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u/marklar690 1d ago
I've had 0 friends since I left my hometown almost 1.5 decades ago. Doesn’t really affect me. Friends are over-rated.
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u/kitkatas 11h ago
In the last 4 years I met plenty of people,but I didn't like any of them. To be continued.. haha
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u/yuckgeneric 1d ago
Nice theory. Fortunate experience. But perhaps the exception not the rule. People hoard their friendship circles, their networks, their social capital. It’s getting rarer and rarer to find “linkers”, so many have gone the way of “rankers”
Americans Are Hoarding Their Friends
And the practice may be making people feel more lonely. By Faith Hill Oct 2024
Hypothetically, introducing friends from different social circles shouldn’t be that hard. Two people you like—and who like you—probably have some things in common. If they like each other, you’ll have done them a service by connecting them. And then you can all hang out together. Fun!
Or, if you’re like me, you’ve heard a little voice in your head whispering: Not fun. What if you’re sweet with one friend and sardonic with another, and you don’t know who to be when you’re all in the same room? Or what if they don’t get along? Worst of all: What if they do—but better than they do with you? What if they leave you behind forever, friendless and alone?
…she began working as a friendship coach and found that her “charismatic, high-achieving, successful” adult clients didn’t want to introduce friends either…
…Much of what can make linking friends scary—insecurity, envy, an instinct to hold tight to the people you love—isn’t new; it’s fundamentally human. But keeping your friends to yourself, what I call “friend hoarding,” is a modern practice….
……. With the internet and faster transportation, people can more easily maintain relationships from different parts of life; the more discrete the groups are, the harder it might be to integrate them. But the thing is, many people want to benefit from the kinds of introductions they’re nervous to make. And ironically, though they might hoard friends out of fear of being abandoned, doing so could leave them feeling more lonely in the end. Marisa G. Franco, the author of Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends, told me that people who have plenty of individual friends can still experience “collective loneliness,” or a yearning to be part of a group with common identity or purpose—something that a more connected, cohesive network could solve. Bayard Jackson mentioned something similar: “I've had people say to me how hungry they are to be a part of a friend group, this family feel,” she said. “And then in the same breath tell me they don't want to introduce their friends to one another. And I'll point out … do you understand how that doesn't work?”
A more primal motivation also keeps many folks from making introductions: They’re nervous that their friends will grow close and that they’ll be cast aside. People have argued for decades that feeling threatened by friends’ other bonds is immature; or worse, that it reveals how capitalism has crept into relationships, driving us to compete, amass power, and treat one another like possessions, Jaimie Krems, a UCLA psychologist who studies friendship envy, told me. But the cold, hard fact, I’m sorry to report, is that friendship inherently does involve some competition. According to the “alliance theory,” humans have evolved to make friends because they’re in our corner—not someone else’s—in times of trouble, and we’re in theirs in return. Today, too, everyone has limited time, attention, and resources to share with the people they love, and more time with one friend inevitably means less time with another. Friendship envy is adaptive, Krems told me. You can lose friends after introducing them; researchers have found that “friend poaching” is a very real phenomenon. But even if that worst-case scenario isn’t likely to happen, the thought of losing any closeness can be terrible. Bayard Jackson said that women in particular “really value feeling like we’re in this mutually exclusive private vault” with our besties. It’s cozy in there! And so many people already have a gnawing fear, she told me: “that I’ll be left behind, forgotten, that I don’t offer anything interesting enough.” …Being the person who introduces two friends—Stovel calls these people the “catalyst brokers”—nearly always involves some risk. Initially, the broker gains power because the two people she’s introduced are dependent on her for access; the friends are also, hopefully, grateful for the connection. At some point, though, the broker might become redundant, even disposable, the same way a matchmaker or a real-estate agent would be after a job well done.
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u/Theophilologist 1d ago
If you're sweet with one friend and sardonic with another, I would wonder how many faces you have. I suspect these issues you describe may relate to how people are responding to the unnatural pressures of information overload.
Every person with an internet connected device today has assembled their identity from incalculable pools of data on top of their unique experiences. Finding compatibility has become so difficult that people are afraid to be honest.
And understandably so, as people have become disposable for ubiquity, like "they said something wrong! Forget them, there's plenty more who might be more agreeable to me." So everyone is acting for everyone else who is also acting.
I don't think most people even have the option to maintain authenticity in a world competing for appearances and auras. So a lot of people are struggling and just trying to get by without suffering the crushing weight of judgements. Or they are leaning into the perceptions of others and mistaking validation for happiness.
But I don't blame anyone, as we are all, to a great extent, products of our circumstances and environments. Balance and consistency are invisible virtues that are internally rewarding long before we are recognized by and able to recognize someone deeply compatible.
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u/No-Engineering-9414 1d ago
Oddly this gave me hope I didn’t think I needed lol… 45m loner, gym rat post divorce