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

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.

xpost

Yeah, Chicagoans have a tendency to nest. My Chicago circles pretty much consist of people I knew before I lived there and improv peeps.

If you learned to knit you would really be the darling of the knitting circle (as a str8 man even if married).

n/a yeah, thanks, I need to come to one that works and soon

Yeah, its hard to generalize cities, but one of the guys I met in Austin complimented me on my Nachtmystium t-shirt and we struck up a convo for like 25 minutes. On the other hand, I saw a guy in Reckless here a couple weeks ago with a Ghost t-shirt. It was a couple days after their show here so I asked if he'd seen them and just got a frown and grunt in return.

improv ppl. brrrrrr.

I am only saying "knitting group" bcz I have no idea what the "male" version of stitch & bitch is; I try not to think of it as a gendered activity but YOU KNOW. In my mind it's slot car racing.

It sucks making friends in a new town; there are flakes and crazoids in every hamlet and it seems like some of them are always around to start you off with a bad impression. However, there are also awesome people of all demographics. I don't see why friend making would end at any age; it's not like you stop needing friends after Jesus age.

Mordy, I didn't have the highest opinion of improv until I started doing it and met some of the best and kindest people I know.

I've been seriously thinking about learning to knit so's I could have something to do while doing otherwise unconstructive stuff like watching tv for hours.

If it wasnt for the internet I'd probably be a shut in with no friends at all, so.

Yeah, I mean, thank god my wife has lots of friends so I get dragged out of the house now and then.

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

Seconded. Some of us are OK.

It was ridiculously easy to make conversations with total strangers in New Orleans. I don't think Chicagoans are unfriendly, but we have that big city thing of minding our own business and figuring if a stranger Is talking to you, they probably want something. In NOLA I found that you could say Hi to some random person in the street and wind up in a conversation. Not just bc of booze, either.

Yeah, there is definitely a different vibe here when it comes to interacting with strangers.

I just make all my friends through message boards and twitter. Talking to random strangers is no way to live.

JON you have met me. You have friends, you just need to come hang out with us!

Do you mean to say that you have met n/a and LL and other chilxors and missed a bunch of their semi-regular faps and not asked them out to anything and not planned a gathering to reach out to people, and it's been a couple of years that you've been there (at least?), and now you're complaining to the internet that you don't have any friends?

Have you tried...being a friend? Inviting people on planned activities so that it's easy for them to say "yes"?

Sorry, jon, my obvious irritation isn't really directed at you, it's a build-up of every person who has ever cried to me that they don't have any friends when they are resolutely and repeatedly unwilling to BE a friend to anyone else because it's inconvenient for them or they don't see what they would get out of it.

I actually only met LL to pick up a ticket to a Gudied by Voices show, I haven't met any of the other chilxors. And it isn't that I'm unwilling, believe me, my hesitation with the chilxor group in particulat comes from me being really intimidated by being the "third wheel" to a group that obviously knows each other really, really well. I don't think that makes me altogether weird.

And, in larger terms, I am definitely willing to put in the work on my end. A lot of my frustration lately comes from inviting people to do stuff and having them flake out or just not be interested.

my hesitation with the chilxor group in particulat comes from me being really intimidated by being the "third wheel" to a group that obviously knows each other really, really well. I don't think that makes me altogether weird.

Well it makes you not have "any" "friends", so you can either stay that way or get over it and do the chilxors the favor of assuming that they might actually be nice to be around and you might get something out of their company.