Wanting and not wanting friends

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I feel that I don't want any friends. As an adult I've felt that the high cost I pay for social interaction (eg. overwhelm, exhuastion, shutdown) is too high to want to bother. I understand though that there are positive aspects to friendships that I am missing out on, such as not feeling so alone.

I have been feeling very alone lately. I've been having a really hard time for a few months now and I tell my psychologist that I feel alone, that there is no one in my life that can understand me and how I see the world, and no one who is there to help me to get through the challenges that I face everyday.

She says that she thinks that I never learnt to make these connections with people so I only think that I don't want friends because I don't know of anything else and it is easier to believe than to try and fail. Could this be true? When I think about the possibilities like I could go out to dinner or have someone to gain support from, it looks like a fairytale. But the reality of those things would be a lot of distress and the expectation of mutual support, which I honestly don't feel like I can muster at the moment.

Maybe I have never found the right type of person before. Maybe I'm looking for someone else with aspergers. Because although I feel alone in my experience of life, I don't feel lonely.

Having experienced the empowering feeling of friendship, I definitely want friends. But, like you, I really have no idea how to gain and maintain friendships. It seems that it's been an elusive beast for me that has evaded me for many years and I don't really understand what it takes for people to want to be around you.

I definitely want friends. I perhaps don't want as many as some people, I have 4 at the moment - my best friend (of 13 years) and the other 3 I have known for 2 years, plus my husband of course. I think I perhaps have a slightly different perspective on friendship from most people, in terms of how much contact I need and how I relate to people. I also don't tend to have very deep friendships. For example, friends quite often come in and out of my life as my interests change or people move away and I don't usually miss people. But I would not want to be totally alone, I do enjoy companionship.

I tend to describe myself as I want friends but I don't want the social interactions that comes with that.


I'm absolutely miserable about not having friends, but I don't want what people think comes with a friendship. I want someone I can rely on, someone who can rely on me, someone I can sit in the same room as typing on our computers and taking breaks to play board games. The social interactions part doesn't seem like a good thing, the person you know cares for you and you know you can turn to at any necessary moment, is something I'm miserable about not having.

I never used to need friends. From grade school all the way to age 22 I had very few friends. I had two or three people I ended up hanging out with over the years, but never felt close to people. I ate my high school lunches in the library or the bathroom until I made friends with the band kids and then I spent my lunches and spare periods helping the music teacher teach the younger kids or sitting in with the older kids. I'm glad the music teacher let me sit in on classes, or else I would have been wandering around alone. I always dreaded lunch until I discovered I could do music instead.

Somewhere around the age of 22 I went to a very small theatre college and my class had 13 people in it. We all got close fast, by the nature of theatre. That was the first time I had close friends, and the first time I shared myself.

Ever since then, I haven't been able to go back to that time where I was all right being alone. Nowadays I tend to get depressed when I have no one in my life.

Social interaction is hard and overwhelming, and I often wish I could go back to being okay alone, because then I wouldn't need other people so much.

But at the same time, having friends is a good feeling.

I never wanted friends. I just wanted someone to lecture too about my obsesions and boss around. Once I found out that's not what a friend was, I lost intrest in making them. Even as an adult, I refuse to make friends with people that don't have the same intrests as me and I only talk to people I supposedly am friends with about my obsessions.

In theory friends sound good. But in practice people inevitably annoy me somehow. I also can't quite imagine what I would really 'do' with friends. Ultimately, the 'I want friends' element must arise from some non-rational area of me, because the rational area can't make any sense of it.

I'm not even sure what a 'friend' is.. someone who would help you move? Someone who would go out to lunch with you so you can talk about whatever? Someone who agrees with you on the relative worthiness of particular shows/games/general concepts? But then, how often can you really discuss or do such things before it gets boring?

I've just never had great experiences with 'friendships' in general.. in hindsight they seem less like friendships and more like a parasitic relationship..

Another way of putting it is, I generally find nice people to be too boring, but non-nice people always end up being.. not nice. It's easier to just not even consider the whole thing in the first place.

I don't want a friend. I want a friend. All of my potential face-to-face friends had friends. You know what I mean. The "best choices." The ones they turn everyone else down in order to continue a conversation with.
And oh yes, I'm lonely. I succeed in ignoring it, but I know it's still there, deep inside. I've had friends before. It didn't work. Maybe it's just my lot.

Mglosenger, all of your thoughts match mine well. When I picture having a friend, I always see myself talking with them for hours in a coffee shop. But I know there's more to it than that. It seems that loneliness is the lesser of two evils when it comes to something that requires maintenance and may not even be worth it in the end.

I think really I simply always find people 'yucky' somehow. This whole physical universe thing has always been rather bizarre to me.. it's all so.. biological

I would say your psychologist may be projecting NT sensibilities onto you.

I've found that I do need social interaction and need to know people but don't really need "friends" in the typical sense. I prefer to have acquaintances related to work and hobbies. It gives us a common subject to discuss and it's easy to deflect any requests to move things to a purely social setting. When I'm stressed out I can just stay home and don't get a call asking me to go out to some bar or whatever. I never really understood why it was frowned upon to do certain things alone like eating or going to a movie. I like doing those things alone, so I do.

If you are feeling lonely, maybe you could find a shared hobby or group activity of some sort. Maybe do some volunteer work.

I'm not too concerned with having friends. Some of the games I play aren't as fun alone. The only time I really feel lonely is when I play one specific game. I keep going back to playing it after long breaks, but because it is such a lonely game, I stop pretty quick.

I agree with you though, people are too much of a pain. I've had friends, but I've slowly been breaking away from them, because even though I've known them for 10 or more years, they're still a pain.