Why it is difficult to make friends in mature age

Post Reply New Topic

1) Decline in vitality and energies. Vitality is a strange thing. I would like to think that all ages have their forms of vitality. At 70 it’s not sensible to think one can climb mount Everest. You have to dose your resources, not dissipate, and, in a sense, specialize. Once old people were valued for their experience, their memories, and being somewhat wise. It’s not more this way, and each one of us is disposable and useless like old PCs. But you are nor anymore inclined to put much efforts to communicate your views and your life-history to people who are not keen on listening stale narratives.
2) Instant information is looked for and the web and media are much more competitive than old people.
3) Young people have no interest in gloomy outlooks. Outlooks may look gloomy, buy sometimes are only realistic. To view as futile many involvements is a matter of economy, and if Lenin had understood that the administration of society, even under socialism, could never be so simple that a cook could have managed it easily (he said that – how could he? Well he said it and many people believed him) he would have spared the world a lot of suffering, and might have spent his life as librarian at his better satisfaction.
4) Same thing might be said for Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples, the “Chicago boys”, Baroness Thatcher and many other reformers and eradicators of Evil on the right.
5) I have probably already irritated some people and surely not made progress in gaining friends.
6) The more you advance in age the more you survive in an array of mental stratagems, which are important for you, but irrelevant for others. You may, for example, have reached some very idiosyncratic ideas about how to cope with fact that you are surrounded by universal injustice, public idiocy, spin, outright lies dispatched by media, educational systems, slaughterhouses, daily massacres. The stratagem he might be a high degree of detachment, looking things from afar, because, after all you can’t do anything normally to fight idiocy and large scale cruelty. You can defend a weak person if you see her\him being a victim, but if you start thinking that you can eradicate evil from the planet you end up like Lenin or Mao or Pol Pot or that Reverend in Guyana some decade ago.
7) This for now. Numbers are not an idea of mine but an oddity of the computer’s behavior which I am not able to intepret.

If you look at the world around you, notice the sun, the warm wind in the leaves.
Taste something exquisite.
We exist in present time and can actively extract from life what we will within our circumstances.
Even the youngest aren't guaranteed tomorrow; all alive are ageless in the context of now.

I sometimes think of myself as a fine, vintage wine, properly aged, and there is no one interested in drinking it, as they would rather have a Coke.

Yes, all alive are ageless, very well said, I agree. It's one of my statagems now to see life this way.

Why is it difficult to make friends at any age that’s above adolescence?

The answer I give to you is in that question.

Actually, I found adolescence very difficult
Only in college did I really make friends.
When I went back to school, I assumed
that it would be similar, but I was so focused
on getting through, that I didn't. Grad school
ain't doing it either.

I don't even know what "friend" and "friendship" mean. I have to know what the expectations are, and if they change, so I can decide if I agree to those terms. And I have to decide what it is I am expecting and to notify them if my own expectations change.

People say to "go with the flow".

Ever seen a twig or styrofoam cup "going with the flow"? Bounces against rocks, spins around and around, gets hung up in some slimy gunk. As seen in gutters around the world.

Does the friendship require doing a lot of things that, well, I would try to get out of by "accidently" jabbing a shrimp fork in my buttock just so I wouldn't have to go?

"Gosh, new friend, I am so sorry I cannot go spelunking with you for the week. No, has nothing to do with the entry point being a 150 foot drop into a dark, bottomless hole that ends up in dank water and bat guano. No, no, if course there's no problem with crawling on my belly for a mile and a half and having to pack out all my bodily waste products. I just happened to have a shrimp fork stuck in my right buttock and I need to go the hospital."

I want to add this: of course if making friends in advanced age is difficult, this difficulty is hugely compounded by autism. After all enjoying friendship means the possibility of intimacy, and how difficult intimacy is for us! We are all folded up in our bubbles, vital idiosyncrasies, habits, rituals. A friend should always be careful not to trespass in your bubble, and in contradiction with this, should love or like your particular way of living in your bubble. You are your bubble, in a way, your bubble is private and forcedly secretive, so how to have people be interested and respectful for something mysterious?

And with age the bubble solidifies, becomes encrusted, impenetrable.

You interpreted it correctly; both times. Since we with ASD are on a spectrum where each symptom is of differing severity for each individual, i.e., one person could have a single symptom as bad as is possible, and the rest not so; but that one symptom is what precludes the individual from friendship in person.

I was frosty in early primary and preschool; you could sit down next to someone and stack blocks with them and you're good friends.... They talk to you, and they don't even mind if you answer back with nothing but a nod or a shake of your head; the action of playing blocks was enough.... You even get invited to peoples’ houses, and people thought good things of you.

I was frosty in early 20s; you could sit down next to someone and smoke drugs with them and you're good friends.... They talk to you, and they don't even mind if you answer back with nothing but a nod or a shake of your head; the action of smoking drugs was enough.... You even get invited to peoples’ houses, and people thought good things of you.

Ha...I'm laughing.

I’ve regressed since then; I couldn’t sit next to an adult now, well I could; I wouldn’t need drugs to feel “high”.

College was the only time I had friends as well. I have a few friends now, mostly acquaintances that I do things with occasionally (all w/ kids the same approximate ages as mine.) I only have 1 close friend right now and she is also an undiagnosed aspie. And she moved in next door, which is great! I think it's helping both of us to learn so much from each other. We misread each other's intentions all the time, but we actually talk about it afterwards, which is much better than my (and her) old habit of avoiding that person afterwards. Like if i have a headache and am grumpy, but I don't tell her, she'll think I'm mad at her until I tell her sorry, I had a horrible headache yesterday. And w/ all this practice, I'm starting to tell people WHILE I have the headache that I have one and they're more understanding of my bad moods.

THe best thing is that she has kids, so our kids tend to like to all be in one house together. So my kids will disappear for a few hours and I don't have to worry about them in exchange for her kids coming over here to scream and tell for a few hours. It works out.

Back to the OP, I think I'm just too tired to bother making new friends. I'm tired of not being sure if they really want to be friends or if they're just being nice to that weird lady. I'm tired of trying to figure out what they mean when they say something. I'm just tired of it all.

I don't have a crusty bubble.

I don't see people here having much trouble expressing themselves. At all.

When I see that people say they have no friends, which I also say, it seems like folks here are a great bunch. Friend-worthy.

What is the difference between being open and honest here and being open and honest in daily life? There isn't one.

What is wrong with companionable silence? Being content to be in each other's presence. Some people and relationships and friendships are more like dogs. Running around, straining at leashes, ready to go, leaping and bounding.

Others are more like cats. There is some boisterous activity, but not on the same level as a dog. Cat will jump in the lap, demand attention, and just as mysteriously jump out of the lap and lie down somewhere. I'm more cat. I think a lot of Aspies might be more cat.

We don't do tricks. We don't do a lot of dangling tongue in public stuff. We just kind of do our own thing. And millions of people love cats. Maybe we need to look to befriend people who like cats. Or people who enjoy bird-watching.

When you are a kid or a teen you normally live in an environment, like school, where you find class mates, bench mates, pairs with whom you socialize, play, study together. You are not so much self conscious about your being special. Later this “forced” (but not always disagreeable) socialization becomes less frequent. In work situations, where people of our kind find sometimes impossible to enter, the mate is often a competitor, being together is often marred by utility or hostility. Anyhow it’s not only more difficult to make friends, you also gradually lose them. They leave, they have their problems, sometimes they die. And what often happens is that, while before there was some intellectual openness, later in life, people encrust themselves in some dogmatic convictions, which are, in fact, some byproduct of their life experiences.

While with animals a mute companionship is possible (but there must be some barks, purring, body language, mieows, licking) with humans staying together in silence when you meet is nearly impossible. Not to say anything means being hostile. The reason for elevator conversations about weather is not an exchange of information about being cold or hot outside but rather “I say this because I am not your enemy”.

Paolo, I never did that stuff in school. I didn't have close friends at all in school. Banished to the undesirable areas, like the rest of the social rejects. Most of the time I wandered off long before being banished.

Those social things exist even before school. And not knowing how they work and being into one's own thoughts had me go elsewhere. There's a social hierarchy and kids are assessed and placed into that category with a once-over view by the kings and queens of the playground.

I did the same thing at jobs. Wandered off by myself. Didn't have much to do with coworkers. They usually didn't like me too much, I guess, but I didn't notice too much, because again, I was in my own mind.

I do like talking to people. I'm just not good at maintaining long term friendships. Casual ones are fine.

It doesn't have to be that we are "set in our ways" but instead "we have found ourselves". We've already been through a lot, and learned many lessons (hopefully) that have added to our knowledge and perhaps we have gained wisdom.

We have discarded meaningless things. We have decided what it is that is MOST important to us. We've realized there are some things we just don't like and don't want to do. Things that look fun, like skating and twirling around on the dance floor, not for me. I get dizzy or nauseated or have no balance or just fall down a lot. The dizzy thing has always been there, and it's not going away.

I am open to new ideas. I crave ideas.

I am often looking for ways to make this world better. And they might not be huge improvements, but there are many little things, supporting roles we can play to help this world.

I like talking to people in the elevator. Sometimes I'm just very tired though. There ARE people I'd consider "elevator friends". Our friendship is only related to the elevator. That's okay. There are hallway friends. Garage friends. Grocery store friends.

A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet.

you have to get out of that bubble.

the bubble is being over-precious about yourself. you're so f*****g special.