Making friends
It does get tougher as you get older, particularly when you find most people generally annoying, and you like your alone time. Up until a few years ago, I had at least one or two other friends outside my relationship. Currently, I have lots of acquaintances, but no one I would call a friend. No one I'm terribly interested in spending a lot of time with.
My partner and my therapist have been on me for months now to make some friends. I expected this to be difficult, and annoying, and it's turned out to be worse than I thought. For starters, I don't usually get along well with other men. I can't say for sure why this is, but it's been the case my entire life. Most of my friends have been women. While this doesn't bother my partner in the least, society at large generally has problems with it. Usually, I find chit-chat difficult. I'm not interested in the usual stuff people (particularly men) want to talk about while waiting in line at the grocery store, or sitting in a waiting room. Conversation is usually stilted and awkward, and talking about the weather gets old, really old. Once in a while though, for reasons I've never been able to pin down, sometimes I immediately strike up a conversation with someone, and enjoy it. It's very, very rare.
I refuse to do most social media, or at least the big ones. I've checked various places online to look for group activities and events around town, but nothing looks even remotely interesting to me. In fact, most of them look noisy and irritating. There are a few dating-like websites dedicated specifically to finding local friends, but they're all pretty dismal, and something about it just feels desperate.
I've thought about bars, but I know from experience how that's going to go. I'll feel weird because everyone is 20 years younger than me, I'll fight for the bartender's attention to get a few drinks, and then go home and play the Sims.
Sports? Yeah, right.
Games? Have you been to game shops? Kids in their twenties, and younger, that smell like they've been rolling in sweaty gym socks and cow shit. What the fuck is it with this crop of 20-somethings? It's like they're allergic to fucking showers or something.
Classes? Everything I'm interested in runs during the work day.
I have no idea how to go about this, and I feel pretty stupid about it.
-DeadTOm