Friends

[damnromulans]

The spectrum of social skill level on this forum is pretty far-reaching. I'm curious as to how most of you go about befriending people/making friendships happen/bonding with people.

I go about it similarly to how I pursue a relationship I guess. Find an interesting person, single her/him out, hang out/talk about life just the two of us, develop rapport and lots of inside jokes ---> friendship.

 

[Satanist Hobo]

What I do is approach a random person, pull my penis out and show them. If they don't run away or hit me I've made a new friend.

 

[Srontgorrth]

I don't necessarily pursue a relationship, I just end up naturally getting to know a person (i.e. at school hanging out, talking and so on, or at work eating lunch at the Sam's Club cafe and so on).

Anyways yesterday I learned how a friend at work had to get synthetic urine for the drug test for work, lulz.

 

[The Ozzman]

I don't really have many friends. I think that anyone who can get past my awkwardness and see me for a very loyal and trusting person can be considered my friend.

 

[damnromulans]

Ah yes. School is such a good place to meet people. Work too depending on your coworkers. I guess I can see how it could be tough once school's out and you move and you have to be super-proactive to meet new people.

 

[st3333phani3333]

I don't really have many friends.

The same goes for me. I consider very few my friends. But the ones I do have and consider are very awesome. Friends come and go.

Anyways, I never really thought about how I became a friend of someone or how I consider one mine. I usually just find out their name or them find out mine and then talking is being done for so long and then hanging out/becoming close. That is how I put it.

 

[unknown]

I actually don't really make friends wherever I work. I've kept my spheres separate. Oh sure I have acquaintances and get along with everybody really well, but I keep it at work. Very few of my co-workers do I actually hang out with outside of work and consider friends.

Most of the friends I've made in college I had multiple classes with and developed slowly over the years. The friends I've had the longest I've known since high school, junior high and elementary school. I have quite a large group of friends, but only a handful of really close best friends.

my basic process is generally some combination of being witty, offensive, silent, an asshole or charming. I really can't say since it just seems to happen spontaneously

 

[Vegard Pompey]

I may or may not seem reasonably charismatic to you all, but as a result of being raised by the internet, I am mostly devoid of real life-social skills. I find it difficult to express myself outside of text and being around other humans makes me feel nervous. Moreover, I live in Sweden, my native language is Swedish, but since I picked it up from television and the internet, English is the preferred language of my mind and Swedish feels like a foreign language to me. As might be expected, I don't have any friends.

Additionally, I can't seem to find other people I can relate to in real life. In a new class I started in about a year ago, there was this one guy who talked to me when no one else would. We would chat sometimes on the way home from school as our homes were in the same direction, and he seemed really nice and patient with my poor rhetoric, but the more we talked the more I realized we had nothing in common. I really wanted to befriend this guy but I couldn't find any common ground no matter how hard I tried. Today, we don't talk much.

 

[panzerfaust666]

I dont have many friends and don't actively seek them. it's not that I am socially awkward ( which I am ), but I prefer to be a hermit in my own world, going through life as I please. This obviously doesn't create wonders in the female division, but ah welllllll.

 

[Krigloch the Furious]

I hate people, so meeting new friends isnt fun.

 

[damnromulans]

If you have trouble relating to people in person, it might be a good idea to pursue e-friendships with people and working your way up to meeting them in person so you already have a solid foundation to work with. I have done that before and it's nice to already have stuff to talk about when you meet.

I'm so social it has probably retarded my actual personal development, at age 23 I still feel like I am just getting to know who I am sometimes. Whenever I do something cool, my first thought is "who can I text about this?!" or I post it on Twitter. I've always had a huge and varied group of friends and I don't think I could stand to be alone for more than 24 hours at a time.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

If you have trouble relating to people in person, it might be a good idea to pursue e-friendships with people and working your way up to meeting them in person so you already have a solid foundation to work with. I have done that before and it's nice to already have stuff to talk about when you meet.

I forgot to mention this, but I actually have several very good e-friends whom I would not hesitate to entrust with my life if I had to. Some people would say you can't get that close to a person online, I would say they're wrong. We have plans to meet somewhere down the road but sadly they are all more or less on the other side of the world.

 

[The Emptier]

I don't.

 

[damnromulans]

I forgot to mention this, but I actually have several very good e-friends whom I would not hesitate to entrust with my life if I had to. Some people would say you can't get that close to a person online, I would say they're wrong. We have plans to meet somewhere down the road but sadly they are all more or less on the other side of the world.

E-friends are valuable and definitely "count" as real friends. Just because you're not sitting there looking at them doesn't mean you haven't told them stuff you'd never dream of telling people you know IRL. I've got some pretty cool e-friends myself. And a few posters here I would consider "e-friends" at this point.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I could never keep friends for more than a year in elementary school and have stopped trying since.

EDIT: Honestly, I've never even enjoyed the social buddy-buddy aspect of friends and in general just like to have something to engage in conversation with, whether friendly or not. The internet is my substitute.

 

[damnromulans]

Interesting. There are a lot more hikkikomori types on here than I thought. Seems a similar distribution to Metal-Archives, where at least ten members claimed to have Aspergers

 

[DarkBliss]

My friends are scattered about; some across Israel, others abroad.

We get together on the weekends sometimes. Most of my friends in Israel live too far away or are too busy during the week for us to hang out more often.I kinda miss the childhood/teenage years when we weren't encumbered with all sorts of adult affairs.
My coworkers are really nice, but none are real friends.

 

[hexwind]

I don't think I have good social skills, maybe because I have other interests in life than any other one around here. I have different things that I want to discuss while we meet.
I have very few friends, I enjoy hanging out with them. There are some really cool e-friends that I want to meet in real life, but I'm afraid for some reasons.
I'm generally against the way people tend to befriend each other, I mean like relying on the internet to do so. Like here, everything is planned, discussed, solved either on facebook or msn. I really hate that. Why would you use those means to communicate will you have the real-life alternative... I think that diminishes one's social skills, I don't even add my friends on msn, and I have removed my facebook account cause I became sorta anti-facebook for some reasons. This seems like a new drift in our evolutionary history !
I think the only valid reason to use Internet as a way of communciation is to meet people from the other side of the globe. We're social beings, yet most of us, at least here(in this forum, and me included) fail at our social skills !

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

I've found as I've gotten older that it's increasingly harder to make friends. Adults have busy schedules, so even getting together with someone you know and get along well with is a challenge. It's always been hard for me to find friends anyway, because I hardly know anyone who loves metal, doesn't really watch a lot of movies, watches very little television, likes hockey, is an atheist, is an anarchist, and reads non-fiction books. Another thing that sets me back is that I don't use a cell phone. When I meet someone and they say "Let me get your number, I'll text you" it creates a really awkward situation.

 

[sevag00]

I too have a big circle of friends, from school, the university and some other places. Though i don't consider them my real friends. I have 2-3 real friends, whom i hangout with almost everyday. The last time i made a real friend was few weeks ago. We attend the same university, take almost the same courses and have nice things in common. Although, i hate making new friends, but this friendship was eventually going to happen.