its painful each time (┬┬﹏┬┬)
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can u be my therapist ?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Well, no. I don't have the certification to be a therapist, and I sure as hell ain't paying the money and putting in the time and effort for a job that pays jack shit.
But if you identify with the above image, my advice to you would be to stop trying and just show up. Just get online - go to Facebook and Instagram and meetup.com, and start searching for clubs, groups, meetups, and events happening in your area. Just scroll through literally everything, and if you think "hmm, maybe I'd like that" or just "I don't know if I'd like that", then put it on your calendar and show up. (Note: I would avoid any groups specifically about mental health or personal development, as they tend to be Scientology fronts). Literally all you have to do is walk in the door. No matter what, just walk in the door. From there, you can do whatever you want. You can just leave. You can find the group and introduce yourself. You can sit quietly and not talk to anyone the whole time. You can vomit your whole life story and history of trauma to everyone there. It literally doesn't matter. Afterwards, if you think to yourself "I liked that, and would like to do it again", then show up again. If not, get on FB/IG/meetup/whatever again and go to a different thing. Do this again and again and again. And again and again and again. Build up a calendar of events where 5 to 7 days per week, you are showing up to a group of people, in real life, where you are going to do something that you can reasonably expect to enjoy.
Basically without trying, the people in these groups will get to know you, and they will probably like you. If they end up not liking you, that is okay too - the group is just not a good fit for you. Go start exploring again until you find a group that is a good fit for you. The more people you talk to and interact with, the more you'll find that people are generally nice and want to know you. This will decrease your neediness, which will make people like you more. By just showing up and not trying, you will gradually build deeper relationships with the people you meet, and eventually some of them will naturally become good friends.
If you find that you show up and don't know what to say, here is a hack. Just go in with an autistic level of honesty. Don't try to be smooth or cool or likeable. Just walk up to someone and say "hi, I'm x. I'm here for the thing." Or "I'm feeling nervous because I'm meeting a new group of people". Or "I wanted to make new friends, so I just randomly showed up here to see if you guys are cool."
Literally, that's it. Show up. Vomit out whatever is in your head. Repeat. Just keep doing this, and you will make friends.
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You meet these friends in real life?
A few of them, yeah.
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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.
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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.
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
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Well, no. I don't have the certification to be a therapist, and I sure as hell ain't paying the money and putting in the time and effort for a job that pays jack shit.
But if you identify with the above image, my advice to you would be to stop trying and just show up. Just get online - go to Facebook and Instagram and meetup.com, and start searching for clubs, groups, meetups, and events happening in your area. Just scroll through literally everything, and if you think "hmm, maybe I'd like that" or just "I don't know if I'd like that", then put it on your calendar and show up. (Note: I would avoid any groups specifically about mental health or personal development, as they tend to be Scientology fronts). Literally all you have to do is walk in the door. No matter what, just walk in the door. From there, you can do whatever you want. You can just leave. You can find the group and introduce yourself. You can sit quietly and not talk to anyone the whole time. You can vomit your whole life story and history of trauma to everyone there. It literally doesn't matter. Afterwards, if you think to yourself "I liked that, and would like to do it again", then show up again. If not, get on FB/IG/meetup/whatever again and go to a different thing. Do this again and again and again. And again and again and again. Build up a calendar of events where 5 to 7 days per week, you are showing up to a group of people, in real life, where you are going to do something that you can reasonably expect to enjoy.
Basically without trying, the people in these groups will get to know you, and they will probably like you. If they end up not liking you, that is okay too - the group is just not a good fit for you. Go start exploring again until you find a group that is a good fit for you. The more people you talk to and interact with, the more you'll find that people are generally nice and want to know you. This will decrease your neediness, which will make people like you more. By just showing up and not trying, you will gradually build deeper relationships with the people you meet, and eventually some of them will naturally become good friends.
If you find that you show up and don't know what to say, here is a hack. Just go in with an autistic level of honesty. Don't try to be smooth or cool or likeable. Just walk up to someone and say "hi, I'm x. I'm here for the thing." Or "I'm feeling nervous because I'm meeting a new group of people". Or "I wanted to make new friends, so I just randomly showed up here to see if you guys are cool."
Literally, that's it. Show up. Vomit out whatever is in your head. Repeat. Just keep doing this, and you will make friends.
idk if i have energy to do all this, but thank you anyway
️ good advice -
EASIER SAID THAN DONE -_-
Go to any gaming store, and they'll have 5 weekly DnD sessions. Join one.
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A few of them, yeah.
It's just practice. You'll get better at it.
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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.
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idk if i have energy to do all this, but thank you anyway
️ good adviceJust do it once. Then do it again. And again. Break the process down into the smallest steps you can think of, and just do a little every day. For example, today, type meetup.com in your browser and hit enter. If you want to do more, that is fine, but if that's all you can do, then accept that and go on with your day. Tomorrow, you can do the same thing, or you can try putting your location in the search bar. If even that is too much, you can just set a timer for 1 minute and think about searching for groups of people to meet. Or once you have some events that you might be interested in going to, and know where they are happening and that they are happening today, you could spend 1 minute thinking about walking out the door to go to that event.
Often what happens is that by just taking the smallest first step, you keep going. Because you feel rather silly "just" doing something for one minute. And sometimes you just do it for one minute, and that's all you can do, and that's okay too.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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
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EASIER SAID THAN DONE -_-
What are your interests?
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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.
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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.
Strange, you wrote a really sane take, yet you're getting downvoted.
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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!
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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.
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D&D and other tabletop games are a good way to keep things going.
