Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
As another commenter posted, I wished someone had told me this when I was younger.<p>I never had a lot of friends in high school. I was a nerd when and where being a nerd was bad. I never really got the dynamic that mirrororing helps a lot with this and that I contributed to this by unwittingly coming across as aloof. What friends I had weren&#x27;t... great. Frankly, after high school I never saw them again and honestly don&#x27;t feel like I was missing much.<p>What compounds this is I have severe myopia. Always have, always will. It&#x27;s not the kind of thing that surgery can fix. This meant, say, playing team sports just wasn&#x27;t possible. It&#x27;s also a limiting factor in so many things. Not being able to drive a massive handicap. It impacts the ability to even watch sports so that&#x27;s not something I ever developed an interest in.<p>I also have anxiety issues. Not major. Not &quot;I can&#x27;t leave the house&quot; type issues but... issues. In high school I never had to try so it wasn&#x27;t an issue. In college I did, although I didn&#x27;t realize it at the time. But it kept me from going to classes in part because I just didn&#x27;t want to have to deal with not being able to see&#x2F;read the board from that distance.<p>So I was pretty much a no-show and ended up dropping out. This also meant that I just didn&#x27;t make a circle of friends in college like so many seem to.<p>There&#x27;s been some interesting research done on people who appear trustworthy. This is a hard thing to measure but it seems to hold almost universally true. I think the study was about people who appear &quot;untrustworthy&quot; were more likely to be given the death sentence out of a pool of people who were all later exonerated with DNA evidence.<p>I feel like I&#x27;m one of those people that people just react negatively to. Even if they don&#x27;t I don&#x27;t think it matters because I pretty much believe it to be true. Combine that with some low-grade anxiety and you get a bad mix of trust issues and keeping one&#x27;s distance from people.<p>I only ever really had one serious relationship and it didn&#x27;t work out in a fairly gut-wrenching way that&#x27;s stayed with me for years, in part from the self-flagellation for the choices I made that contributed to that ending.<p>So here I am, years later in my 40s. I have acquaintances but not much in the way of true friends. Honestly I can&#x27;t even remember the last time I had a deep conversation with somebody. I&#x27;m reminded of Kevin Spacey&#x27;s character in American Beauty when asked &quot;how are you?&quot; and he replied that it&#x27;d been a long time since anyone had asked. That&#x27;s how I feel.<p>How people form relationships mystifies me so unlike some whose friends fall away but they still have their families, I don&#x27;t even have that.<p>So here I am still wondering, how do people make friends?