Do you have friends?

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^^^^^^ how apropriate ^^^^^ ....... Pink Floyd wishing you were here .

INR...if you think about friends lost, what you miss about them tells you what friendship means to you

No, I don’t really have friends;
Wish I did.

When I was in graduate school I had three good friends. But these fell away after school.

I now have two friends, but they are people on my work team. I don’t believe these would continue without the glue of shared work goal.

So, I’m not sure those qualify as friendships or not.

I find now that I am in my 50s I have no desire to develop new friendships. Its really too much effort,

I reminisce about friends of old; we knew each other well. But too much water has now passed under the bridge to rekindle old friendships...except my favourite best friend was a girl named Tracy who was my best friend in second grade primary school. We had the purest friendship and for some reason she is the only friend I miss. Only check box on my friend bucket list.

Of course in real life If I found her she would think I was being weird and creepy to have even remembered her

^ yeah, when my father was your age, and i was much younger, much more anxious and depressed about wanting more friends, he mocked me and told me the last thing he wanted, was more friends. i didn't understand then, but now i'm seeing it.

meeting new people when school is behind you and everyone at work has their own goals and agenda really is a herculean task with often little reward.

hope ya find tracy someday...

why not?
do you see them outside of work?

I can't pretend to know what your dad went through but...It's tiring looking after an autistic child, plus a lot of people don't have the time or patience to deal with the baggage making friends with parents of a child with a disability (even if its mild).

For me time I spend socialising is time I feel I missed with my daughter.

Wouldn’t you agree that, sometimes, your daughter needs some “Me time” as well?

Yeah plenty now. But I'm too used to worrying about her all the time

No. And we have very different interests.

People I know casually or maybe on a little deeper, acquaintance-type level? Yeah, I have plenty of those, though most of them are back in other places I have lived and so I only know them online now. I'm still pretty new where I live now so I haven't really had much time to get to know folks here.

But if you're talking about really close friends you have a truly deep connection with, then no, I guess I don't really have anyone like that in my life now. I do have my partner, but while we care about each other and get along reasonably well, I'm not sure if we really have the kind of connection that I've had with other folks in the past.

As far as loneliness goes, I deal with that quite a bit. When I was a teenager, I kept a journal/diary at times and often wrote about wanting to find a best friend, someone who I defined as a person who would understand me perfectly and who I would have a very deep and special bond with (I guess most folks think of this person as a romantic partner, but I always labeled that person as a best friend during those years). I still haven't found that person just yet, and over the years I have come to the conclusion that that person probably doesn't actually exist. There are a couple of people in my life in the past who I felt got me better than most people and who I had pretty deep bonds with, but I'm not sure that "perfect" best friend really exists.

But yeah, I think loneliness is pretty common for autistic folks. I sometimes tell myself that I want to be alone and don't mind not having friends, but I think a lot of that is mainly the result of coming to the realization over the years that there really aren't too many people out there I can relate to. Deep down, I still don't think I'd mind making that special connection with someone if it was the right person.

Currently, no. Not many other people in my life either. That's a big reason why I joined up- to be able to socialize a little, but not so much it gets overwhelming.
I get easily overwhelmed.
I guess that if I wanted to, I could have a couple of friends. I'm usually the one who backs off or drops contact...I really suck at making contact, and then there's the fact that I just don't find most people very interesting. Not worth the energy drain.

Right now I think I'd be happiest if I worked with some nice people (looking for a job right now), have regular therapy contact (where I can rant without having to worry about reciprocity ), and a romantic relationship. Maybe some online friends. That'd be pretty perfect...but it's also pretty far from my current life.

I guess it depends on how you define friends. I feel like I don't have close friends but I know people who I suspect if I said we weren't friends they would be offended. I've only recently started trying to build relationships with people, I was basically a hikikomori throughout my 20s and I didn't realize it was taking a mental toll on me, so I started going to meetups and events to try to meet people, and now I have friends but there are people that I just text every so often and once in a blue moon I will see them in person, sometimes going through periods where we hang out a lot for a while and then zero contact for a long time after, then one day something makes me think of them and I'll want to message them as if we talked yesterday, I'm sure that's putting a strain on things. It's really hard to break the habit of being a loner and I don't know how to maintain relationships, it's exhausting for me to socialize I need more time to recharge after, but I'm sure my deafening silence for long periods of time isn't helping.

Are you in the Army?

I wouldn’t mind it. I’m just curious.

Am thinking , common traits exists on this here Wrong Planet . As the above posters seem to acknowledge some of the same traits inherent to this Planet ..... Hope you find this to be a good place to associate.

I have many "hang out" folks.

But I only have three truly close friends.