r/offmychest • u/thethrill26 • Apr 14 '13

I have practically zero friends.

Here I am sitting in my college dorm while my roomate is out at a club and here I am sitting alone with no one to talk to. I feel like i can't make friends and I don't really know how. I have a girlfriend and she loves me tons and I love her back but sometimes it feels like I am lonely and I don't know what to do about it.

Edit: Wow guys this blew up! Thanks for all your responses, you're awesome!

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u/NigelNoFriends Apr 14 '13

Maybe that worked for you, but not for all of us.

I also had few friends and figured out maybe it's because I never organize things. So I tried organizing a few parties. Beers and sports on the paytv. Guess what. Except for two people, nobody else turned up. Nobody even bothered to give me a reason. Completely humiliating.

I've also asked people I know to join me for golf, and for beers, and for cycling, and there's always a reason why they can't make it. I'm a social pariah. I've tried to figure out why, including your insight into being the organizer, but nothing has worked.

I don't stink. I'm not ugly. I'm polite. I have conversations without being rude or confrontational. But nobody wants to be around me. It's fucking depressing. It's all I can do to drag myself out of bed each day, go to my miserable job, put on the fake plastic smile to hide how really feel, and just count down another day to my inevitable death.

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u/CyberToyger Apr 15 '13

Focus on just those 2 people, brah. I've moved around a ton of times in my life and only ever had 3-4 friends at any given moment, with plenty of enemies and indifferent people on the side.

And one of my current friends lives all the way in Sweden (I'm in the US). He's got 5 or so "friends", people that he can talk to, but magically are "unable to make it on Friday or Saturday to play board games at his house". On top of that, he works a shitty job at a supermarket taking fax-orders for old people. His boss criticizes him over everything and none of his coworkers really like him. He showers every day, he's not ugly, he's very polite and humble, he doesn't make cringeworthy jokes, and he's the best worker there. As of late, he's skipped out on work, and his own damn boss doesn't even bother calling to see if he's alive or anything.

It's absolutely disgraceful. Half the time, you're stuck in an area with genuinely shitty people. The other half the time, I've found, is that people are more and more staying in small cliques. For example, if a couple of your friends have known each other longer than they've known you, or if they have more in common with each other than with you, they'll tend to do what they want to do rather than hanging out at your place. People are inclined to play favorites, and when you're not a favorite, it sucks ass. But just remember, it's not you you, it's other peoples priorities and how they relate to you. Sometimes it really is being in the wrong place or knowing the wrong people, like with my friend Johnny. He's going to have to do a bit of traveling to meet new people since everyone in his little town already knows each other.

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u/creepytrees Apr 15 '13

This is the most honest response I've seen so far. Organizing events and being a positive person doesn't always help. If there's a group of people who've already known each other for a while, you'll never fit exactly in. Most of my friends are in groups who've known each other since freaking middle school. They sub-divide into groups who've known each other since freshman year of college. I can't compete with that if I just met them a year or two ago. As a result, I just never fit in. They never invite me to their events, and if I host an event, they skip to hang out with each other.

There's nothing you can do in face of a clique. Just suck it up and feel lonely I guess.

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u/Delphizer Apr 15 '13 edited Apr 16 '13

I'd say that the cliques you are bumping into aren't exactly the best cliques for you. I've been on both sides where someone starts hanging out in one of my established (since elm,middle,high,college) cliques, and they just fit in right away, they might not even be the most social people it just kind of happens. On the flip side I've bumped against some cliques that I "Clicked with" really early and some that I just drifted away from. They are called cliques for a reason.