TL;DR I have no close friends, my boyfriend has a lot, and I'm worried people will think I'm a weirdo.
Kind of an embarrassing post to write as I'm well aware of the stigma against people with "no friends". I had a normal group of friends through high school but I sort of lost touch with them over the years. I've always had trouble forming close bonds with people, so my friendships were mostly surface-level, and if I'm completely honest, a lot of them existed so I wouldn't be known as someone with no friends. Someone without a friend group was an easy target to be picked off by other kids, and I wasn't going to let that happen to me.
Because my friendships were more shallow and I had trouble relating to people, I don't keep in touch with many of them anymore. I had a group of friends in univeristy too but everyone moved away after graduation and, again, no close bonds with any one person meant I just drifted off on my own. I've had a significant other of some sort for most of this time so I didn't really feel the lack of close personal friends. I prefer to do a lot of solitary activities in my free time because I'm an introvert where being around others drains me of energy rather than fills me with it.
Now I'm almost 30 and I have zero close friends. Unusually, I'm definitely not a shut-in. I take part in a decent number of social clubs and activities where I seem to be well liked. I get along with my coworkers and take part in some outside-work activities with them from time to time, but like the clubs above, nothing translates into a general friendship. I feel like there's something lacking or wrong with me in that I just don't have the skills to connect with people the way others do. I'm always quick to help out if someone is in need, I'm a good listener, I think I'm alright at conversation since people seem to seek me out for it in my clubs and so on.
I've been aware of having no friends for a while and periodically feel a bit pathetic about it, but it's really noticible now that I'm dating someone with a wide circle of friends - some of them all the way from childhood. I've met pretty much all his friends and seem to get along with them well on a surface level, but I feel embarrassed that there's no one from "my side" for him to meet. I worry about if I ever get married because I don't have anyone except my family who would come for me (and then people will know for sure I have no friends). The weirdest part is that I don't really have a desire to have friends for their own sake; I just feel like as a human being I'm supposed to have them. Is it normal to have no friends? Is there any way to mitigate people thinking I'm weird because I don't have any?
Submitted November 27, 2018 at 10:59AM by SorryLettuce https://ift.tt/2SioC6G
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