It must be nice having friends. I don't have friends in the sense that I do things together socially with them. I have acquaintances.
There's (not always, but) often a tangible point where my acquaintances tend to turn into friends. It's usually some bonding experience. We stayed up all night and did X. We drank together and had a heart to heart. We both love doing Y and spent a lot of time doing that. We travelled together. We suffered through college classes. We spent weekends hanging out together. We spent years talking on IRC. Often there's also some something about level of trust. Someone reveals something about themselves. They talk about something personal that they normally wouldn't. Etc. Absent either of those, my acquaintances tend to stay acquaintances.
On the flipside, I've found that keeping around people who don't value you, don't have your best interests at heart or intentionally cause you to feel bad in any way is just a bad idea. Wanting to become better friends doesn't make it so. It's a two sided thing. Really, I love most of my friends and I'd sacrifice much for them, so when it comes to people like this, I don't have time for that shit.
I have a relatively small number of close friends, and I don't get to spend time with all of them all the time. And as time passes and life happens, friendships form and fade (and I find that the good ones can kickstart right back - even years later.) All that is fine and natural.
It's really about mutual happiness, fun and sharing, and the rest doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Hope this helps!
If you ever find the time to write down more of your thoughts about friendships I'd definitely be interested in reading them.
I struggle to make new friends. The standard advice seems to be to go to meetups, do volunteering, and join sports clubs. I've tried those and can't get them to work for me. There's something more to it than just being in attendance.
I think you're definitely right about that tangible point where things change, and I never manage to quite get there. I don't know if that tipping point is something you can instigate or if you just have to leave it to chance.
I'm an introvert and it is tough meeting people. I'm not saying it is easy to move out of your comfort zone, but it is necessary. If you want to be more social and have more friends, then make conscious effort be more social and make more friends.
Just to be clear, both of those things are choices one makes, not excuses to be made.
I still disagree with the assertion that "how many friends you do or don't have is entirely up to you". It may be true in some extremely narrow sense, but if it came down to it how many people would give up the spouse they love because they were the problem, or their children because they were, or drop everything and move to where people were more similar to themselves?
Right, because someone with no friends probably have never thought or believed that it is their own fault for being shy/uninteresting/boring (and that they're shy/uninteresting/boring in part because ... they have no friends). It has probably never crossed their mind at all.
> I'm an introvert and it is tough meeting people. I'm not saying it is easy to move out of your comfort zone, but it is necessary. If you want to be more social and have more friends, then make conscious effort be more social and make more friends.
In order to be social, you need to try to be social. Right.
So he's not saying that you 'have to try and be social', he's saying 'work at it'. That means doing things that you may not want to do right now, to pay-off later.
Who believes that there are any alternatives? Shy people and people with social anxiety (etc.) don't have a reputation for spontaneously becoming outgoing and so on.
For me it would not be a problem if I could just resolve the female companionship problem (or lack thereof). I'm not even shy, it just seems that if I don't pay them women tend to ignore me ...