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Your description of drifting apart from friends resonates with me. I've felt the same thing, where it's increasingly forced to care about people I no longer can connect with.

I'm married and my wife has gone through a similar transformation. We're also fairly introverted, in the sense that social situations leave us feeling tired afterwards. The funny thing is that time together is like being alone: it isn't exhausting.

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What's wrong with being tired though? You go out for a bit and socialize and then crashing on the couch with Netflix until you fall asleep feels more satisfying.

For us introverts, socializing is exhausting in a way that's very different from being physically tired or just sleepy. For me, it's a similar sort of exhaustion that comes from doing a tedious task for a long time. The kind of exhaustion you might experience if you had to write the same sentence out on a piece of paper by hand a thousand times. Wouldn't you think twice before signing up for such an experience? I often endure it because occasionally there are really fulfilling interactions and transfers of information that happen, but most of the time I find people in social situations don't want to engage their intellect at all and so the interaction is pure tedium.

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