Is there something wrong with me?

[booyou]

I am posting on here as I need to get this out and find another perspective on this.

I am a mum to 3 delicious children and have a solid relationship with my husband.

I think I am a nice person and a good friend. My problem is that I don't seem to be able to maintain friendships. I left school and di not keep in touch with and school friends, I moved a couple of hours away from my hometown and have lived here for 10 years.

I have has lots of what I class as friendships and some acquaintances over the years. Right now I have issues with a lady that I have been friends with for 6 or 7 years so I think that this relationship may end. I have a couple of newer friends and lots of people I know.

How can I make long lasting friendships?

tbh I think this is very common.

Every now and then a similar topic is started and there are always lots of responses along the same lines, and the consensus seems to be that once you get older it becomes harder to make and maintain meaningful friendships.

Fwiw I do understand where you're coming from. I too have lived here for ten years and I can hand on heart say that I have no real friends here. I have lots of aquaintences, people who i consider to be friends and then they seem to drift away from me and I don't really know why. But from reading other posts on here it does seem to be quite a common thing, and IMO part of it is that people often already have their long-standing friendships and don't necessarily really have the space for more.

Like you, although I can make friend easily, I do not seem to kept them for long. When I started uni I seemed to lose touch with my school friends; when I started work, I drifted aways from my uni friends. Once at work I moved from town to town, so it was difficult to maintain any friendships. But , even now as a mum, I only see one women from my DD baby days, again all of the other relationships just drift.

I think unless you continue to have things in common, friendships can be difficult and time consuming to keep hold of.

You say you have issues with your friend - is it you or her that is going to back away?

Sorry, that was a really long ramble to post, without even having an answer!

I never seem to make close long lasting friendships either.

I think it is a failing on my part. not sure what exactly though

we're a sad bunch, aren't we!

Thank you, makes me feel better to know its is not just me IYSWIM.

havoc The issues with my friend will mean me backing away I think. When I see her, I feel very close to her, as if I can tell her anything but she has let me (and my family) down over and over again ie she will arrnage to meet and then cancel or just ignore texts but then she will send her DH with gifts for my Dc at christmas etc - fed up of the rejection.

I think it gets to the stage when you are older that people have made all the friends they are going to and everyone gets on with their own lives. Also, you have said that you are a forces family in other posts, from my experience, WAGS tend to keep themselves to themselves, in the two years on camp no one really wanted to bother with me or anyone else. It was almost like they were afraid of something.

lighthouse No that is not me, not a forces wife. LOL. It makes me sad if this is the case because I could do with more friends.

lighthouse it is me that is the forces wife.

booyou your MN name is causing a bit of confusion i think.

it can be hard not to think that there must be something wrong with you.

I've always found it hard to make friends, but about a year ago I got to a point where I actually thought I finally was being accepted into a group of friends. I became confident enough to invite a whole group of people round for a bbq in the summer. Within 24 hours of me inviting about eight couples they had all declined. I gave the benefit of the doubt and put it down to them being busy etc, so I moved the date and again had rejections from all within hours, and this time some didn't even respond.

I later found out that a number of them had a party at one of their houses on the first date I had suggested, to which I obv hadn't been invited..

Lesson learned and I will never again try and do something like that.

People are strange

Everybody has stuff going on in their minds/lives, and it's really not easy to know what. I've often found that the friends who are 'always there' have got some weird agenda going on, eg one who 'stole' my husband and one who stole my life, "Single White Female" style!!

Don't forget we change, too. Since I started getting my head straight, I've found I don't even like my old friends from advertising any more. And of course this happens inveitably when you have kids, if your friends haven't.

Soul-mate friends are as precious as soul-mate husbands, think about how many frogs you have to kiss first! It's easier to make new friends at school/college/work because there are hundreds of people around you & you're together all day ... even with so many potential pals, you still end up with only a dozen or so you'd call friends. So, naturally, when you're working with a smaller pool you're going to get fewer results.

WannaBe, don't give up on your invites! Just because that lot were rude to you, it doesn't mean everyone will be - or even that that they will be, another time. Maybe stick to having one or two round for an hour or so for a while; see if things improve - and if they don't, move on to some different people

I guess we all might have more RL friends if we devoted ourselves as much to physical folk as we do to forums ...