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.

Tinder would never have become known as an app for revenge shags if everyone needed to chat to each other and be mates before sex.

I think the disconnect is that you may consider friends and acquaintances the same thing while others see them as separately.

Even by dictionary terms they are separate things.

Because you do different things with people at different levels of friendship. You aren't going to go on a night out with an acquaintance and someone who thinks that you are their bestie won't be happy with just a quick chat at the school gates. Having a rough idea of how the other person sees you, then can tell you what type of things that you can likely do with them.

No I completely understand that there’s a difference between a friend and an acquaintance.

But I am happy to meet people and sit with the ambiguity: I don’t get the need to immediately pigeonhole people as one or the other.

Acquaintances can turn into friends and vice versa.

What absolute tosh. I don't think we need a bloke to school us on feminism and friendship. My feminism has always been a key component of my appreciation for the women in my life. Valuing women is why I invest in my relationships with them. The outlier tales you read on here are just that - exceptions, not the norm. Oh, and I think what you may find, if you dig a little deeper, is that it's often the choking hands of the patriarchy that see women competing with and attacking one another, internalising societial misogyny and losing touch with what makes female collaboration and cooperation great. Jog on.

I have strongly suspected for some time that a large proportion of Mumsnetters are neurodivergent, and likely have partners who are the same.
Absolutely not an insult, merely an observation.

CS Lewis wrote something along the lines of: the start of a good friendship are the words "me to".

I've always really struggled making friends with women, but I find men much easier to get along with. I find women generally don't have much in common with me...I'm a geek, I like sci-fi and gaming. I'm not into crap TV dramas or reality TV. I've found very few school mums who share my values, interests or humour...and you need all 3. I've found a few blokes over the years I've gelled with, some I'm still close to.

I know several lonely men, it's more common than you think, generally nice guys who either spend their time with the family or are guilted by the wife when they do go out.

I think the problem these days is twofold: that if someone isn't perfect, cut them loose or keep your guard up; we don't accept people for who they are any more. That it takes repeated interations to build a friendship, and to build trust. if the connection isn't there on the first "date", that's it. It's not how connection works. People don't play the long game anymore.

I find women generally don't have much in common with me...I'm a geek, I like sci-fi and gaming. I'm not into crap TV dramas or reality TV.

Oh for fuck's sake. Do women still bloody do this?

I do wonder if the ridged social rules in the past helped. You spoke formally to those who weren't friends and more informally to those who were. There were rules on how to act depending on who you were with which made it clear who you were to them.

I always wondered if Victorian were ruled by the ND community due to how ridged society was.

Oh FFS. 'I am not like the other girls'.
In 2026.

The amount of ingrained misogyny on this thread is beyond belief.

And of course, men are intellectual (geeky, sci fi) and women love crap TV.

Don't even know where to start with this hogwash. Perhaps 1997?

You know the worst part? The guy who waded in at the start to tell us it's all women's fault because they all hate each other while men are all such total bros (lol) will see us calling out this steaming pile as proof that he's right.

Life stages have huge impact.

And others are not for several factors which other posters have named. Not everyone has the time or energy for ambiguity and from what I have read many aren’t expecting an instant decision on whether they are friends with someone or not.

I think most start off as acquaintances and it either moves to friendship, stay an acquaintance and sometimes drop down from friend to acquaintance after some time.

Plus, it helps if both parties are aware where they stand in each other’s mind whether they both see themselves as acquaintances or friends.

I wouldn’t call it pigeonholing more that there is a decision phase where you either see the other person as an acquaintance or as a friend after several encounters and sometimes some people make it immediately known in the first interaction if you want to be friends with them where you invite them out again or be acquaintances where you only chat to them when you happen to be in the same place.

Or maybe they don't feel like other girls because other girls had to mask and weren't allowed to show their geeky sides when growing up as it wasn't allowed. It was only for boys. Many ND girls feel this way because they couldn't meet like minded people.

I do think that the rise of The Big Bang Theory may stop people growing up feeling this way as it was suddenly seen socially acceptable for girls to be geeky.

I know some people do look at it like this. But I suggest that this sort of rigidity is a major factor in people struggling with friendships.

When I read these threads about friend difficulties 90% of the time my internal reaction is to think people need to chill out and stop overthinking things.

This.

the way friendship is viewed on here is a sort of an npc who can never fuck up or disagree or even have an opinion. Just a floating yes person. But your lying and cheating hating husband is on chance 56 and you think he can change.

let alone the way female friendships are talked about is often extremely misogynistic on here. Bitchy, cliquey, catty, queen be, jealousy.

it’s honestly so bizarre.

but I think a lot of it is how social gatherings are often scoffed and scorned. You hate hen dos, it’s your friend shut up and go and just leave early. It’s not about you. I went to this Fridays for 10 years for 3 mates birthdays. I bloody hate the place, I love my friends so I went and had a good time because I enjoyed their company! You do have to compromise and be flexible for friends just as you do a partner. You can’t only do what you want and then wonder why you’re billy no mates.

@Thepeopleversuswork Apologies, I haven't read the full thread, but didn't see the obvious answer on the first page.

It's because, if a woman is reasonably looking, there will be men interested in her even if she has no social skills whatsoever, and the men will do the chasing.

I speak as someone in this position - I am not sociable, I'm taciturn and boring, can't chat, joke, make or keep friends, but inspite of this, over the years men have tried to pursue relationships with me. To be frank, this put me right off them, but I can well imagine that there are women who are only a little "socially anxious" who would be very happy to experience romance and maybe even blossom with the attention and so end up with a partner but no friends.

I'm much more confused when someone says they (or their child) are autistic but are "very sociable" and have a "large group of friends". That does not make any sense to me whatsoever.

But the important thing, and the only thing you can control, is how you see them.

I know what you mean but I’m not sure this quite answers it.

Being reasonably good looking will certainly attract a lot of male attention and you don’t have to do much more than smile.

But that’s not enough to build a lifetime partnership on?

@Thepeopleversuswork I agree that it wouldn't work with someone who is genuinely socially impaired, but many socially anxious women are really just shy, and in that case, 1:1 attention may well grow into a relationship.

When I read these threads about friend difficulties 90% of the time my internal reaction is to think people need to chill out and stop overthinking things.

I agree but I also wouldn’t use MN as the best example. Most things people worry about on here has never crossed my mind nor have I ever heard it discussed outside of MN. The whole air freshener in bathroom thread is what immediately comes to mind.

It's because, if a woman is reasonably looking, there will be men interested in her even if she has no social skills whatsoever, and the men will do the chasing.

Yes, this will get you a shag. Or, multiple shags. It wont guarantee you a years-long successful, loving relationship.

If that were the case, then all attractive people would be in amazing, supportive relationships and all unattractive people would all be perpetually single and we know thats not the case or how it works

You're clearly never going to understand. It should now be obvious that some of us view romantic relationships differently from friendships and don't see it as at all strange that we've been successful with the former and not the latter. Life's like that. Nobody gets a full set of everything, and the wisest know to treasure what we have. I certainly treasure my DH and DCs. We're not all philosophers like you, OP, and so don't need to understand why.

That air freshener thread is absurd. A joke thread perhaps?

Do what? Genuine question.