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.

I think you may have inadvertently highlighted something. Making friends requires skill. Finding THE ONE is much more down to luck.

@SoftIce re autism, that puzzles me too. I think the diagnostic criteria have widened a lot and if it widens much more we'll all be autistic. Also, a lot of people are diagnosing themselves.

There's no misogyny in @PeepDeBeaul post. So she gets on better with males than females. Why shouldn't she! She isn't criticising women.

I agree

Yes friends take time and efforts. My work colleague has no friends. Said school mams moved on. But you do need friends too

They say once you meet one autistic person you have met one autistic person. It is possible to enjoy company but also need a lot of downtime, and still be autistic.

Your comment, and that of the other poster show a certain amount of ignorance.

Oh and if it helps, I am properly diagnosed with AuDHD - the autism diagnosis was 6 years ago and involved 6 or 7 in person assessments.

Fair: and if you are happy living like that then crack on.

But a lot of people aren’t happy. So many people (on here and IRL) seem desperately unhappy without friends and drive themselves nuts worrying about their friendships (or lack of them).

You don’t have to be a “philosopher” to identify a social problem and wonder what’s causing it. I don’t understand why you seem to want to disparage people for being interested in a phenomenon that affects millions of people?

If it's ignorance, then some professionals are equally ignorant, since some of them say the same thing.

By all means try to work out, in general terms, why some people don't have friends, but with regard to why some such people have found love, you've been told we see the two things differently, and have been given some very plausible reasons why they're not at all the same. You don't seem to 'get it' and I don't see that changing.

It's misogynist to claim that men are geeks and love sci-fi and therefore better company, while women love reality shows and crap TV drama. 🙄
Replace 'women' with another demographic. Say black people. Would it be ok to generalise an entire sex or race?

This entire thread is riddled with internalised deepseated misogyny. Women are apparently catty, bitchy, bullies, prone to drama, shallow, stupid, love crap TV... the list goes on. Men, of course, are princes and intellectual giants.

I think that it was true at the time the poster who said it grew up. The problem was around strict gender stereotypes and not allowing women to be geeky at the time without being horribly bullied and ostracised.

Things probably have changed within the last 10 years so the only boys can be geeky stereotype will probably disappear within the next 10 years.

All she's saying is that her interests overlap more with men she's met than women she's met. As regards any generalisation she may be making, if indeed she is generalising, the worst that could be said is that she's out of touch or old fashioned. We all do generalise sometimes. For example I think women make much better drivers than men. That doesn't mean I believe all men are aggressive and wreckless on the roads. I don't think the thread is riddled with misogyny - there's a lot about men chasing boring women just to get inside their knickers.

You say “you’ve been told” as if I am a disobedient child and need to accept your account of this without challenge, as if you were laying down the gospel 🤣

I have had some interesting opinions and accounts on this from different people for sure, its been enlightening. I have found this thread fascinating.

It has shed a lot of light.

Not laying down gospel for everyone, but for those of us in the position you described in your first post, it's true because we feel the 2 things are different, and you can't argue with what we feel.

But what do you have to gain by keep asking the question? People have explained their situations

Yes and some believed that the MMR caused developmental issues - yet that had been debunked. So some professionals ARE equally ignorant.

What qualifications do you have that enable you to spout things like that?

If you met me in certain circumstances, you would not think I had anything wrong. I can mask as much as anyone but it costs me to do so. So I’m sure you would be telling people that I clearly couldn’t have it.

What do you think we gain with a diagnosis? I was 50 when it happened and have struggled all my life. I don’t get benefits or any special treatment. I am on meds for ADHD.

I do however have people judging me when I tell them and treating me like I’m thick as pigshit. Or saying ‘you don’t look autistic/ADHD’.

I do hope you tell any autistic people in your life that they can’t possibly have it.

Better understanding. Which to some extent I have got.

I understand more about people’s experience of friendship versus relationships. I understand that many people find romantic relationships easier than friendship.

The perspective that some people have, that a romantic relationship is easy and a friendship is hard, doesn’t make sense to me emotionally or rationally at
all and doesn’t resonate with my experience but I accept that a lot if people experience life like this.

Thats the beauty of a discussion board I guess.

BTW looks have nothing to do with hooking up, neither does a sparkling personality.

I used to get drunk and have one night stands with random people most weekends - I certainly am not even reasonable looking (neither were they, to be fair) and neither of us bothered with personality.

Friendship is about clicking with someone.

Still it must be a burden to have all those men chasing you.

Welcome to my world. The entire NT world makes no sense to me, including why people are so needy about having friends and partners. But logically I know I’m the outlier.

Things don’t have to make sense to you - the answers are very obvious though.

Maybe. Its still interesting and useful to try to unpack this I think.

But you clearly don’t get it

You Say

The perspective that some people have, that a romantic relationship is easy and a friendship is hard, doesn’t make sense to me emotionally or rationally at
all and doesn’t resonate with my experience but I accept that a lot if people experience life like this.

That is fine. You don’t get it. But you are still not going to get it even if this thread fills up with people explaining it.

People are different - who knew? Why do you need to unpack it - some people have different issues to others.

It’s really not complex

Of course I understand people are different, we wouldn’t be having this discussion if they weren’t.

But you keep saying I don’t “get it” as if there were some hard objective truth to be revealed. Its not like that.

Human experience is subjective. I’m trying to make sense of something which doesn’t make sense so I ask questions. I have heard from a number of people how they experience it and I understand that their perspective is different from mine. I completely get that. And I am grateful and the discussion has been enlightening. Its reinforced the fact that people experience these feelings in very different ways.

But its not incumbent upon me to say that I have had some revelation and it all makes perfect sense: I still don’t, deep down, empathise with people who find romantic relationships very easy and friendship very difficult. It doesn’t make emotional sense, probably never will.

I can no more change my perspective on this than you can. You seem to be taking this quite personally as if its a rejection of your values.

Thanks for this thread, OP - genuinely one of the most interesting things I've read on here, and something I've often wondered too from the perspective of someone who finds it incredibly straightforward to make friends, and am more vulnerable around romantic relationships. (Also baffled by the hostility on show - it's a discussion board! This is what discussion looks like! We're learning from each other, not looking for a definitive answer!)

One thing I wonder about also is practice, which I think a few posters have mentioned. I've moved about a lot in my career and have a routine pretty much down for finding friends wherever I go, which involves putting myself out there, meeting a bunch of people, and then narrowing that down to folks I actually want to be friends with. Kind of similar to dating, but to different ends. It's a slow process, and the early period of being somewhere new can be very lonely but I know that that's what it is and I can be patient. Also, over the years, I've developed much better self-knowledge for who I actually want to spend time with, not just clinging to the first people who were nice to me (see also: dating!).

So I guess if you're out of practice in developing friendships, this stuff would naturally be much harder; and because it feels difficult, you might feel more fragile around it (like dating!). And of course, if you have kids / are shy / are busy with work / etc, folks won't have the time to develop this muscle in making friends.

Thanks. I completely agree about “practice” and what I call the “social muscle”. It is a use it or lose it thing and it’s cumulative in that the more experience you accrue of friendship and being socially active the more comfortable you are likely to be with it.

This is why I speculated that people who settle down young may tend to find this harder because they have just done it less and have generally met a more limited group of social contacts.

I have also moved around a fair bit and moved between different social groups over the years and while I often get drained by social contact (I am not a natural extrovert) I don’t find it inherently difficult, and don’t feel daunted by the prospect of talking to or getting to know people. Its a skill that atrophies if you don’t use it, like language or physical fitness and the more variety you have in your life and the more you can talk about, the more you will feel you have to “offer” people.

Obviously some people naturally find this easier than others: not everyone is charismatic or confident and its much harder if you are neurodiverse, but I do think to some extent you can learn to be good with people and you certainly can learn how to be a better friend.

With decent people, being a good friend is effortless.

Do you point out about the ‘social muscle’ to people with friendship issues? Because if it’s the case then they may not be aware.

If people want friends and can’t make them then it’s clearly something about them that people don’t click with. But it’s often lack of self awareness.

And yes I have pointed that out to people.

The point with ND people is not always that they struggle. It can be that they don’t prioritise socialisation. It’s very freeing, to be honest