Feeling lonely and yet not feeling good when socializing?

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Can anybody relate to this? It's a very strange feeling, or rather a combination of feelings, if you ask me.

Yes, I feel lonely, want to socialise then have trouble with it when I do. Not only do I feel exhausted but I can't keep up with the level of socialisation that most people seem to require to maintain friendships. It sucks.

I'm very socially isolated and often get lonely, but I get even more lonely whenever I'm in a group social setting. I feel better in a one on one social setting and can handle them much better. It's very hard for me to socialize in group settings. The problem is that one must first get somewhat successfully through group events in order to get a chance to socialize one on one with someone, but I can't seem to get that far. People don't give me much of a chance because of my inability to socialize well in group settings. I don't know how I can get to know new people and make friends who I can socialize with one on one.

Yes. Precisely. Pattern goes:
1) Feel lonely, want to socialize.
2) Decide to do something social.
3) Almost chicken out at last minute.
4) Go anyway (in past, that is. Now stay home and feel better)
5) May have a little fun, or feel board and can't wait to get home.
6) Get home and feel like s**t for several days.

Well although I am very introverted, I do have my moments of being social. If I am not talking to myself in my head I am usually really hyper and I am very very humorous. So I am either in la la land at home or being a spectacle somewhere else lol!! !
Most comfy at home though.

Yup. 'Caught between a rock and a hard place.' (meaning caught between a bad situation and a solution which is another bad situation).

Me too. When I'm alone, I wish there were other people around, and when there are other people around, I wish I was alone.

My problem is a I have a short time limit with people before I start feeling tired, or bored or overwhelmed or irritated, etc. With some people I can last awhile but with most people it's very short.

There are people who, if they get in touch with me, I'm really glad to hear from them but about 5-10 minutes later I'm already tired of them.

I feel this way at times.

For example I might go to a social event even if I know I might feel awkward, and probably won't really enjoy it that much.

Completely. I get lonely sometimes, but when I do try to make friends I seem to end up getting my feelings hurt. So, I bounce between the two.

What this is for me is a feeling of disconnectedness - even when I appear to interact well with an individual or in a group. I feel disconnected from everybody and everything. When my father was alive, he even commented on this saying that I seem to have no interest in being part of a family and not much of an ability to function in group situations.

If the group situation is NOT of my choosing, my ability to function or demonstrate interest is SEVERELY impaired. Most often, people say I look And even when being a part of the situation IS of my own volition, I may try harder but I am still limited/impaired in my ability to function socially. As I've said before on here, people would tell me that I need to try HARDER, but THAT only seems to make matters WORSE! I end up looking like this: I'm unable to follow conversations like others and reciprocate.

SHUTDOWN.

I seem to have gone full circle with thinking/knowing I have ASD/Asperger's to the point that I really don't know anymore.

Depressing.

I don't know when I will be able to get a screening, and the new diagnostic criteria seems to have filtering as many people as possible out of the equation.

I have this issue, and it's one that nobody understands. This is where I think NTs can be black and white thinkers too. If my cousin phoned me up on a Friday or Saturday evening asking if I wanted to come out with them to a noisy rowdy bar place and I refused, if I complained about being lonely, people would say, ''well you had the chance, you said no, if you were that lonely and desperate then you would of said yes''. Then if I said yes to my cousin and went upstairs to get ready and started getting uptight and anxious, people would say, ''you don't have to go out, if it makes you that anxious then you can't want to go out that badly.'' So I've noticed that NTs seem to look at it one way or the other, without thinking of the shady bits in between, where in this situation, I am caught up in the shady bits in between. Part of me wants to go out and socialise, and the thought of it thrills me, but another part of me doesn't because a string of anxieties come into my head. ''Will I get end up standing in the corner?'' ''Will people judge me?'' ''Will I be able to get home OK?'' ''What if I have a little too much to drink and start to feel sick?'' and so on. So in a way I do prefer to just stay at home, where I can relax and don't have to worry about impressing people, and dressing up in clothes that aren't me, and dancing in a place where I don't want to be, and associating myself with people who I am probably too quiet for, and drinking alcohol that doesn't agree with my stomach but knowing that if I don't drink alcohol to relax then I would just be sitting there tense...... See, it's all a vicious circle. And so that is why I avoid these sorts of places - it's because I will be caught up in a vicious circle, so it's best just to avoid these places all together and do things that will make me happier. After all, happiness is what's meant to come first. Young NTs don't realise this until they get older. Then they get to an age where they realise that there is much more to life than dancing about in a noisy bar. That is probably why I can relate to older people better than people in my peers (unless they are quiet or have a disability or something).

I feel lonely on a regular basis, and desire socializing, but often when I do it, it overwhelms me and I end up feeling worse.

NTs don't seem to see friendship the same way that I do. If socializing went the way I wished, people would be close to me, with mutual sharing, but if I needed some time off, and we didn't communicate for a week or two, we could resume our friendship at the same level as when we left it.

I have maybe one or two friends who I only talk to once every few months, and we're still close-ish. But we don't live in the same city.

I try to make friends with people I see regularly, but EVERY time I've tried that lately, there has been some form of miscommunication between us and the friendship falls apart and I'm left wondering what happened. I feel like I miss the other person's signals, or don't understand what they expect from me.

So yes, I'm lonely. But trying to make friends hurts too much. So I stay lonely.

Yes.
And ditto to all of the above replies.
It sucks.

I just got through watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy (over the past couple of nights).
What I love most about that movie is the intimate friendships they all have with each other.
I wish more than anything that I could know what that feels like first-hand, but I know I never will. And that makes me feel very sad and lonely.

I can totally relate to the sentiments expressed in this thread, even now, but especially during the many years when I was single.

When it comes to socializing, the upside of being with my girlfriend is that we both help each other to do it more easily and comfortably. I still have certain kinds and types of difficulties and discomfort, but it's a lot better this way than it was when I was doing it all on my own. The downside is that sometimes one of us gets stuck having to be social for a longer or shorter period of time than is desired, because we've gone somewhere together and aren't always in synch about how good a time we're having and how long we want to stay.

This also affects us at home, when we have house guests. She can't always feel comfortable jumping into the conversations I have with some of my friends. I seriously struggle if she wants someone to stay with us for an extended period of time, because the overload of constant company, disruption of my daily patterns, and disarrangement of our living space starts to get to me very quickly, even if I like the friend who's staying with us a lot. I'm dealing with that right now, and I've been pretty stressed. But I want my girlfriend to be able to have this guest with us, because it's a friend who lives far away. She only visits once or twice a year. She really means a lot to my girlfriend, and it's not fair for me to make things difficult, so I just do the best I can with the situation. My girlfriend has also tried to compromise and to help work things out so I can handle it better.

I'm still not diagnosed yet, but we've agreed to act as if I have, for the purposes of helping her to understand me better and helping me to deal with stuff better. It's making a big difference. Things were much harder when we had no clue what might be going on. How we manage everything has really been improved.

Oh, yes. How I know this cycle... I have finally come to a point where I stay at home, de-hook from technology, and read books I want to read, without a care about whether it is in suave enough taste, or not... In the long run, disappointing books are a lot easier to recover from than exhausting, disappointing humans.

Exactly...