Are you unable to make friends online?

Post Reply New Topic

I have NO friends, either offline or online.

Offline, I fumble with the body language and everything social-related.

Online, have no clue of the give and take of chat.

You?

I've never attempted to make friends online; it makes little sense to me because of the dynamic of online friendships being kind of messed up. I'm adept enough socially to make friends in person, and use forums such as these for advice or understanding, but not friendship.

Yuuup! Zero friends here.

I've a couple real life friends from high school that I watch online but we are all so different now.

I thought making friends online would be easy but, nope. I just don't seem to connect with anybody.

I don't understand it.

Oh, well. Maybe in the next life.

I have no real life friends but do have 3 online friends. One of them I've known for about 12 years now.

I used to make friends online. I would just put in my email address online and IM screen names and I made friends that way. I used to get PMs sometimes asking to chat and now today I will occasionally get a PM somewhere and I answer and I never hear back from them. I also lost contact with lot of them or they blocked me. I have had people gone silent on me lots of times. People move on and I have very few now.

In real life no friends. I honestly don't know what to do with them and I don't have things in common with many people or know how to approach them. I even had lot if rejections as a kid and only kids came to me but even my own friends didn't like me following them or didn't want me around. I always found social chit chat boring and preferred to do activities.

I don't have any online friends nor do I have any friends in real life. Suffice to say that it's the latter of the two that causes me to feel great shame and disappointment. I sometimes wish that I were non-verbal and rue the fact that I can communicate, albeit poorly.

I've been quite successful making friends online, or more accurately they've been successful making friends with me, because all I seem to do is sit here and go along with their overtures if I think I can cope with the aftermath (which usually I can't). Not that the world beats a path to my door, just that the very few people who have approached me are enough for me - any more and I'd screw up. It's hard to compare it with realtime / "real life" friend-making, because over the decades my success had varied enormously depending on the cultures I've been in. And it's hard to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions generally with this question because of the small numbers of observations. I could lose the few friends I have, and die alone. Like I say, I'm not very proactive at all with friendship creation, just strongly reactive (in a good way), so it feels like it would depend on what they decided to do next. Like a girl trapped in a traditional sexist society, all I could do would be to try and look pretty and hope that some rich man will take a fancy to me and save me from starvation. So much for the male-brain theory of autism.

No, I'm not unable to make friends online, though like TD the initial overture usually comes from others, and there has to be enough in common for a "give and take" relationship that recognises and respects the differences as well as similarities.

Boundary issues are crucially important in all friendships I think - comments perceived as serious boundary invasions can instantly end friendships - and it's much harder online to perceive another's boundaries and to signal one's own boundaries.

Boundaries can be a big issue for some ASD people it seems, perhaps because the learning curve is supposed to be a socially-intuitive silent process - if it was written down and presented as a set of guideline instructions during the early social-learning phase of life, then things would probably be very much better for them. Sometimes I think a mentoring system for specific difficulties could be a great accommodation for the subgroup who has real difficulty in this area and suffers greatly because of it.

I have made a few acquaintances online, not true friends though. I don't make or care to make friends however. It's interesting to see this thread because I thought the aforementioned and my age were the reasons.

I have a lot of trouble with initiating and maintaining conversation, this affects both online and real life. Although I can do it if it's regarding a concrete task, i usually have a complete mental block about what to say otherwise. Wether it's a direct result of that i'm not sure, but while i would like friends i don't really have much interest in talking.

According to my real life friend, who ironically i met online, i'm slightly better in person than online. But i still rely heavily on the other peson to initiate everything, there are only so many people around with the patience to do that.

I have no friends either, I could say you are not alone, but that's just a bad joke.

yes i can not make friends everytime i do i mess up and they dont talk too me ever again that includes online friends

I have more than enough. Even though I rarely initiate, they come to me.
I used to have enough acquaintances that passed me as 'popular' in a certain group.
Then I used to have several various circles of online friends. Had merged, divided, connected them even. Fun times.

Nowadays, I'm not as active since I don't have enough time unless I'm asking something... Though I have chatted 2 or 3 of them at least once a week or month.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

I can never figure out the dynamics of an online friendship... it's not that I don't want one it's just that I never know when to respond or with how much information or with what questions. >~<

Oh thank goodness, I'm not the only one.

I have two online friends, and right now two IRL friends (including my fiancé).

I am as terrible with back and forth chatting online as I am IRL. The concept of general chit chat and small talk needs to just go away and never come back. Communicating in something other than infodumping takes a lot of effort.

Both online and IRL, I often feel panicked because I can't tell where social boundaries are and either come off as too invasive with my attention or too withdrawn. I don't know how much is too much or too little. I prefer other people approach me when they want to hang out/chat for the aforementioned reasons, which people interpret as not wanting to hang out, period.

I often trip myself up with trying to fit in. I pretend to like things I don't, which always fails, and I don't know why I can't seem to make myself stop. I used to talk about sex and drinking a lot because I thought that was what people liked to hear. I had a reputation as a drunken floozy for a while and didn't understand why. I spent a long, long time trying to present myself as very vulgar and kooky because it got laughs, not realizing how offensive and off putting I was until I got called out by someone I looked up to. It wasn't completely an act, but I turned it up from maybe five to eleven.

I don't know how to act to fit in. Being myself doesn't feel like an option. I am stony and blunt, so I'm kinda regarded as an ice queen when I am >_<

I honestly have no idea how I have the friends I have, online or off.

Careful with that radiation stuff. It killed Mary Curie. What Space stuff specifically?