AIBU to wonder why many posters find it harder to make friends than find a life partner?

[Thepeopleversuswork]

I'm baffled at the number of people on Mumsnet who struggle with the most basic social interactions and find making friends to be traumatic, but have found a life partner to settle down and have kids with.

A significant number of posters on here struggle with friendship or social interaction to various degrees, manifested in the extreme in the declarations that they "hate people", "don't want new friends", find friends to be too much "drama" and only want to spend time with their families. There is a classic of the genre running at the moment in which an OP has taken umbrage at a coworker making fairly mild friendly overtures to her as a gross invasion of her privacy. (But admits that she met her partner at work?) Or just at the milder end of the spectrum the huge amount of anxiety which making new friends seems to generate.

I genuinely don't understand why people who have managed to find an intimate relationship in which to have children can find the prospect of exchanging words outside the school gate or sending a text to a coworker so traumatic.

I found attracting a partner and building a relationship to be a far more fraught and involved process than making friends: there's so much more to lose, so much more vulnerability needed and the prospect of loss of face and self-esteem in the process of dating is far greater than in making friends. But texting someone (platonically) to ask if they want to have a coffee seems to spiral posters into paroxysms of self-doubt. The "school mum" threads are a whole sub-genre in their own right, where the paranoia and suspicion is often seriously irrational.

Why do people find it relatively easy to find a partner but finding friends so difficult? From my perspective it should be the other way around.

@OtterlyAstounding

I think your inability to understand that people can be different is possibly the real problem here.

I completely understand that people are different. I just want to understand why.

I’ve had a lost of friends throughout my life kept some and just civil with others. I have a cousin who am close with probably the only person I confide in these days . The older am getting I find relaxing in my home better than going out to spend money.

You want to know why people are different? Really?

I'm not sure it can be explained any more clearly than people already have. Obviously, you experience platonic and romantic relationships in one way, and people have told you that they experience them in a very different way, and why that is.

So what exactly are you not understanding?

There are differences, but at heart, both are built on intimate relationships and I still think if you can build one you can build the other.

And both have to be consented to and for some friendships are harder than romantic ones and vice versa and some can do both.

It all comes down to people being on the same page in both instances and accepting of each other.

I've found it an interesting thread, but then I also find it difficult to understand how people who find social interaction and friendships very difficult in the first place ever get to the point of meeting partners, and particularly how they navigate those early stages of whether there's a romantic interest or not if they find social cues difficult to read.

Someone up thread did mention that everyone she knew over the age of 35 had met their partner online, so they could bypass much of the initial social setting stages. And others seem to have met when young when people are more naturally spending a lot of time in group settings (school, college, university) where even if they find social aspects of life hard they still spend a lot of time in that setting so meeting someone becomes much more likely. But this can't be the case for everyone, and particularly for anyone older and who didn't meet a partner at school/college how did they do it later in life if they find navigating social interaction so difficult.

If you're one of the people for whom meeting and keeping a partner is easy but social interaction and friendship is difficult, how and in what setting did you meet your partner? Did it start out as a friendship, or obviously immediately romantic? How did you get to talk to them if that's not something you would normally do?

I guess if it was a long time ago men were much less hesitant about approaching women, and now it's a lot different, even for older generations.

I've had several romantic relationships and these were easier to find when younger, but then when they don't work out and as you get older it gets much harder to meet a partner. I share OPs experience of trying to figure out what someone is actually looking for more difficult and involves a level of vulnerability that doesn't come into friendships or social connections for me. I don't find making friends inherently difficult, although it is harder as you get older, especially if you move around etc and depends a lot on putting conscious effort into meeting like-minded people. But it's lower stakes for me in the way that romantic relationships are not.

One thing that maybe is significant is the drive to have children and maybe that overrides socially awkward people's problems with social interaction. I've never wanted children so possibly an unconscious urgency to meet (and keep) a partner wasn't there, even though I've had several long-term partners since my teenage years.

I don’t think having managed to find a partner means someone should therefore find it easy to make friends.

I’m pretty sociable. I can walk into a room and talk to people quite happily. That’s completely different from meeting people I actually want to form friendships with.

I’ve done the standard “join something!” advice. I tried the WI for a while and found it incredibly cliquey and, frankly, mind-numbingly dull. There seemed to be an awful lot of conversation about kitchen renovations, cruises and various forms of competitive domesticity. If you weren’t making your own knickers, knitting your own knitwear or baking sufficient cake to supply a small market town, I wasn’t entirely sure what we were supposed to talk about.

At the time I was self-employed, so I’d sometimes be sitting there thinking that not only was I bored, I could actually be at home earning money instead. I was effectively paying to hear about somebody’s new kitchen.

Needless to say, I did not emerge with a collection of new best friends. But that wasn’t because I was incapable of talking to people or forming relationships. I just hadn’t met anyone there I particularly wanted a relationship with.

I think that’s what gets missed in these conversations. “Join a club” solves the problem of not being physically near other humans. It doesn’t solve compatibility.
We completely understand this with romantic relationships. Nobody says “there are twenty single men in this room, pick one; you’ve no excuse now.” We accept that attraction, humour, values, personality and chemistry matter. Yet with friendship there’s sometimes this odd assumption that any collection of age-appropriate adults should be able to manufacture meaningful relationships if they make enough effort.

And finding one partner at some point doesn’t prove you’re generally good at creating relationships from scratch anyway.

Sometimes circumstances bring two compatible people together and it develops naturally. Adult friendship can actually be more ambiguous because there’s no established script for getting from “person I quite like” to “person I text on Tuesday because I fancy going for a drink”.

So when someone says they struggle to make friends despite having a partner, I don’t find that remotely contradictory. Being able to connect deeply with the right person and being able to generate friendships from whichever humans happen to be locally available are completely different skills and circumstances.

Of course I get that. But a lot of Mumsnet threads are about people interrogating the differences between different people and trying to figure out what is behind them and what makes people tick. I'm interested in this topic, partly for social reasons, partly because of my own experience.

It's a discussion board: that's literally the purpose of it. I can understand that you and I are different people without different views without having to agree with you or come around to your way of thinking.

Another question is why are there people with such strong and diverse friendships who struggle to find/maintain a relationship?

It's clear different strengths and skill sets are involved!

The friendless married people worrying about social people being queen bees and cliques have more in common with the single popular people who think others are inept losers who married the first idiot who would look at them.

It's more complex than that.

A lot of logic and good sense, not to mention perceptiveness, in this post.

If you're one of the people for whom meeting and keeping a partner is easy but social interaction and friendship is difficult, how and in what setting did you meet your partner? Did it start out as a friendship, or obviously immediately romantic? How did you get to talk to them if that's not something you would normally do?

I was in my late teens and out for drinks with my cousins, and met my now DH at the pub he was working at, after he'd knocked off for the night. A combination of dutch courage and him being gorgeous made me come onto him embarrassingly blatantly, and we talked all evening and exchanged numbers (but he refused to go home with me as I'd been drinking). Our relationship definitely began as romantic/sexual, but two decades later, we're best friends.

I was always very awkward and wary of making friendships due to bullying and ostracism, but great at hooking up (usually when drinking) due to a combination of deep sexual trauma and poor boundaries resulting from that. I lucked out stumbling across my DH.

I've been told endlessly on here that they are two completely different beasts but at heart I think they are (or should be) the same. I'm clearly not going to win some people over though.

How are they the same?

Friendships can be many things, but they don't usually involve living together, legally binding agreements to share bringing up children, tax breaks, or a sexual relationship.

I think you mean different people WITH different views?
You say you're interested partly due to your own experience? Are you by any chance single but not through choice? Do you feel you ought to have a partner because you're good at making friends?

You are my polar opposite. 😂I am rubbish at hooking up and romantic connections. Decent at making friends.

I get it a little more now.

Sure. But I feel as though you don't understand that others are different people with not just different views, but different experiences.

It's like saying you can't understand why someone who loves and is great at baking, hates cooking and is awful at it, because baking and cooking have so much in common. Well, yes, they have a lot of crossover skills and aspects, but they're still quite different, and it's possible to enjoy and be good at one, and not enjoy or be good at the other.

Haha, I think being good at making friends is probably more helpful in the long-run, as once you've snagged a partner, you (hopefully!) won't ever need to look for another! So all that skill is just going to waste 🤣

Absolutely that. People like you, OP, clearly have some natural ability that enables you to know what to say, when. To know when your friendship overtures are welcome and when they're not. To know where you fit and and and where you are in a new friend or acquaintance's priorities. To not come across as needy, or standoffish, because you just have that knack that people like me do not.

You don't have to sit and overthink whether you should ask if someone wants a coffee, or how to do it the right way, or if that's going to be welcome or whether the other party is inwardly rolling their eyes.

I totally understand that you're asking this question for good reasons, @Thepeopleversuswork , but because it comes so naturally to you, you seem to not be able to understand (and occasionally you don't respect) our posts. Saying 'but why don't/can't you be like me?' isn't particularly empathetic.

I would love to have your skills

So yes, finding a partner means you only have to go through the sussing out what to do and say, and where you sit in their lives thing, once. Negotiating multiple potential and established friendship stuff needs your skills pretty much every day

Obviously they aren’t structured in the same way. You don’t marry your friends or commit to sharing assets with them.

But the bit that seems to scare people about building a friendship: breaking the ice, moving the relationship forward, the anxiety about rejection etc, seems similar to me.

As a PP mentioned they involve the same process of getting to know one another and the nervousness that goes with that. The worry that you might not be “enough” for someone.

In both cases its a situation which involves risk and vulnerability. And when the other person has the potential to really hurt you.

But, for people who can’t read others, that is the way to do things if the only alternative is to assume others want to be friends and risk being too ‘full on’.

No not single (well not married, I am in a live in LTR).

In that case are you an Academic? I can't fathom your level of interest.

I was always very uncomfortable making new friends because I'd been quiet and unpopular at school but I think I finally got over that in my 50s! I've some lifelong friends but still making new ones. Also fortunate to be married. The loneliest i ever felt was on maternity leave with small babies because I wasn't used to socialising with people outside work at that time. I'm also lucky that extended family double up as friends. I hold onto all this and look to the positives because our children ended up moving 1000s of miles away. So no big family Sunday dinners or looking after the grandchildren.

Thats not whats happening in this thread though. People are telling you they experience these types of relationship differently, and you're basically going "Nope, thats a load of bollocks, I don't experience them differently so no-one else does either"

That may not be what you're going for, but its certainly how you're coming across.

Not an academic either. Just interested.

That’s not my intention and I apologise if that’s what is coming across.

Presumably then the only way to maintain the social contract is to fall in and obey the unwritten rules of society so that others benefit?

That sounds miserable as hell.

Social interaction should be mutually beneficial. I speak to those few people I like but I don’t see what there is to gain by forcing myself through discomfort for something that will not benefit me in any way.