Why you don’t have many friends

It is an innate yet strange thing in us, humans, to assume that every connection should succeed. We are so selective with our romantic companions, yet when it comes to friendship, every seed should flourish.

A friend is a partner. You can make friends, in the light sense of the term, very easily. You just have to be friendly, it is often reciprocated. The reason why it doesn’t solidify from there is the reason why you don’t have many friends.

Part 1 — Investing
Friendships tend to develop under unplanned time spent together. As you grow up and you start being paid per hour, the more you get paid the more likely you will develop the sense of the waste of time.

The majority of things you will do in life will fail but is crucial for your success. Success, when not luck, is often the outcome of enduring failure. Either a numbers game or a learning process, perhaps both.

You will have to invest your time into relationships. Unlike money, you only have so much time, but it will be worth spending as according to science, meaningful relationships are the number one reason behind longevity and a sense of a well-lived life.

Your time is limited, but just like finding a romantic partner can be fun, and reveal or develop new segments of your personality. Finding a friendship partner can be just the same. Through attempts of friendship, introductions are made, and before you know it, your best friend is the friend of a person you are just sort of friends with.

Part 2 — Curiosity

There is this moment in every upgraded mutual acquaintance connection, you start spending more unplanned time together and you feel you know each other, yet you don’t really know much at all.

What happens next might is a core difference between those that have many friends and those who don’t. It’s the split between the curious and the judgemental. A judgemental extrovert will have less meaningful connections than a curious introvert. The judgemental extrovert is just social, and can make a lot of acquaintances, but can’t maintain friendships. As soon as the person starts getting closer, they become comfortable judging direct or indirectly. Notice this in yourself?

Judging is common, we are constantly judging things, trying to guess before we learn. Pairing different types of information with what we have seen before and putting it together like a broken jar.

When you judge you are losing all the chances to develop a friendship. Asking questions with an open mind can be enlightening and help you grow as a person. Open doors of opportunity in your mind that might translate to a less limiting life experience.

See if you judge he who smokes or she who flirts, in a bottled stereotype what is there to learn? You are not curious, you decided this person is not worth getting to know, and you met this kind before. At this moment, you are the fool. You are misjudging this person. You know this is true because you are familiar with the feeling, as chances are, someone has done this to you — Not given you a chance.

It is very difficult for people to be the same. We are born at different times and exposed to different things, so much has happened to us. You might be from the same city as me, and the same age, gender, same interests, and even then, we are so so different. Beyond personality, beliefs, and goals, there’s that awful thing that happened to you, and that awful thing that happened to me. We can act the same, to feel like we belong or that we hold some kind of value, or maybe even to mask our true self in a social setup, a shield to protect the fragile inside of an insecure, self-judging human.

This social behavior of acting a certain way is a social ritual we learn to perform to make socializing easier. Our social self. An easy comprehensible version of us, that hopefully is likable. This social self becomes to unpeel itself as we become more comfortable around those around us. We relax. When you can’t relax, the ritual is exhausted, and you feel socially drained. Sounds familiar?

The key thing here is to allow for comfort in others and allow for that comfort in yourself. This doesn’t mean you act like you are at home in your workplace or at a party. This social self is a healthy ritual, it allows privacy and it is part of a functioning environment — not everyone should be trialed for friendship.

Being authentic doesn’t mean you share personal details of your life with those you have just met. There’s authenticity in the social self. You chose that Griffindor hat. And signaling this persona is useful to find like-minded. The stereotypes save us time at the acquaintance level.

Part 3 — Tolerance

You know real love when you see it. It is unconditional. A parent and a child, a couple that makes up, or friends that despite knowing each other so well, now and then are reminded of the bits they don’t like so much in each other.

Forgiveness. Tolerance.

Neither in romance nor friendship, the two are just so perfect together, they see no flaws. This is not love, this is a whim, passion. Real love is in seeing the good and the bad and accepting it. Accepting your friends as they are. Tolerating the things in them you are not so fond of. Tolerating the feelings inside of you, annoyance, frustration. After all, in most cases there is nothing intrinsically wrong with their behavior, you are just not a fan of the stylistic approach they take in certain situations. The fun is, you get to annoy them back with things in you, you do, and you never bothered to change.

Forgiveness is powerful. Practice forgiveness, as it is not easy, yet it is the master key to long-lasting relationships.

We are not perfect, and the longer we are friends the more the chances one will mess up, maybe even both. It’s maybe not intentional, it might escalate and take you back to judgment and ignite a huge fight. You might not speak for days. Relationships are challenged to the point there is a need for forgiveness if it happens you have perhaps, a friend for life.