Submitted 8 months ago by goofystench@lemy.lol to [deleted]
https://lemy.lol/pictrs/image/b8351828-b567-400b-bc50-661eae5c296e.png
Most people aren’t ready to jump full force into a friendship like that. If they’re your only friend, but you aren’t their only friend, you have much more energy and motivation to start/maintain the friendship than they do.
Also fun math fact: For the average person, your friends will have more friends than you do.
i know that but shit… thanks for reminding me what a loser i am
You’ll get there. Just take it slow and focus on helping yourself <3
No amount of money, friends and other things that can be observed will make you a winner or loser. Being a content, happy and confident person makes you not a loser.
D&D and other tabletop games are a good way to keep things going.
Once I was in the train, minding my own business, reading an unusual, interesting book. The guy seating in front of me noticed it and we started talking. It turned out, we live in the same city. We both were relatively new there.
FF a week. We went out to get some burgers. Talked about basically everything. We had what could only qualify as a wonderful time together. Chatted for hours, even talked about travelling together to a country I know relatively well and he’d like to visit.
Where I live, split checks are custom. I always hated them, so thinking (wrongly, as it’d turn out) we’d see each other again very soon, I paid for the whole bill.
Before going home, I even cited Casablanca’s well known ‘beginning of a long friendship’ line.
Never heard from him after that. When I tried to reach out, only a half-hearted bs ‘oh sorry, I’m so bad at replying texts’ came.
Never saw him again.
Really shattered my confidence in people, and myself.
Angus, if you’re out there. WTF man. Why.
He might have thought you were romantically interested in him, wasn’t interested, and didn’t know how to communicate that without being worried he might offend you.
There’s this concept of a relationship escalator and everybody rightly shits on how much it fucks things up on the back end of erotic relationships.
But in pretty much every kind of new relationship, whether it’s business, friendship, family, or romance, people expect to increase their commitments gradually, in coordination with the other person.
Yes, this means that most people looking to make new friends and lovers expect you to act a little less excited about getting to know them than you actually are. 🤷🏻♀️
Actually, the only way I’ve been able to make sense of what happened is thinking that he might have been interested in me, correctly sensed I’d never be, and didn’t want to be hurt.
maybe hes scared to develop any further relationship with you bc hes depressed and scared to get close to anyone, so he just dipped? i know that type of person, its me
I made this experience too. I conclude that it’s just that most people aren’t the type of people that i’d have long-term relationships with. It seems to me that a lot of people are either too superficial or just not interested in the things that i’m interested in.
I just have to accept that it’s tricky to find the kind of people that i do want to spend time with.
Treat people 20% better than you wish to be treated to correct for measurement error.
So if you want to scale back your interactions with someone because you feel like you are putting in all the effort: Adjust your effort to 20% more than their effort. Also consider whether you might just have more energy / time for this potential friendship. It’s okay that one person “does” more than the other.
I have a similar rule I call the 2/3 rule. I’m willing to put in around 2/3 of the effort required to keep any sort of relationship going. If the other person consistently can’t put in 1/3, I’ll be cordial but won’t otherwise do anything more for them than I’d do for a stranger.
I have been seeing this guy and we pretty much don’t even speak to each other. We just send stickers and then when our plans line up, sleep together.
Its pretty dope.
If that works for you guys, why not
OH 😭 ok…
Played some cs surf last night talking with people. Felt great
I’ve been trying to do the same thing on 2fort, you can meet some funny folks on there at the later hours
i get along acceptably just chatting with the same group of people every day, you don’t have to try to force regular friendships if it doesn’t seem to be working out.
Any social interaction is better than none, maybe you’ll be able to make friendships stick in the future but don’t let the lack of them make you feel like you’re inherently unlikable, try other approaches and see if that works better. Maybe you can just get well aquainted with people, without strictly being friends as such?
I think it’s a little hard on the other side of that as well. I have a lot of friends and it’s hard to not let someone down because things get busy and I get booked out so quick. Planning things a month out is the most realistic way I even get to see people these days.
I haven’t even seen my best friend in person for like two years now because we’ve both been slammed :/ I don’t know how reassuring that is, but I hope you don’t see it as people being against seeing you but some people feeling a bit overwhelmed by other stuff going on. Your best bet at knowing if things between y’all are good is asking to do an activity together a few weeks from now and catching up then. I hope this helps! :D
Tone down step 3 and cancel step 4.
The secret is to make friends with common interests and focus on the interests.
This is great advice. I want to add that it helps to have the necessary social skills to make those friends. I highly recommend Dale Carnegie’s How to Make Friends and Influence People. It’s old and a bit hokey but the advice is solid. It helped me grow from being awkward and largely friendless to awkward with a few friends!
I’m having my daughter read that now. I hate “self-help” books, but that one is essential.
EASIER SAID THAN DONE -_-
Go to any gaming store, and they’ll have 5 weekly DnD sessions. Join one.
Hasn’t worked out for me so far
You meet these friends in real life?
Dming on Lemmy
oh i didnt even notice you can do that :3
I gave up. If people talk to me nicely, I respond politely but I don’t make any effort to get closer. Ik it’s futile.
honestly, im so close to giving up as well. its not a good idea but im so fucking tired
I’m sorry, OP. 😔 Out of curiosity, are you in a committed relationship?
no… im asexual and live in a small town so its difficult XD
It’s a tightrope walk. Put in too much effort and you risk pushing them away. Not enough effort and they lose interest. That is also why, in my experience, it is a good idea to have multiple friends. If you’re someone who needs a lot of attention, it allows you to have multiple sources of attention without being smothering towards one person.
yea, having many friends sounds fun… but i would like to start with one XD
If getting messaged once a week or so to ask if you wanna hang is “smothering” and “risk pushing” you away, then maybe, just maybe, the problem is not the dude messaging.
It’s not a tightrope walk, a friendship is built on mutual respect. Feeling left out and lonely because there is no reciprocation whatsoever is normal. Calling this OP’s fault is extremely toxic, holy shit.
If getting messaged once a week or so to ask if you wanna hang is “smothering” and “risk pushing” you away, then maybe, just maybe, the problem is not the dude messaging.
???
What?
Where in OP’s post was this mentioned?
Are you okay?
It’s not a tightrope walk, a friendship is built on mutual respect. Feeling left out and lonely because there is no reciprocation whatsoever is normal. Calling this OP’s fault is extremely toxic, holy shit. If it’s a tightrope walk, you didn’t wanna be friends from the very beginning and are bad at communicating your intent.
You still have to maintain a middle ground, and blaming the other for a lack of interest like OP’s meme seems to imply, is not the correct way of doing things either. That is also extremely toxic, and it’s the kind of behavior I mainly see people who tend to smother or cling to others engage in. Being smothering or clingy is not even remotely healthy and will absolutely drive people away.
On the contrary, as a dude with many friends, none of us put in “tons of effort”. Each of my friendships are casual and relaxed, we “see each other when we see each other”, and that works well for all of us. We have lots of mutual respect, and an intent to have a friendship, but friendship just means different things to different people.
Some people, like it seems maybe yourself and OP, have the energy of a drowning person who will take any person who tries to help them down with them. And also a sense of… justice?.. that’s highly attuned to amplify small slights. I’ve seen it before in some second hand reports of like “I sent him a photo that I really liked and he didn’t respond within 24 hours, and when he did it was just with a 😛. Can you imagine the gall!”, when actually there’s no indignity, he just doesn’t look at his phone much… or he was busy. But it’s a problem when the sender isn’t busy, and is in fact just sitting there fuming for 24h because they have way more energy invested into this.
I want to check in real quick here, none of my tone here is intended to be angry or even mocking. I’ve got a lot of privilege for sure, and it helps combat this. A person suffering with food scarcity is going to react differently to a backyard BBQ than a person without food scarcity, and I’m willing to bet a person suffering from social scarcity would do the same.
My only purpose for writing this is because I’ve met people who feel “desperate”, and people who have a sense of “principles of friendship” that are iron clad, but also not mutual and are inflexible and cause them to push everyone away for not respecting them, meanwhile all the people they pushed away seem to get by just fine. And often it’s easiest to just let these people go because they’re, perhaps through no fault of their own, toxic to non-manic casual friends and friend groups. And I figured I’d give a more “average” perspective of what the other side of this might actually look or feel like.
And I already feel like I’m going to regret it 😛
Also, since we talked about expressing intent upfront, let me say that I’m going to post this and then get out of bed, and I probably won’t look at Lemmy again the rest of the day. I have some errands to run and I’m going to a BBQ with some friends later, and I have notifications turned off because I don’t want Lemmy stuff being a force of push in my life, only pull, so I probably won’t see any replies until maybe tonight when I go to bed, maybe tomorrow morning if I do something else tonight? So I can’t guarantee I’ll want to respond to any replies, but if I haven’t replied in 24h, that isn’t actually emotionally meaningful. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just doing other stuff and literally not thinking about you. 😉
The implication of OP’s post is that they are unable to make new friends. Somethingsomethingcommondenominator…
If getting messaged once a week or so to ask if you wanna hang is “smothering” and “risk pushing” you away, then maybe, just maybe, the problem is not the dude messaging.
Where does OP say that this is what they are doing? The assumption I would get from the meme is that they are trying to have long form conversations over text, which can be exhausting for other people - especially if you just met.
The whole phrasing of the meme puts off huge neediness vibes, which is kind of the joke. *Of course" OP has a hard time making friends, because they are so lonely. Catch 22, remember, was a comedy.
robocall@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Friendships require maintenance and effort.
goofystench@lemy.lol 8 months ago
really? very insightful, didnt know that 👍