I’ve always struggled to make friends. I’m outgoing, confident, but I also have a disability and I have always been led to believe that it should be up to others to want to be friends with me rather than the other way around.
Obviously there were the usual school mum friends etc but they drift as the kids get older, and we moved just as the youngest was going into secondary, so even school mums weren’t around, and when we moved I didn’t have a job and then fell ill so wasn’t able to get one.
My then DH had friends, but they were all his and he didn’t really like me having friends anyway, which is partly why we moved so often. He also used to frequently say that he wondered why nobody liked me.
Anyway that’s the background. I’ve pretty much grown up believing that friendships are for others, and although sometimes I wish I had a group of friends to do things with, I think I’ve spent so much of my life not having one that I would probably feel completely like a fish out of water.
Obviously the impression a lot of people give is that they all have these groups of friends or are always out for coffee with this one or that one and so on, but then I frequently read posts on here from people who struggle to make friends, all in different circumstances.
So is it that a lot more people actually do find it hard to make friends? Or is it that I just see those posts because I am one of them?