To think this decision I made at 16 has ruined my life?

[SayItOnceAgain]

I'm currently nearly 30, for context. At 16 I was shy, but had a good group of friends and was well-liked amongst my peers. For some reason at 16 I decided I wanted a fresh start and to go to college rather than stay on at sixth form like nearly all of my classmates. All the adults in life say it would be the best thing for me, I'd grow in confidence and make lots of new friends. I went to college and it was awful. I didn't click with anyone, there were lots of mature students who had children or degrees and were retraining. I was a very young, naive 16 year old and couldn't form any friendships. I spent 2 years being so, so lonely. I'd spend lunch times hiding in the toilets or on the phone to my older sister in tears. I'd pray that I would fail my a-level exams so I had an excuse to drop out. It really impacted my self-esteem as it was the first time in my life having no friends. It led me to feel like nobody would ever want to be friends with me and I was destined to be a loner - and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy as at university and most jobs I've not made any friends.

In the meantime, everyone who stayed on at sixth form seemed to grow closer and form a big, close-knit friendship group. Fast forward to now and many of them have married or got engaged to each other within this group, there's now baby showers and bridal showers and housewarming parties. I feel so stunted compared to them. I have no friends, never been in a relationship. It felt like we were all on the same path until that decision to go to college. I've had so many years to make up for it and try catch up with them, but I just can't. I know I can't really blame it all on college, but it seemed like that was the start of things going down hill.

I agree with others, don’t let your 16-year old self define you. I assume you know about these couplings etc from FB or ‘around’ and you’re not in touch with your school friends.

Yes it’s unfortunate that you didn’t make friends at college but you can def start afresh - 32 is young! Are there any local meet-up/interest groups you can join? Maybe also try therapy to give you some closure and confidence. Good luck.

OP, you have a life goal (child/children) which is great. Now, how do you want to start moving towards that? Dating apps or joining some social groups or both? Maybe looking at going it alone via a donor? Is therapy something to start off with? What's your next move?

I made an awful mistake ending a relationship in my 20s (over 20 years ago). I absolutely regret it, he was (is) the love of my life. However, there is no guarantee I'd be in an idyllic relationship with him now. I have no clue what that path would have been (although it's easy to dream of a long and happy marriage to him, he might have dumped me long ago!). But, the decision was made, the path was laid and there is no redo.

You only live one life and you have to live it.

I would recommend the book The Midnight Library to anyone feeling this way. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be, your life wouldn’t be perfect if you went to the same college as your friends, and they wouldn’t say their life is perfect. There may be one of them wishing to escape thinking how different their life would be if only they’d been brave enough to go to a different college alone.

Do you think you are maybe autistic

Some of your post sounded like what I did. Left school and went to an FE college - where most of my peers were in their 30's and 40's. I was 16 and so disappointed!

Anyway I don't think such decisions alter your life dramatically, it's never too late to change things.

@SayItOnceAgain I would second other poster’s recommendation of The Midnight Library, we make choices which are right for us at the time for many different reasons, we can never know how things would have turned out if we made another choice. Life would have been different but not necessarily better.

Please look at trying CBT. I was in the exact same position as you but in reverse. I stayed on at sixth form and every single one of my friends left for college. For the first time at school I had no friends and like you would hide in the toilet etc! This led me to feel like a socially awkward loner.

I then spent the rest of my teens and all of my twenties looking at how I socialised through this lens and it really affected any social interaction I had, whether it be at work or outside, and led to extreme social anxiety.

I finally took the plunge last year and started CBT to change the way I thought about this and honestly it was the best thing I've ever done. We changed the whole 'self-fulfilling prophecy' narrative in my head and the fact I always felt doomed to not make friends.

Good luck and please know things can and will get better! Any new people you meet will never know any of this ever happened to you and you can make friends with a fresh start and a different outlook.

I think you're looking for an excuse. Stop looking backwards and start looking forwards. That decision at 16 might have been the wrong one, but it was only two years. Even if you'd carried on in that 6th form with your friends, it would only have been another two years together, then surely you'd all have gone in separate directions anyway (different Uni's, careers etc)? You've identified the problem - i.e. that you're not great at forming friendships. So you can either learn to live with it or work on it to improve yourself (assuming you feel that would be a positive personality characteristic).

Maybe some counselling could help you to stop dwelling on past decisions (something that we probably all do from time to time, but it shouldn't become over arching).

I'm terrible at making friends, but I do try to push myself to get out and socialise. I do seem to end up with lot's of acquaintances rather than any close friends though - people I know well enough to chat to day to day, or go out and do a mutual hobby/interest with, but they never develop into proper friendships, and I always seem to find myself on the fringes of other people's friendship groups. A common interest is a great way to break ice with new people though. So this probably isn't something you're going to fix overnight, but only you can fix it, and the past can only ruin your future if you let it.

Great advice

Yes, you do have to find the courage to go on dating apps. Or to do something. No one ever got together by sitting at home and waiting, even in the pre-internet days. You have to make choices and take chances, if you want a relationship in which you have children with a partner.

You mention control here, and if I were to hazard a bit of pop psychology, you're staying off the apps to maintain control. If you don't put yourself out there, you can't be vulnerable, or leave yourself open to being judged, or being hurt. I wonder if there's something in that to your lack of friendships, too? It's not precisely that you assume rejection, but that you stop the possibility of rejection before it has a chance to happen.

But ultimately, if you want to be in control of having children, you can be. One of my DS's friends is a single mum by choice. She and her child have a lovely life.

You can't change your past. That's done. Only you can change your future, one step at a time.

Op they are the ones who haven’t moved on.. they are literally the exact same group they were when you were 16!!! Try and see it differently in your mind. You jumped out into something unknown. You have carried on a different path despite it being difficult. You have lived a life with different experiences in it! Keep looking forward. Don’t be afraid to be that person who steps into the unknown; own it. Xxx

Like someone else posted, I left school before you were born. My husband and I did know each other before uni (didn't start dating till 21 mind you), and over time I met a group of his friends who had stayed in contact since primary school (only some had been at secondary together). We were the first marriage in that group by some way, I think the second wedding was the one DH danced with our baby daughter at. We were at that point the age you are now.

I don't think anyone married within the original group of friends, it just expanded as partners were added. And got stretched further and further as we moved around (us to the UK for example). I think the majority would have been over 30 when they met their partners.

I too can look back on facebook at my own secondary school friends (from an all-girls' school). That's told me that, although a couple had children quite young (eg 20), I'm still in a small minority who had a baby by 30. I haven't tried to work it out, but I suspect more of my friends started their families over 40 than before 32. Most of those wouldn't have found their partners till their mid 30s I imagine.

I describe this to you as much to reassure you that 29 really is young in the scheme of things. I hope you are in a position to get some therapy to explore your identity further and find ways to boost your self-confidence. Find out what defines who you are and who you want to be in a broader sense. Take up a hobby. Live some more life, and life will happen to you.

Good luck, I hope you have a lovely future.

Your post has really made me think. For sixth form I moved from my really nice local school where I had lots of friends, to a private school. It was brutal socially and I never really fitted in. It left me pretty bruised until my mid-20s, but I also think I was the kind of person who would be prone to introspection. However, your post made me realise that it's the rumination about past events that might be problem here, not necessarily the events themselves. I think I managed to stop ruminating on the past because I eventually became more settled in myself in my mid 20s, and found a place/job where I fitted in. But it would have been tough had I not found those things. As others have suggested, could you work this through with a therapist?

Honestly try the dating apps, quite a few people (including myself) met their husbands on there, its the only way to meet such a high volume of people outside of your normal life.

If you really want to be a mother there are ways to do this alone depending on how much you want to spend. Set an age where if you haven't met someone by you'll look at alternatives.

I’m mid forties, since I left school I’ve seen one person semi regularly, our wives became closer then we were so when they divorced we were team wife. I don’t think I’ve even had a beer with sitting else. It was an amazing school but schools you’re thrown together by location and age. If you don’t quite fit it can be miserable. I wasn’t very happy during my first degree but by second degree I found my thing and so many I’d the people were more compatible, now I know me I find many more people but still have just a handful of people that are really close and if I hadn’t met my wife I have no idea who I’d have married.

Don’t look back and blame school, you can’t change the past, look forward, it’s the only way. Is retraining an option? Our volunteering? I always recommend parkrun, low commitment but very friendly, particularly the smaller ones.

Why was a fresh start important to you at 16?

I made some really poor choices aged about 18 and did stuff I totally regret and feel really embarrassed/ashamed of. For ages I let this limit what I did and my relationships and seeing a counsellor for a bit really helped me move on and while I would say I am still socially quite anxious I am happy with my life. Focusing on things I wanted to do really helped as well to have a focus and a goal that wasn't just about relationships and these travel/hobbies really helped build my confidence. Turning 30 is a bit rubbish though I think - I remember mine and feeling like I wasn't really where I thought I would be at that time. Turns out my thirties were the best time. Focus on the future and make some plans to get excited about

I was much like you at 29, never had a relationship, only had a small friendship group, had a good career and traveled but that wasn’t what I really wanted. All my friends were getting married, starting families, etc. I’m an introvert and struggle to make friends. I plucked up the courage to join a dating app, I chose eharmony as you have to pay for that one so I thought it would be people who were serious about a relationship. After a few months, I met my now husband, we’ve been married nearly 6 years and have a 3.5 year old and a 14 month old and I am so happy. I still don’t have loads of friends although I now have a new group of ‘mum’ friends as well as my old friends but that’s ok, I have all the friends I need.

Honestly OP I’d encourage you at least give it a try, if you don’t like it then at least you can say you tried but you might meet your future husband on there.

I don't think that one event is what has defined your happiness, no.

I changed primary school twice, the first time it was hard. The 2nd time I can definitely relate to being alone, crying in the loos etc. I was also very lonely and unhappy at university for a lot of it. So I do empathize, it's really not a nice feeling ☹️. I do now have friends, a partner, two children and a life though... nothing to do with the years in secondary school or sixth form where I knew people (I'm only in contact with four of them from that whole era, thinking about it).

ALSO, had you of stayed with your friendset, you could still be unhappy with life, and be blaming it on the fact you DIDN'T swap to a different school....

Sorry OP, think maybe you should move past this fixation and focus on what you actually want out of life x

To say too, anti-anxiety / anti-depressants made a massive difference to me, to be able to meet someone stable etc. Might help you if you have social anxiety, which it sounds like you might have. It's a game changer x

So much good advice here. My advice for you comes from a close friend who is an architect. She works for a small firm and is in charge of building projects from A to Z. She spends her days making constant decisions.

Sometimes she doesn't have all the necessary information to make a perfectly informed one but she is obliged to decide because so many other people's work depends on hers. It often cannot wait. So she makes the best choice she can at that given time. And then everyone can keep going forward . That decision of course influences the next one and so on. And everyone just adapts. Sometimes she makes a great decision and some times a not so good one.

The important thing she does do, she says is that she decides, and then the building can go forward and get built. She doesn't waste her time second guessing herself, because that would be unproductive and she has buildings to build!

The same goes for you; decide what is right for you now, keep adapting and don't dwell on the past. ;)

I have had this same conundrum. I went to an amazing school and left for 6th form, where I struggled socially.

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD and I believe I either have autistic traits or am autistic.

I've been looking back a lot in light of my ADHD diagnosis and here is the thing.

You have to have compassion for your 16 year old self. Also rumination isn't good.

There's a technique called rreframing and I have been doing this over my college experience. The reality is that the college was not that great at the time and the sensory experience was over whelming, it was so noisy, there were all these different groups not actually mixing. Whereas I had come from a relatively heterogeneous bubble. So it wasn't down to me being a failure, it was just that the environment didn't work for me.

On dating, the apps are only one way of dating and I'd strongly recommend joining groups, going along to things IRL.

Hi OP,

I don't think that decision at 16 has ruined your life. You could of stayed on and your life could still be how it is now.

I stayed on at my secondary school 6th form, I'm early 30s now and I don't speak to any of them from the group. I haven't properly spoken to any since I was about 20. I only have two of them on Facebook.

Are you ND by any chance, OP? The reason I ask is you sound very much like me. I struggled through school with being extremely "shy" and with the environment and expectations in general (I was undisgnosed with ASD and ADHD at this point). I made the same decision you did to go to a local college to do A-levels, thinking I could reinvent myself. Be a different person, be more confident, make friends, achieve academically etc.

Nope. I was still the same small, insecure person who couldn't make friends and hated the environment around me. I also saw all my schoolmates go through boyfriends, build careers, have amazing holidays with each other, get married, and have babies.

I, too, thought it was because they had stayed together and progressed through life together. But the truth is the reason my life didn't go that way was because I am different/ND and didn't have the skills needed because of that at the time. Understanding that made a big difference.