Do friends have bigger lives outside of you?

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I've gone to a couple of weddings so far in my life, as well as Bar Mitzvahs & all that.

the first Bar Mitzvah I went to was that of a family friend.

I felt so alone there because he and his parents had so many friends outside of us, none of whom we actually knew.

That seemed to apply to every big said event I went to.

I almost felt many times like I was just an "afterthought" in their lives; just some guy on the side in their lives that they could care less either way if they existed in their lives or not.

I was pretty much never in that "main circle" in most of those cases, if you know what I mean.

Was it like this for anyone else?

I don't understand other people at all. They are so confusing.

When I went to my brother's wedding I was amazed about how few people I knew outside of the family. There were dozens of people on the groom's side who I've never seen before in my life.

Last edited by Molecular_Biologist on 11 Jun 2010, 12:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

yes, i can definitely relate to the afterthought feeling. i feel like i'm a fringe friend that people keep talking to 'cus they know i'm fragile.

Yes, friends do have a much bigger social circle than me but their lives are considerably more complicated. I have a handful of friends, that's it, but they have work friends, squash club friends, poker buddies, business associates, girlfriends, boyfriends and a host of other people that they have to keep track of.

Give me the simple life anytime.

Vanilla_Slice

Yes, I find this highly relatable.

In fact, the first (and only) Bar Mitzvah I went to was a similar experience. It was for a friend. Actually, I considered him my best friend. I was downcast when I realized that I was not even in his top ten, as he spent his time with other boys. Of course, besides his immediate family, I didn't know anyone there. I spent much of my time outside (literally the fringe of the event) talking with adults. They were mostly doctors, lawyers, and rabbis, so at least the conversation was stimulating. Though looking back, I believe they only talked to me because I was an intellectually precocious eight-year-old. A novelty.
I felt very lonely that day. Deficient, in some ineffable way.

I'm still waiting for that feeling to go away.

Yeah. It seems like most times when i've made what i think could be a friend it'll be kind of a big deal for me, but then at some point another person they are better friends with will be around and i don't matter much. Also, anytime it goes from me interacting one-on-one with a person to there being a third or fourth person, they form a sort of group that i end up feeling left out of for the most part.

I would sincerely hope for my friends' sake that they have bigger social lives than I do.

Most everyone has a bigger life than me. Whenever I go to some kind of function witch does not happen much; there are least 2wice as many people there than all the people in my life that I am even somewaht close to. It's like I only have five people in my life at all & everyone else has over 50.

Yes, always has been that way.

No doubt some of my friends have a lot going on socially that I know almost nothing about....they're welcome to it. I wouldn't want a list of names to memorise and I don't particularly want to meet all these other folks, except one by one perhaps. I used to envy them a bit, but that was in the days when I still thought that being the life and soul of the big party was something to aspire to.

But I tend only to get very close to people who, like me, have just a small circle of friends. Not that I check it out first, it just seems to happen that way. I guess I get attracted to unusual people who tend to scare company away or just don't have the skills or the inclination to forge and maintain a big social network. My closest friend at the music club has put off at least one guy from going there because (in his own words) she's so weird. All the more for me

I'd rather have 2 good friends, than 40 fake friends.

Meh. Most people have loads of friends, whereas we tend to only have a few. No big deal.

+1

I'm always a fringe friend, or rather "the girlfriend". They wouldn't hang with me if it wasn't for who my boyfriend was. I have one good friend now, but she has so many more friends than me. I feel like when I was a kid, like I'm expendable kind of. No that's not fair, she's different than most people. But I would say I feel generally vulnerable having so few friends. I do need people to talk to and see on a regular basis. if there were more of them I wouldn't be so dependent. But I really can't handle too many people at the same time, it stresses me out. I wish I had the personality of a hermit, instead of needing friends and affection but at the same time getting very anxious around it.

I've been very lucky recently in that way. I happened to fall into 2 or 3 significant friendships all around the same time, and I'm sure it's helped me to balance my feelings for them and keep it all finite. I seem able to just about get my brain round the complications that number of people brings into my life - any more and I'd be out of my depth.


The "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" syndrome, I guess. But maybe if you balance up the one friendship with just one more, that might be some kind of happy medium between loneliness and social anxiety?

I definitely am just a fringe friend to everybody, even those in the family. Excluding my parents, I feel people wouldn't really care if I was at a big event either way. It was like that when I went to a wedding a few years ago... I knew maybe 10 people there out of 1250 and everybody saw me flash my underwear after my heel got caught in a concrete hole, and I have a nasty scar on my leg to remind me of the horrible event. So to a majority of people in my family circle I'm the clumsy strange flasher... lovely huh? That event alone has made me a permanent fringe friend to many until I move to a new area.