weekends with, to go out with, to talk to on the phone or see face to face over a good meal. No one had "too many friends" or "not enough time".
Now I'm almost 30 and I'm left scratching my head. I've tried the workplace, I've tried volunteer work, and I've tried online services. Work and volunteer settings have nice people but they're mostly 20+ years older than me and quite busy, both with work and with family. Online I only get contacted by single, heterosexual men wanting something else - oftentimes from other continents.
If so many people in the world deal with loneliness, as articles and studies keep suggesting, why do so few seek actual, physical friends? I live just outside of a big city. Where are all the lonely introverts who just want a nice cup of coffee and some chat?
This is exactly how I feel it is, in your teens everyone makes the friends they will take with them into their adult lives, they get the social skills needed to make and maintain fiends, and then the circle tightens and closes off, they are not open to making new friends. They can be good company for an evening at all types off events and you might even become a FB friend (ugh), but it's hard to go further than that.
It seems to me the mid 20's to probably late mid 40's are a virtual wasteland when it comes to making friends, only after that age will people start to open up to new people in their lives, when they themselves are faced with possible breaks in their circle caused by deaths.
Having spend my teens in depression I made no friends, starting work at 24 and now almost 10 years there, I have great colleagues, we had work dinner nights, I went to a sports event with one that had a spare ticket. But it's not really a close friendship like you'd have with someone that comes over for drinks, a movie, a BBQ or just to hang.
The problem with those that are looking for friends is 2 fold, first they need to find each other, I've made great friends here on ALL, but they are scattered all over the place, I wish I could just hang with them irl like I sometimes do online. second is a universal one, that they need to have a click, as we all noticed, lost of lonely people here, but you won't relate to or like all of them, so this further lowers the chances of people finding one another.
That's my take on it anyway
Tealeaf said:
It's deeply depressing. I spent several years improving myself, improving my life, all while telling myself and being told that if I got better I could just make new friends. And now it's too late. I missed my chance and all I have to show for those years of hard work is that I feel okay while sitting alone at my PC night after night instead of self-loathing and mildly suicidal.
I work, I volunteer, I reach out, and it's still not enough.
The same is true for me, you go through life doing all the things that are expected of a well rounded individual thinking that things will just "happen" if you keep bettering yourself, get a job, get an education, buy a home, work out to look good (or better at least), and you end up feeling good about who you are, how you look and what you do, but nothing "happens".
I used to do this thing where I said to myself at 15 "if I'm not happy at 20, I'll end it", then at 20 the message stayed the same but it got pushed back 5 years, same thing at 25 and again at 30. Things kept going better all the time, I now feel better about myself then I ever did and don't think I'll have a repeat of that at 35, so at the very least I got that for all my work.
I've been putting myself out there for years, if only things just started to "happen" for me.