Don’t have any friends and it does not bother me.

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I had a few friends throughout my school days but we were never that close. I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone either — I’m only interested in chatting with close family members and men in whom I’m interested.

I just don’t want to do what is required to maintain friendships — it feels like a chore.

I may come across as cold and am normally quiet. Why chat on the phone with a girlfriend when I can indulge in my beloved video games?

Anyone else relate? I *hate* how we’re expected to be social because quiet people make outgoing people uncomfortable.

I love chatting on the phone. I also love going places with someone, like a day trip. I like visiting or having company round for a chat over a cup of tea or lunch. I don't like being friendless. Society seems to shame people who ain't got friends. In the UK single people are accepted but friendless people aren't.

the only people i want in my life is my husband,my son,and maybe my mother

friends dont mean a thing to me

i even get socially exhausted if i go on wrong planet too much ! !

same here. the only people I really talk to are my (estranged) wife and children. I work remotely by myself so only have to make small talk at the occasional meeting. I don't care that I have no real friends. They're just a pain in the ass anyway.

Friends (I only have a few) help prevent me from feeling lonely, I learn things from them, and I do some of my special interests with them, so I find they add to my life a lot. We are all different though, I think important we are just true to ourselves?

I always chuckle to myself when I see the word "ass" used in this way. In the UK an ass is a donkey, while an arse is slang for a bottom / posterior. So you can see why I am laughing at your sentence above! I nearly posted a picture of a surprised donkey

It you ever get in a long term relationship, remember your partner will need to be socializing.




Assuming you're born in 1988? It's natural you get less social as you age, it's especially true when you're aging in the midst of a pandemic.



Because in all likelihood it isn't healthy. Video addiction isn't healthy, doesn't mean it doesn't feel good while doing it. Extreme introversion is very much like being a boiling frog.

Things occur gradually, so gradually you don't notice as parts of your body and mind atrophy.




It's simply radically unhealthy.

You can get a comfort in low effort depression, but that doesn't make it right.

I can't relate to it on a personal level, but I've heard that some people with ASD don't have a sense of need for friends.

Me, I'm probably nearer to that state than the average person is. If I interact socially too much then I can start feeling anxious and out of my depth. Even when the people around me were really non-judgemental, non-invasive, mild-mannered and friendly, there was a limit on how long I could cope without my alone time, though I didn't get very anxious, I just felt increasingly impatient for a bit of privacy so I could pursue my own thoughts and special interests without other people "under my feet." So I think the anxiety depends very much on the personalities of the friends and therefore on how safe I feel in their hands.

But I've always feared ending up without any friends whenever it's looked as if I might be heading that way, and whenever I've been alone for any sizeable amount of time I've felt lonely and kind of depressed and debilitated. Recently I've had to be alone for several spells of more than a week at a time, with very little company between. The only relief was a daily audiocall, a few text messages, and a bit of interaction on public social media. That was probably a lot better than nothing, but I still found myself feeling down. Luckily I pushed myself into pursuing an ambitious special interest, and achieved quite a lot with that, and started feeling a lot better for it.

I'd probably be fine with just a partner and a very small number of good friends, but the problem with small numbers is that if anything goes wrong they don't have far to fall before I'm at zero, and I'm not good at starting from scratch. If I've got one friend then they might introduce me to others and give me a bit of moral support so I don't have to go out on a limb to find new friends. But somehow I don't have much enthusiasm to grow my circle of friends when the opportunity is there, so it doesn't happen much. And of course just because my friend gets on with another person it doesn't mean that I will. One of the biggest problem with having a friend is that I can find myself under pressure to tolerate their friends and family.

I don't like the expectations either.
But not because of social anxiety, shyness or inability to speak up.

I simply have no social interest whatsoever, except I'm bored or cared enough or something.


Especially when I'm not in the right condition to be. More so in a long run like dealing with burnout.
Would anyone rather socialize with a version of me who isn't tired, able to communicate ideas and is reliable?

Or a version of me who spends time coping with some unnamed illness, stressed out tired with fatigue, slow, clumsy, irritable, struggles with words, potentially violent and is unreliable to anyone including to myself?



I don't mind not having friends.
Sure I enjoy and cherish having any. Sure I can and likely will reciprocate if someone cares. And yes I have several attachments.

But it's not what defines my life, what I desire and need or something like that.

My problem lies not in being able to "get" friends. I'm generally seen as approachable and liked, especially if you add in that my skills make me attractive on the job market. The problem lies in maintaining friendships.

As I got older and simply the task of managing everyday adult life became harder, I decided the area to prune in my life was the slog of such maintenance. I'm sure a lot of people were offended by this decision, and consequently I now have nobody left from my "old" life.

I meet people regularly through my wife and workplace, less now though as we're still in a pandemic. I can do the chitchat and so on and people often want to meet again. However, I don't. The benefits of friendship don't weigh up the effort I have to put in. I'll probably die missed by none if I continue like this but unless the aforementioned cost/benefit equation changes in some substantial way, I don't think I'll change either.

It doesn’t much bother me to have no friends. And I do not believe everyone needs to have friends in order to be healthy mentally. I think some of us are born to it.

In general, I find other people boring (not referring to people on WP.) The people who seem interesting to me are so much smarter than I am they can’t be bothered.

I do have work in which I interact with people and families in a specific role. I know this role and it takes something out of me, but not as much as a regular social situation. Many of these people I find not only interesting, but fascinating.

I agree it's not black-and-white about everybody needing friends, but I think generally speaking most people wouldn't feel quite right without them. My theory is that as a species we've evolved to aggregate together for the sake of survival, and that we're usually saddled with a social drive which manifests as loneliness when we're isolated. But that's not to say that everybody has such a drive.

Personally I get a lot out of working with other people, co-operating towards a common purpose. Although it seems a purely logical thing to do that, I get a nice sense of emotional warmth from it, and I wish I did it more often. I've also heard a theory that when a group has no common purpose, it falls apart.

I have no friends by choice and I'm okay with it completely.

I used to force myself to socialize when I was younger but I was always bored and wished I was at home doing almost anything else. I get the very limited amount of social interaction I desire at work.

i am basically alone and lonely but that is leavened with a few excellent pen pals and having a dolly to talk to. i am rather like the person in this twilight zone episode-

You are not alone in that. It's like reading description of myself (well, apart from interest in men, as I prefer women).

Same as you, I had few friends through the school years and on university but wasn't that close to any of them. It was more like being a pack of friends in which some people are like really close to one another and simply like to hang out with the rest. But for me there wasn't a "close friend" part. I was the guy the rest liked to hang out with sometimes, to put it simply.

Thing with me is, I do not really have that much trouble with maintaining shallow relationships like being work colleagues etc. People find me interesting because I am an information junkie and binge on so many subjects when they catch my attention that I can discuss anything from reproductive habits of hyenas, to reasons why space elevator is not something we can realistically achieve as a species. I know a lot of stuff people do not. They perceive me as clever, so have some level of sympathy for me after they get to know me a bit more. But for me, they are not necessarily interesting. Sometimes I am interested in things they know and then try to spend more time with them to "extract" as much data and learn as much from them I can, but I am not interested in their personalities and lives, with very rare exceptions.

I think the fact that I miss having an open access to sciencedirect database, which I had during my studies, more than people I hanged out with back then speaks for itself. When there's any kind of social meeting (my wife does have friends she stays in touch with) it feels like a chore. But I am excited when I am going to an appointment with my neurologist, even though I barely know anything about her. It's just that she does have an PhD and is one of the best in class specialists in subject of epilepsy in my country.

Since I've been diagnosed with lateral temporal lobe epilepsy, I've started to read tons of stuff on the subject and learned so much. Even paid for access to like 7 scientific papers (spent like $400 on it when put together I think) about it. Every appointment, me and my doctor have discussion about the path of my therapy and some of my own findings convinced her to try some non-standard medication mixtures - i.e. I am currently on lamotrigine and we've introduced an additional daily dose of piracetam even though there are no studies about benefits of the two being used together. Currently, I am making observations to see how different doses of piracetam work. Some effects of higher dose I am taking now are unexpected to both me and her i.e. my visual snow (yeah, my brain is f**** up in many different ways) has became more visible and dense, an observation which apparently was never reported in papers. Seeing how involved I am, she got me into genetic research on epilepsy as a test subject - normally I would need to pay a loads of money for those, but this is a scientific project so it's free. So not only I learn something from her and can have a discussion about area of knowledge that interest me, I also have some additional benefits out of it. But is she my friend? No. But I value her way more than any friend I ever had. Basically, going to bi-monthly check-up with her feels like a visit to candy store back when I was a kid.

Other than that, my wife is someone I can have a conversation on a lot of subjects and feel emotional connection with. She is a smart woman with better than average levels of knowledge about the world around us. When speaking with her, I do not feel the need to explain everything like to a child, something I've felt towards my past partners. She may not "fire up" my brain in the same way my doctor does, but I feel her love, support and know that we share common goal. I feel good being with her. Plus, I find her attractive. She is also an efficient buffer between me and NT people dominated world.

But I do not feel the need to develop friendship with others. I am focused on maintaining a relationship with my wife and building relationship with my kids. My dad is AS too and pretty similar in many ways, so it is more like a mutual respect than deep connection. Oh, I also have a sister. I see her like two or three times a year, even though she lives about 4km from my location, lol. Rest of the family I barely have any contact with.

People say that not having friends is bad for you and unhealthy. And it is true. The thing is, it is true for vast majority of folks, but not for everyone. Unfortunately, psychology (don't get me started on absurdity of way too many claims of this non-science!) is focused on a "model human being" and take it as a reference point.

I mean - look at the havoc this pandemic has caused. So many people struggle with mental issues due to social distancing and isolation. So many of them are so starved for contact with other humans that they risk being infected and throw parties to meet with friends. My neighbour was one of those. He is dead now, caught COVID, he had problems with his heart earlier and it was too much for him. I've seen people writing excited notes about how they missed other humans during two weeks of isolation and how great it feels to be among them, walking down the street. Can you imagine that? Feeling excited to be in the crowd of strangers? I perceive them as an annoyance, lol.

Humans have evolved as social species and it was a key to our success. But I think there was always a case of people who weren't into it that much. In less developed stages of civilisation it was harder for them to live or even stay alive, because of this trait, but here and now? People like us can lead comfortable lives, have jobs, pursue our interests and so on. It is not something unhealthy for us to stay away from the society as we do not feel the need to live among people, it doesn't bother us and doesn't have any negative effect on our mental health.

When I explain this concept to others, I quite often use a metaphor about wolves and golden jackals. Wolves form packs - it is natural for them to live in those. But golden jackals do not - they are pairing and raise offspring together, but that's about it when it comes to their social lives. It is rare to see groups of several individuals and in these occasions, they are composed of parents and offspring brought together by necessity - i.e. the prey in the area is too big for one or two jackals to kill it, so they cooperate to down it and have a meal.

These two animals look a bit similar and even can understand each other to some degree when they cross paths i.e. they both howl and can recognise meaning behind other species' howls. But they do not usually mix together (other than some occasional sex between lone jackal females and wolf males when there's no males of their own species to mate with), because they are different canid species with different ways of living, with one way being a valid option for wolf and another one for golden jackal.

I am a golden jackal and I live a happy life!

But there are many who aren't so lucky and their isolation is result of their disability or other traits - well, look around this forum, you'll find an abundance of people struggling with, hating their autism and even having suicidal thoughts because it makes them unable to socialise with others. If you have AS and are a golden jackal, consider yourself lucky. Feel sorry and have some understanding for wolves with AS, they are having really hard time.

Last edited by KMCIURA on 04 Feb 2022, 6:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.