I feel socially excluded and it hurts.

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I'm a 21 year old man at university. My social life is non-existent, constrained within my studies.

I used to hang out with a friend (man). We then met two others (women) and we all started hanging together. The problem is that the two others are consistently avoiding me by not sitting next to me and not asking me how I feel. They have no trouble being with each other and at this point I feel like I stick out like a tumour.

Feels bad not being appreciated. Could be that I'm imagining that I'm being excluded even though such is not the case. I keep feeling left out which makes me angry and lonely, which then repells others further away from me.

I don't know what to do. My friends probably wonder why I'm constantly angry or bitter, or just troubled in general. In reality, I'm only even angry when I feel rejected -- which is every day. Never had loving parents and I have always been treated like crap. Feels like it won't stop. Back then, it wasn't my fault. Now, it feels like I'm the one subconsciously creating the problems out of nowhere.

The case with my friends:

I believe I may be the one stirring up the inner conflicts. One of the women (older than me), I assumed was pitying me. I then stopped looking and talking to her, now she avoids me or something.

I keep feeling angry and hostile towards these two women. I have always wanted us to be in better terms but now over time I have grown tired of it. I can't appear to be in a friendly mood, a mood for chatter. So they avoid me futher and I feel even more excluded and lonely.

How's your hygiene?

I felt the same way when I was your age. I spent my work breaks with a bunch of younger girls. All they wanted to talk about was sex, drugs and parties. There was even a guy who would hand out with them and he would hand out joints to people who wanted them. One day I got so pissed off that I walked away from that group and I never bothered with them again. I decided to hang out with the older people from that point on and I never looked back.

As an Autistic about to graduate from university, I totally feel your pain. My social life at university was next-to-nonexistent until halfway through my second year, and even then it was limited until my third, when I co-founded a student club for those with disabilities with two other students (non-Autistic but living with other types of disabilities, thus understood the whole "being different" thing better than your average NT). I don't know if Universities in Sweden have student clubs in the same way they do here in America, but if they do I would highly recommend looking for one that either a) is based around a major interest of yours or b) based around disability and/or neurodiversity. I hope you find a friend or friends at your university before you graduate! Everyone deserves happiness in life!

I wouldn't consider myself excluded. I go to a lot of activities and have a large circle of friends. All of them, so far, have been female friends. No man has yet asked me to go out or displayed that sort of interest in me, and that hurts me.

In my experience, most relationships work better when you don't worry yourself with how other people feel about you. My mom and siblings take a similar approach to what you describe - they worry about how to interpret the moods of the people around them and try to rationalize other people's attitudes as if they were solely based on the role that they play in that person's life. It causes them a lot of grief and makes them hostile towards others due to their anxiety. I think the better approach is to focus on what you put out rather than the way that other people are receiving it. I'm bad at interpreting other people's emotions, so I've always just assumed the best of everyone. With that assumption, I focus on whether or not I'm being friendly and helpful instead of focusing on whether other people are doing likewise. If they act peevish or annoyed, I find it confusing, but I don't know how to interpret it, so the best I can do is stick to focusing on my own output. The result is that people treat me very differently from the rest of my family. My siblings are baffled by the fact that the people they think are terrible treat me with so much kindness. In the end, there's really nothing to gain by reacting emotionally to people being people - maybe they're really rude, maybe it's anxiety making you doubt them - in any case, I think that focusing on your own output is the best you can do.

I remember at the beginning of the second semester my freshman year in college, I approached a group that I had been typically hanging out with a lot of the time my first semester. I heard them whisper "it's [my name]." When I came into the group, they acted obviously cold towards me.

To this day I can't understand why they did that, but that sort of thing has happened to me a lot in my life.

I feel like there's some kind of Dunning-Kruger effect to this where lacking certain kinds of social skills means that you fail to understand why the absence of those skills is harming your social life.

The best I've done is to start realizing what others are expecting in social interactions and how they will realistically respond to various kinds of social communication. This includes thinking about facial expressions (I really have to remind myself about not furrowing my brows for instance), tone of voice, hand gestures, and the "way of saying something."

One small thing I will do is check myself before I reply to something and ask "Will my response build rapport? Will this make them feel good about me?"

Example:
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Person - "I love that song you're playing"

Me, a classically trained musician and composer - "Oh no, it's actually a Paraguayan Polka. In formal terminology, songs are a very specific way of arranging music that people have diluted the definition of."

I should have smiled and said, "Thanks. I really enjoy it as well."
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The average person cares more about having a good feeling in discourse than the actual substance of the conversations they have. It took me about 25 years to figure that out.

I would try to widen out more by joining various clubs (or whatever interests you) to make more friends.

If you think of your social network in terms of a pie, when you have few friends and you lose one, they take away a much bigger piece of the pie than if you had more friends.

I need to take my own advice. I had no friends in college. I didn’t really mind, though. Being able to delve into my own interests and do something I really wanted to do for once was enough.