"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

men are afraid of women, part XXXXXLVI in a series

Yeah I saw that one too. I have hard time believing kinds of things are real anymore.

(Besides, they always self-explain way too much for the benefit of the reader, which is just bad writing to me, lol.)

*these kinds of things

DL otm: depressed

internet "comedy" must be destroyed

made-up stuff precisely like this w/"crazy girls" sometimes reads like it comes from the same venn diagram circle as 'mccain campaign worker gets attacked by crazy black man in PA'

really w/r/t the "ex-gf stalking" stuff, which i see a lot of for some reason. idk.

it's kind of a comedy meme atm, like those android commercials with the technologically up-to-date stalker girl

I dunno, I guess it satisfies some need in people to feel less crazy than everyone else. Like, "oh well if that's crazy then I'm okay."

If I find out the ones where a student's mum misunderstands a sexual reference and uses it an unwittingly hilarious way are fake then I'm boycotting the internet.

haha

I basically don't believe anything i see online anymore, which is depressing and existentially harrowing.

i understand this:

phrasing this delicately bc rl but -- a certain student who went pretty self-evidently insane at an east coast university recently turns out to be friends w/ a number of ppl i know, and at least a handful of them have defended her vehemently even tho she is clearly off the rails. i don't think it's totally unbelievable that close friendship can blur craziness.

― Mordy

a friend of mine was with someone for awhile and she smear-campaigned him after they broke up, contacting exes of his and telling them and all their mutual friends that he was an abuser (which was, for reasons too numerous to go into here, an absurd and unbelievable lie, and i'm someone who is inclined to err on the side of believing someone who says they've been abused), but her friends happily went along with it and he left town (after which she continued to send him mocking e-mail messages interspersed with e-mails professing love.)

if that iphone message conversation is real, then the kevin guy has deleted all his responding texts and trimmed out the non-crazy ones, imo

Also he's an asshole. I feel like Facebook is meant to be public so if you say stupid shit you can expect someone to screengrab it but a private text conversation? Nah.

tbf I have a screenshot of a batshit crazy text I received once but it was only to show to a select few friends

well u know we are select few friends here

eh, maybe some other time. I think I correlated it with her probably locking herself in a bathroom and threatening to kill herself for some other dude

the bros who cried wolf.

I really thinks its kind of funny that I have hundreds of friends on Facebook, but not one single irl friend.

That's not funny.

Well, yeah, wrong word. Don't mind me, just going through a feeling sorry for myself phase, realizing its been 15 months now since I've done anything at all with a friend irl.

that's pretty crazy. im a semi-hermit half the time and i saw 6 old friends and 3 acquaintances in the last 2 days. i only have 40 facebook friends. my girlfriend makes fun of me for it. she has over 400.

Just you know, get older friends disappear, etc. Making new friends when you are over 30 is a fucking impossible task.

I have to believe that's not true. Otherwise, I'm doomed.

most of my friends are in their 30s, and im not far off, i turn 28 this year.

probably made more friends since 30 than during my entire 20s

Same here. My 20s were a wasteland of being with one partner who was a paranoid, socially shattered twat who relied on me so heavily I never made a single other friend in the first 4 years or so I was in Melb.

I really regret that now, bcz I have not been able to now break into the social circles I wish I'd been in all along, and instead ended up on the fringes of a raggedy bunch of goth/nerd types who I basically have fuck all in common with, and now I am depressing myself thinking about all this oh christ my head.

See I had tons of friends in college and in my 20s, but most of those relationships have faded off (as they do sometimes) and now I realize I don't have any friends of my own that I see socially (i.e. ones that aren't people I see because of my wife's friends). Its pretty depressing, but really, if you hit 35 and have no friends you may as well pack it in, because you aren't ever going to make new ones.

Well not with that attitude you arent! :)

By which I mean, one has to get out there and go for it, I guess.

Do you think it's harder to make new friends when you're not new in town? xp to Trayce

jvc, I'm think that sometimes, but I'm not sure it's true. People in their 30s -retirement have to start fresh in new places all the tie and they make new friends I think?

I mean, I don't know, I think my situation is a combination of bad timing and my interests. Like when I do get the time to get out and do something, I like going to shows which aren't exactly conducive to meeting new people - its hard to talk to people when loud bands are playing. And its not like I haven't tried, I've been taking my son to this playgroup thing, but it turns out to be all women and I'm the only dad. So, I don't know. Hermit life here I come.

I think in a way it might actually be easier to make friends as you get over the 20s/30s hump. A number of people tend to shed their egos and insecurities as they get older and more comfortable with themselves, which allows them to open up a bit more and not feel such a need to surround themselves with a very particular type of person out of a need for the edification of a restrictive self-image. If that makes sense? You just need to open yourself up to those people, maybe explore some new hobbies and hang out in some new venues, etc.

Yeah, that does make a lot of sense, but I don't really think I have that kind of problem of needing to surround myself with one particular type of person. Like, one of things I really enjoyed about my 20s is that I had groups of friends that were all really different from each other and I really liked that I was able to be myself and enjoy my time with such disparate types of people.

I think whats hard about being 35 is that there isn't a lot of people my age looking for that particular experience at this point in their lives. Like, a lot of the group activity things I've investigated have been full of people significantly older (retirees, etc) or younger. There just don't seem to be a lot of people I'm running into in a similar situation to me.

I've kind of got the exact opposite prob to you, I suspect - all my long-childless, long-unmarried, hedonistic mates have all bloody gotten married/hooked up and popped out kids now theyre in their 30s. Fuckers. All of them. Ive lost touch with 4 or 5 good close friends because of this.

(er, to further explain, I never wanted kids, so now I feel like some left-out peter pan dill)

Heh, see I kind of feel like now that I have kids, I'm expected to just abandon any and all attempt at a social life.

I made a lot of friends after 30, but a lot of this has to do with moving to the middle of nowhere with my wife when she started as a university professor.

We went to the new faculty orientation (back when the state actually was hiring new professors) and met a bunch of other people around our age who were all in the same situation, and a lot of them are really good friends now six years later.

Just to throw out a suggestion: my social life in Chicago was saved by improv. It might not be a particularly easy thing to do with kids, but I've definitely known people who did it. But once you're in it, it's pretty much a readymade social circle to the extent that you actually want it to be. And (speaking as an introvert who can sometimes tend toward hermitage) it's probably still the best thing I ever did for myself for a number of reasons.

Having some kind of hobby where there is an actual social element is huge. To me this advice was always baffling because my hobbies were always solitary – drawing, going to concerts, buying stupid shit, watching movies, etc. When I started knitting & going to stitch & bitch meetups, I found it v easy to make friends because you all at least have the hobby in common. Anything additional makes for an easy entrance into some quality friendships.

Yep a fair few of my female friends do roller derby. Theyre *obsessive* about the friendships in it, now.

Moving to a new country at 28 was kind of hard because the people who you tend to make friends with tend to also be new transplants or fellow Brits and you feel like you're being a stereotype but sometimes the people who've been here for years already have their social circles set and their own routines and scenes. That said, in both places there are people I've seen socially repeatedly and been 'oh yeah, we should meet up sometime!' and never do, and then people you just click with and start wanting to go to the same bars on the same weekends or whatever - you just put in a fraction more of an effort, I guess.

so otm! i feel bad about NOT feeling bad that i haven't made many friends since moving here when i was (also) 28. and my BFF here is british! we bonded over shared immigration hassles. i kind of don't really care about making new friends bc i still have lots of old ones, it's just that they don't live within a visiting radius of me. i like spending lots of time on my own, i like spending lots of time with just my husband, i like spending time skyping with old friends. i don't like spending time vetting potential new friends to make sure they won't be needy and demand i meet social requirements and guilt-trip me when i don't feel like it.

i actually think i'd put more effort into making friends if had kids.

I got really bummed about 5 years after moving that I didn't have many friends, that my circle of OG Australian friends were so far away from me. But one of my good friends put it in perspective: it took me 25 years to build the circle of friends I had back home...it's going to take time to build a good circle of friends in a new country. So I've got a couple of pretty good, cool friends and I'm okay with that now.

The hardest thing was that the friends I picked turned out to be the flakiest people in the world. And eventually I had to say, "Look, I don't think you understand that when we arrange to go out and you don't show up, I take that personally. Making friends is fucking hard, and it's soul crushing to think that people who are enthusiastic about hanging out suddenly are changing their minds at the last minute. So please, please PLEASE for the love of god, do not arrange to do anything unless you mean it." And from then on we were cool.

hey jon, here's some good news/bad news -- now that you're a parent you can look forward to making friends with all your kid's friend's parents when they start going to school!

p sure I would be v terrible at improv and roller derby lol

Whats sort of ironic in this whole thing is that when I was in Austin for 2 days for work, I met like 4 really cool people that wanted me to stick around to hang out. Its like, wait, I can meet new people in 2 days in Austin, but nobody in Chicago over multiple years? Maybe Austin bros are just v chill and Chicagoans are antisocial as hell.

Yr welcome to come to any CHILX get-togethers we discuss on the thread; I'd like to meet u IRL sometime.