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.

@Catza

Your post is really interesting and I totally agree ND doesn't fully explain this phenomenon. I do understand how ND makes this exponentially harder but I also know plenty of ND people (including my partner) who, while not socially "gifted" are very good at friendships.

I also don't really understand the logic that it's easier as an autistic person to find an autistic partner than an autistic friend. If you can bond with a partner you can bond with a friend, in face I would assume it's easier if you take sex out of the equation.

I completely agree that the unrealistic expectations thing is at epidemic levels. People blocking and flouncing because someone doesn't reply to a message within a certain time or blocking because someone blew them out. People seem to have lost the ability to just roll with things, see where they go and take them as they come.

Very few proper friendships are formed within the initial weeks of meeting someone. They take time, they often involve setbacks and they have to be able to bear periods of low contact. You can't dictate the pace or frequency at which someone gets back to you and you have to be prepared to absorb some level of disappointment and confusion sometimes. Not to the point of being a dormat, but you have to not freak out when someone doesn't behave exactly as you want them to.

I wonder whether these sorts of skills were less necessary when people lived in smaller, closed communities (because people knew each other by default) but take more work when people are urbanised and geographically dispersed? ie you have to put more thought into seeing people if you live in different cities than you do if you bump into them at the shop twice a week.

Yes, romantic relationships can be complicated initially, but once you're established as boyfriend and girlfriend, the rules of engagement are pretty clear, with many social rules and an actual legal contract available to define your relationship with each other. The expectation is that you are monogamous, have regular contact, go out together on dates and eventually live together. Romantic relationships also only involve 2 people.

Friendships are much more ambiguous and in my experience, every friendship is different. I have some friends where the friendship works best with regular face to face catch ups with kids in tow. I have others where the friendship mostly plays out via Whatsapp. I have friends where we do an activity together. I have close friends that I tell my problems to and more casual friends who I chat about sport with. I also have many acquaintances who are just people I chat to on the school run or at hobbies. The nuance of each relationship has had to be worked out and has involved a relatively high level of social skill. You have to calibrate how compatible you are on values, what you like doing, how close you want to be, how much contact you want and then negotiate the friendship based on that, all without ever explicitly saying that's what you're doing.

I do also agree that female friendship can be richer and closer, but also more complicated than male friendship.

Both me and my husband are on the spectrum. It was easy to have a relationship as he just instantly understood me.
That said I do still have friendships long standing some 30 years friendships but they were never a struggle as they just accepted me for who I am and have their own quirks themselves.
I struggle with new people, it's the unexpected I don't like. I made friends with a few new people a while back and they ended up using me for favours of money and babysitting and it's damaged my confidence.

I think there are a few factors at play

Lots of people met their partner when they were young and out socialising eg at uni, meeting loads of new people, and stay with them. It's harder to make friends when you're older and working

Lots of people move with work. People tend to move with their partner, but not their friends! It can be tricky if you're a bit on the shy side to break into established friendship groups in an area (vs uni say when everyone was new).

Neurodiverse people can find groups a massive struggle. It's easier for them to be themselves with a partner at home, vs a group of people at a restaurant say.

I find work culture shifts have made it harder to make friends at work. In my work, remote working and designated office days and increased workloads, higher staff turnover vs pre covid, updated rules about drinking etc means a lot less impromptu pub visits at lunchtime or after work.

With two parents working, working parents often struggle with finances, time, and tiredness and can't easily socialise.

Also I think some women are so desperate for a partner that they settle for really horrible behaviour from a partner (eg swearing at them, being disrespectful in other ways) that they would not put up with from a friend.

Im quite shy. When I was younger I made a lot of friends in pubs, as I found alcohol gave me the confidence to socialise (I am aware this is a completely unhealthy coping strategy!). Now I have kids and my lifestyle has changed I do struggle a bit with things like school mum groups - I've met some lovely people but never get past the small talk stage and I can't really be taking a glass of wine on the school run (and I'm too knackered to go out anyway most of thr time)

I don't think it's the case that people could easily find more friends if they just changed their outlook / joined a hobby group / made more effort.

Well I think we’re quite socially atomised now. Parenting can be tough as there is often a lot of politics at the school gates it seems. People are at work a lot and most places I’ve worked you may get on with your colleagues but they are colleagues not friends outside of work.

So people join groups and hobbies hoping to find likeminded people and many do and develop lovely friendship groups. But sometimes it’s just a bunch of people who all have an interest in said activity and not much else in common.

I think as well getting a partner has become the core social expectation and marker of being ‘accepted/acceptable’. Modern nuclear families often force people into super close partnership and they can become insular as a couple.

General community not centred around hobbies or special interests are not as routinely available and to add to that there’s more infrastructure around dating and relationships and more emphasis placed on these ‘skills’ as being of a higher order vs being a good friend or group member.
while it’s true a romantic partnership takes skills these are not necessarily MORE skilled than in groups or close friendships - just given bigger billing.

And because of all of the above the stakes are often higher for people to split - not just in terms of finances, coparenting and so on but in potentially losing for many their main source of both friendship and social interaction and longest relationship. So people stay in marriages they are not happy in and ‘put in the work’ and get weirdly more insular as in a lot of cases new outside friends are seen as suspicious.

It’s a big mix of things in my view but does explain some of why many are long term partnered but have few friends or a friendship ‘gang’.

Plus don’t forget a lot of groups of friends form over time and via shared history - the longer someone is outside of that the harder it is for them to knock on those doors and be accepted. And there is the shame of not being ‘popular’ or people feeling shy to take a risk and try to start new friendships. Which lets not forget takes effort on both sides. You can’t force others to dedicate time and energy to accepting you into an established friendship group or build a 1-1 new friendship with you! And for those already feeling shy excluded or lacking in friends the attempts to make new friends can be very painful if not met with enthusiasm. And with fewer friends there’s fewer social buffers to dealing with social rejections - it’s a vicious circle for some. Maybe we could also ask are many people with bigger social circles keen these days to accept new friends and build new friendships? Is the issue also in people being willing to accept newbies as it were vs people finding new friends?

so that’s my take!

In general we are so much less sociable as a society than we were 100 years ago. People lived in communities in which they had constant contact. They were in the street, in the pub, in each others' houses constantly. There was no such thing as making an effort to meet people. You were seeing people because there was no other way to be entertained/find out information/buy things/work etc etc.

Yep. That applies to my family member. She's had three long term relationships and is very happily settled with her 'probably forever' partner.

She's not diagnosed, but has the stereotypical 'girl autism'. She's not devoid of friends, but only has the ones she made a couple of decades ago, and finds social stuff really hard (though she masks well). She's nerdy and so is her partner. They share interests and get each other, and are very happy.

There's a lot of judgment and blame on this thread, which I find hard to read. It's not always someone's own actions or decisions that mean they don't find it easy to make friends.

This is only true if you are a single mother with sole responsibility for your children. Otherwise, what is the reason that a father of these kids can't take them to clubs at the weekend? Or, if he is somehow incapacitated, why can't they miss a club every now and then and stay home with him while you take time for yourself?

In my case I’m very shy, had pretty poor parenting and fairly sure I’m ND.

But I think on forums and message boards you will always get a higher percentage of people who don’t have many friends, otherwise they’d be socialising or chatting with their friends instead of talking to anonymous strangers. Obviously that is not all, and probably not the majority, of posters, but the sites attract people who want human connection online (and some of those will be people who don’t have it in person)

However, despite my shyness I thought that thread about the coworker was really bizarre! Tbf that poster did not seem to want to make any friends!

I'm meaning this kindly, but you're behaving like a bit of a victim here. I'm sorry that your friends have died, but that's no reason not to nurture the friends who have moved away. I'm in the North West, and my closest friend geographically lives 20 miles away. I also have friends in West Yorks, East Lancs, Galway, Merseyside, Hertfordshire, Tring, London, Derbyshire and Australia! Just because people move away isn't an excuse for not keeping up with friendships - there's email, texts, phone calls and letters or cards!

Most people I know met their partners online (under 35s) so maybe that’s why my experience is different? No worrying whether they fancy you or not, as you met explicitly on a site for meeting people you fancy?

The other points are addressed by what I said about being up front. I’ve never had a problem discussing those things early on with a partner, so they’ve never been an issue for me. I’ve never found it a problem to say “Obviously we’ll see how compatible we are, but I want to know you’re ultimately looking for a monogamous relationship leading to commitment down the line”. Whereas if I said the equivalent to a new acquaintance about friendships, that would be nuts.

As for “it’s a friendly interaction which may be serious or less serious. Why does it have to be defined?”- you made the thread talking about people who don’t have actual friends and want them. Not people who struggle with casual social interaction. They specifically want something more than that and that’s where the difficulties I mention come in.

Whereas with friendships, there’s no “standard” so you’re always trying to suss out what level of friendship other person wants. And if you want friends but keep meeting people who want to be acquaintances, that does knock your confidence to keep putting yourself out there.

I know what you mean, but if I ever feel someone has a checklist of mystery "standards" I need to adhere to, the friendship just doesn't flourish, so I don't worry about it.

I've met a woman in the last few years who seems to have a lot of boundaries, but I'm not quite sure what they are exactly, so I naturally give less of myself to her than others who are much more easy going. We're still friends, but I have much lower expectations with her.

I'm aware of the irony of saying it on the internet, but I do think the rise of 24/7 social media and internet in your pocket all the time, along with its curated algorithms, has led to a lot of social skills getting very stunted and many people now struggling to maintain real life, real time interaction where you have to filter and can't redraft a response as many times as you like, or just click away if you don't like it. And this social stuntedness has been fashionably relabelled as introversion or just hating people, both of which are now seen as rather superior. Obviously this isn't what introversion actually is, and neither introversion nor extroversion is inherently superior to the other, but it soothes a lot of people to think it.

I think there is a reason why regular real life socialisation is one of the biggest defences against dementia (obviously there's no guarantee). It does keep your mind active and agile.

We need more communities. Online communities absolutely have their place, maybe for very personal or niche things, but they can't replace real life ones. These used to be often based around religions; many people don't want that, which is understandable, but there doesn't seem to be anything to replace them. And the truth is that people, even genuinely very introverted people, need people.

It’s worth remembering people with social difficulties of one kind or another are vastly overrepresented on mumsnet, as on any online forum. I myself am pretty sure I’m autistic, but I’ve developed strong masking abilities over the years. I have no trouble at all making friends now and am highly
social. But that’s only with lots of practice.

I think it can be easier to find a partner than friend if you are not very socially skilled, because so many romantic relationships in the earlier stages just revolve around sex. Plenty of people have nothing in common with their spouses, have zero conversation with them and so on. Those things are barriers to friendships but not to romantic relationships for a lot of people.

In my teens/twenties, when I was completely socially inept, I would often start relationships with men literally just by having sex with them. I was too anxious and inept to go on a traditional date but having someone round for sex was manageable because there were no social requirements.

I have close friends from school days, uni and a couple from work, a couple from baby groups.

Most of the mums in DD1's year are mostly lovely, we go for drinks occasionally etc.

DD2's year are mostly awful though, constantly bitching about each other, the teachers, the children. Walked up behind a couple of them to hear them saying horrible things about my DD and another. They see their children being openly horrible to others and think it's funny. It's hard to make friends with people like this, as feel like they can't be trusted. Tbh I dont care what they say or think of me, but seeing them encourage unkind behaviour towards others makes it harder to be friendly with them.

I think this is what makes it harder to make new friends when get older - you get wiser and more able to see through the bullshit, and more selective. When you are younger you feel like you need to keep making friends and maybe compromise a bit to acheive this. But when older you realise 'I don't need awful people in my life, I have a small group of great friends and my family and that's fine with me'.

In the last couple of years, I have tried very hard to make new friends as many of my friends moved far away or were only keen on social media friendships ( which I detest) I joined clubs and actively made an effort to reach out to women I thought were interesting and fun.
I have about a 25% success rate in converting acquaintances to friends. I think that's pretty good actually but some may find that too little ' return'.
I also discovered that a lot of people who constantly say they are lonely don't actually want friends. They just want to talk about making friends. Or they don't want to be friends with me!

I don't think its the parents who make kids their world, they are more likely to have been to baby groups, made friends with school mums, help at clubs and the PTA, all of which can lead to friends or at least socialising. I think he reluctance to do this comes first and the kids are the excuse. Genuinely putting kids first would mean sucking up that discomfort.

I look at my DDs friends up to 14/15 and I feel I can almost tell who will be in this situation as an adult. They always had expectations around friendships which were really meeting the criteria of a relationship "best friend," "don't have other friends and if you do, reassure me I'm more important," "don't do things without me, even if they are things I don't want to do." As teens these girls are having boyfriends but no real standards for these boyfriends and hardly see their friends then.

It's like they lack the perspective that friendship can have many different faces and intensities. The parents encourage this with focusing on BFFs and saying things like "don't make someone a priority if you aren't theirs." It means these kids have drama and insecurity around friendships, often centred on their own needs. The healthiest friendshiosnare often mor outward looking on both sides, people should encourage kindness for its own sake and what you can do for other people and it would come good for them.

These are the people who become very dependent on their adult children for company and support if their partner dies before them. It’s weird.

I’ve often found myself thinking exactly what you say in your OP and you’ve put it very well. Really interesting thread.

Yes, I think with friends it’s much easier. I often say to my young adult kids, that you can get something positive and different out of every friendship, and no one friend has to have it all. Eg one friend can be kind, the other can be funny, the other might be the one that arranges lots of interesting social events and that’s great. But in a partner I think we want far more positive qualities in just one person. Which is much harder surely.

I’m gearing up for the annual ‘all alone at Xmas’ threads, which I read and nod along to with empathy, until the inevitable final line revealing they are actually defining ‘all alone’ as with their DH and DC.

@Nameynamechange21i think that's so true what you said about a vicious circle. When you're isolated and lonely and hungry for connection you can come off a bit desperate and will take rejection or failed attempts to connect harder than if you have friendships already and are more easy come easy go.

I agree, but that’s when I’m just casually socialising and happy for things to stay breezy and develop however. The OP was asking about people who don’t have any friends and struggle to make them. When I’m in that situation, that’s when trying to suss out people’s capacity/expectations/wants becomes important (and for me, tricky!).

This.
There is a kind of 'script' to follow when finding a partner: dating rituals, social conventions and norms, expectations of fidelity, and you can have the 'where is this going?' conversation.

With friendship, there is absolutely no guidelines, no commonly-accepted process, no clear boundaries.
It is a minefield and feels far more risky.

@Thepeopleversuswork
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.
I have always found exactly the opposite.
You know what is expected of a boyfriend, and if he doesn't measure up you can dump him. You have no idea what you should expect from a friend, what should be normal, and there is no clear-cut status like 'we are over' or 'we are trying to make it work', just a vagueness and confusion.

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