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Intentionally making close friends

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Re: Intentionally making close friends

#161

Post by mrcrumb1 »

tinglymintyfrsh wrote: post #89

Disclaimer: no unsolicited advice please. I'm old(er) mid-40's, single, no kids, and never married. I don't have much family or close friends. Hookup culture is de rigueur but it doesn't interest me. Where I'm at, there isn't a context to meet people and most random people in public around keep to themselves and treat me like I'm invisible. I do volunteering but that also doesn't go anywhere. If you have to constantl…

This line of thinking seems pretty prevalent but the way I see it, there's no such thing as carrying the relationship. If you're the one with the social need, the onus is on you to get that need filled. This generally means doing more work than others but it's not on behalf of them. It would be nice if other people filled our needs for us, but that's generally just wishful thinking.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#162

Post by rchaud »

tasuki wrote: post #149
giantg2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This really doesn't ring true outside of school/university years." I agree. At this point in life, I just want people to leave me alone. It seems like there isn't any time to make friends anyways.

Quoted post unavailable.

> it's just a matter of priorities.

by that metric, most people's lives are nothing but failure. Everybody has a human need for companionship and to feel like they belong. That's hard to accomplish when juxtaposed against an economic system pushes people to work first and live second.

BTW Bezos is about as poor an example as you could pick. He absolutely has more free time than I do, unless by some miracle he cooks, cleans and drives himself everywhere. "Free time" here means he can choose the exact parameters of how to spend his day and not worry about paying the mortgage or tuition ̶o̶r̶ ̶r̶i̶s̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶r̶r̶i̶a̶g̶e̶.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#163

Post by cycomanic »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #129
bgroat wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say that you're wrong, because everyone's environment/experience is different. But this is so outside my perception of the world and that of everyone I've ever spoken to (across a swatch of demographics across North America and Europe). Friendship groups narrow because it isn't EASY anymore (you're not all on campus). Nobody actually desires for them to narrow. If you can make it *easy* for the other person (…

>If you can make it easy* for the other person (by handling the approach, scheduling, etc). They'll be as willing as in uni days* That's definitely not true, or at least not my experience. Everyone I ask out to join me for various activities, has an excuse, usually busy or other plans with someone else, and they never follow up for a rain check. People over 30, even single/child-free, seem to be very busy with their…

In my experience both of you are right. There are many people who are very "desperate" for friendships, especially if they have not lived in the same place for 20+ years. On the other hand there are a bunch of people who are so much in their routines they are not open to do anything out of the ordinary. The ironic thing is that even those are often desperate for friends, they just struggle to break their routines (something you definitely must do to make friends IMO).

Which leads me to a point that is missing in the post, if you want to get to know new people, be open to new things. Just say yes if somebody asks you to go to the arcade, if you really can't but want to do something, follow up on the rain check.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#164

Post by nicbou »

Xcelerate wrote: post #11

I fortunately have close friends, but not through any of my own doing. Over the years, there were a lot of friendly extroverts that encouraged me to hang out and join them for burger night, or they’d message me when they were in town. Everyone I dated took the initiative to ask me out, including my wife. I always feel awkward when I reach out to people, as though I’m bothering them somehow, so I tend to avoid doing s…

Someone posted succeedsocially.com in another thread, and it's an excellent resource that might help you. I'm astonished by how on-point it is.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#165

Post by OmarShehata »

the_only_law wrote: post #87

Every few years I get this urge to “start over” somewhere new where I’m going to turn everything about my life around. Whenever I’ve tried to make friends or be social, it seems to fall into this almost cyclical pattern. I’ll find a group of people who hang out and join that. Tend to make pretty good inroads early, and people seem to like me. Then over time the group slowly starts to fracture into “cliques” none of w…

I've seen this happen but it's really interesting that you say this is cyclic/it always falls into this pattern for you.

Have you found that reaching out to individual people in the group to be worthwhile?

I often find it hard to make/maintain meaningful connections in these groups (and the "people care less about what I have to say" etc feels relatable), but I've had great success with just asking individuals like "wanna grab coffee/lunch sometime" either 1 on 1 or in a group of 3. It can be kind of awkward, and there's always a sense of "Oh you guys were hanging out? Why didn't you let me/XYZ know!" but I just embrace that and it's been a much better way for me I think to make close friends.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#166

Post by alar44 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #141
standardUser wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hookup culture is de rigueur but it doesn't interest me." That's media bullshit that people really like to believe. There is no shortage of people looking for relationships.

There is no shortage of people hoping and dreaming about relationships. The number of people willing to move out of their comfort zone to make a good relationship possible - of any type - is much smaller.

That may be, but it has nothing to do with "hookup culture" which is just nonsense.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#167

Post by PuppyTailWags »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #137
standardUser wrote: post #134

I'm in my 40's and I have a lot of close friends, both in my city (mostly newer friends) and around the country/world (mostly older friendships). My trick is, I cheat. I'm happily single, live alone and have no children. That gives me the luxury of doing the heavy lifting in my friendships. I travel a lot and most of those trips are to stay with friends in their homes or to meet them at a third destination. That's be…

> building more non-romantic relationships with women. I completely agree; I've always preferred being friends with women, but in my opinion it's not easy to do. Things sometimes get complicated quickly if there's attraction on either side which often happens to at least one side if you're close friends. Even without romantic feelings, things get weird/awkward if either party is in a relationship or married.

I wonder if we can learn something from homosexual people in this. I don't often see gay guys cutting off their straight friendships because they're one-sidedly attracted for example in the same way straight men swear off any woman.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#168

Post by VBprogrammer »

I always considered myself someone who made friends easily. In fact when my partner and I met she found it hard to keep track of my various social circles. Friends from school, friends from my first stint at university, friends from my second stint at university, friends from places I used to work etc. She on the other hand had one or two close friends.

Since having kids I've found it much more difficult. It's literally a once a month thing to get a couple of hours to go out for a beer. I enjoy meeting up with a couple of guys I meet through prenatal classes but they are all in the same boat and making time for a new friend when their free time is so limited is challenging.

I also had the profoundly upsetting situation of losing touch with one of my closest friends due to some poorly chosen words while I was in a poor mental state following some stressful experiences after our first was born. Interestingly, this also meant I lost touch with many of the people I had friends in common with on his side.

Weirdly, for my partner her social circles have exploded. She now is very close with a small group from her prenatal classes, she's also converted a couple of her ex-work colleagues into actual friends, many of them by them having similar aged children.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#169

Post by legerdemain »

Denzel wrote: post #118
legerdemain wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's primary advice for making more friends is that you will have conversations with lots of people and you should iterate through them quickly by making more intimate conversation and revealing something about yourself to deepen the relationship. This makes sense if the author is a student at a school of any meaningful size in a popular major. But it doesn't make sense for adults struggling to make connectio…

You captured two of the author's points well: 1) more vulnerable, intimate conversations that eschew social norms can lead to more and deeper friendships; and 2) to grow deeper connections you should cast a wide net and filter down based upon compatibility. The author makes other points about taking initiative and following up as well. Your critique of point #2 is that a middle-aged adult has less opportunities for c…

I also work out at a gym 5-6 days a week, but without headphones, because I want to be able to hear people reaching out to me.

There are definitely gym regulars (the guy wearing Top Gun shades indoors who uses 14 plates for his leg press and never puts them back). The extent of my socializing at that gym, over the course of two years, has been "sorry, are you still using that."

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#170

Post by kleer001 »

tinglymintyfrsh wrote: post #89

Disclaimer: no unsolicited advice please. I'm old(er) mid-40's, single, no kids, and never married. I don't have much family or close friends. Hookup culture is de rigueur but it doesn't interest me. Where I'm at, there isn't a context to meet people and most random people in public around keep to themselves and treat me like I'm invisible. I do volunteering but that also doesn't go anywhere. If you have to constantl…

:Not advice, but many questions and some sharing my experience:

Feel free to answer or not as you like.

> I'm old(er) mid-40's

I was in my early 40s when I found a lovely mate, married, and reproduced.

> Hookup culture is de rigueur

What makes you say that? What geographic region is that? Is that just the kids or those in your demographic?

> Where I'm at, there isn't a context to meet people

Are you in a place without personal ads?

> I do volunteering but that also doesn't go anywhere.

Is that volunteering at the same place or different ones? What kind of volunteering?

> I'd like to have a family and kids,

Do you want to make your own kids? Are you willing to be a step parent?

> but an inability to find and make friends precludes that.

That's not my experience. There's popular advice that one should marry one's friend. But in my experience one can just look for a marriage partner and leap frog that nonsense.

> The thought of getting old alone

Ah, so essentially human, thank you for sharing. I too have that at my core.

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