Maintaining friendship.

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I have no trouble making friends - a lot of people both online and in real life seem to find me likable. But keeping friends is another story entirely.

When I first make friends with people, I'm excited and happy about it at first. But eventually I become afraid of being too emotionally involved with them, so I push them away. I do this by either ignoring them until they leave me alone ("giving them the cold shoulder") or using some petty issue as an excuse to blow up at them and make them hate me so they'll leave me alone.

But later on, I start feeling bad about the way I behaved and I start missing the company of the people who I pushed away. I wish I could become friends with them again, but I know that I've hurt them too badly and they probably don't want anything to do with me anymore.

I have done this many times over the years, especially to other WrongPlanet members.

I suspect that the reason why I behave this way is rooted in a few bad friendships I had in the past.

First and foremost is my real-life friendship with a girl who I became extremely emotionally attached to - to the point of developing romantic feelings for her - which ended very badly (it's a long story). I was so emotionally invested in the relationship that when it ended, my trust towards other people was completely destroyed. I have never been able to form a bond with others the way I bonded with her.

Another relationship I had was when I first got the Internet as an 11 year old. I knew nothing about internet safety, so I started chatting and becoming friends with two boys who were much older than me (one was 17 and the other was 19). To make a long story short, even though they never met me in person, they made sexual comments to me during our chats and they emotionally manipulated me so that even though I knew it was wrong, I couldn't bring myself to stop talking to them out of fear that I would hurt their feelings. My emotional slavery towards them really damaged my relationship with my family members, and after the drama finally ended, I made an internal promise to never allow myself to be controlled by people over the Internet again.

I dunno, all of my friendships get killed by thing like moving before they have a chance to last more than 1-3 years. The one friendship I had that was not forcefully broken slowly died as I went through the hardest time I had with AS.

For me less is more. Even with online friends I only want to have a few really good friends so I can give enough time and attention to each one.

My offline group of friends consists mostly of fans of a particular type of band but I only feel close to one. One other I would be close to if I saw her more but the rest are just aquaintances. These are people I actually hang out with and talk to but they don't feel like real friends. Maybe it's me, I just can't get into deep friendships. I'm a pal, a drinking buddy.

I have two main friends here and one other on another forum.

The problem with me is not giving too much early but not giving enough, even after a couple of years of friendships. I've blown off another chance to hang out with my friend due to my anxiety of moving to the city. I'm considering going out to dinner at least but I'm not really sure. We will have plenty of opportunities to hang out.
I think there's another aquaintance who wants to be a friend but doesn't know how to go about it. He contacted me last night about hanging out at a concert (same one my friend is going to) but I gave him the impression I wasn't going to go.

If anyone is the friendkiller it's me. I get overwhelmed and anxious to fit in and just call the whole thing off. I will not do it with these friends. I love them and they understand me (in ways) and accept me.

There's even a musician I know who I consider a friend. More of an aquaintance but my first friends were in bands and I can't let that go. I really want to be his friend. And my friend is good friends with a singer I just want to have one conversation with.
My Welsh rockstar friend is a real friend even if it's so hard to get to see him. Damn celebrities.

I have a great deal of difficulty in making proper friends.
Slightly unusually perhaps, for someone with AS, I can sometimes go up and speak directly to someone without prompting and maintain a conversation in certain topic areas. This gives the impression that I have lots of 'mates'.
But when it comes down to maintaining and building proper friendships, I find it much harder, and have always found that I have to make most of the effort to do so (maybe because I can come across as a little odd). If I don't make the effort to maintain contact, other certainly don't, and the friendship disappears.

Thanks.

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It's an interesting question, whether or not friendships "run their course".

I don't know if I agree with that. If a person does not want to be friends anymore there is nothing I can do. But that hasn't been my experience with non romantic friendships. They maybe fade from lack of effort etc (that pesky friendship maintenance again!) but friendships that actually ended have been those where romantic feelings got in the way.

Usually one party being in love and the other not. I agree it is sometimes possible to move past that and continue the friendship but on one occasion I felt I had to cease all contact as any amount of contact would have given the other person false hope (I'd say that was a rare case, and one that I regret to this day).

I did a course at uni once and managed to keep up with one student from that but maybe that was an acquaintance more than a friend, and some time after the course there wasn't that much connecting us.

Maybe that's how one knows it was more a purpose-limited thing. I would probably expect "true" friendship (ie friendship) to continue on even if people and interests do change. It was so easy to form these kinds of friendship at school, 9 years of shared experiences, and I was hardly aware that I was forming relationships, it just sort of happened. It is so much harder now.

Quixotic, yes I did have you down as a younger person because you were talking about online friendships etc. It's undoubtedly ageist of me to think only younger people have those. I can be a bit mentally inflexible sometimes. More to the point though, if you tend to jump in feet first emotionally then I think that is just who you are and that's no bad thing.

Even falling in love where one perhaps shouldn't is a sign of being alive. It may cause all manner of problems if one acts on it, but in itself I think it's pretty brilliant.