Friends by Default

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All my life I’ve either been alone or with one friend. The person I am very close with now happens to be a popular, outgoing person. He’s a great guy and is very accepting of my aspie ways. : )

I seem to get all his friends by default. I’ve met a lot of people since I first started hanging around him. Most everyone has been nice to me, but I’m always the third wheel. I don't say much around other people, and when I finally do I tend to make things awkward...or just come off as a jerk. It bugs me knowing that if I stopped tagging along with my friend, I’d never see any of them again. Is it then really even worth the trouble of trying to interact with them?

Just wondering if anyone has had a similar experience...

I was in exactly the same position you're in for about a decade with someone. I, too, suffer from the "chosen one" syndrome, in which I have exactly one person in my life. Can't have any more; can't have any fewer. This person understood and actually kind of liked that. She was always the life of the party when we went out, though -- while I was at the party hiding in a corner hoping no one would talk to me. Her friends slowly became my friends (to an extent). All the while, though, I know that they thought that we were wrong together. When that relationship ended, the "friends" evaporated; but, in truth, they were just as you say: "friends by default." Hey, no one ever promised me this wouldn't be a lonely life.

Well I used to be like that, I do have friend (sadly, we've grown apart the last couple of years) which is the extrovert and I am the opposit of him. But I didn't got his circle of friends as default, never really met them.

Pretty much almost all of my friends in college were friends by default before I cut them out/they left. I would have one or two FRIENDs in a group and their other friends kinda became mine just by association...but im sure they thought i was weird but put up with it because our mutual friend saw something in me that they didnt and accepted our mutual friends judgement. Once I fell out with the mutal friend there was no reason for us to hang out anymore. We had nothing in common and I realized that I didnt even know how to interact with them without our mutual friend acting as a buffer or a link

I've gone through a near-similar experience. Although I have quite a few friends, most are just people by themselves rather than groups. My ex-boyfriend was an extremely outgoing and popular guy who had a slew of friends and aquaintances ,and the whole time we were seeing each other or going out, his friends became instantly attached to me...but when we broke up and even during the time where we remained friends, they slowly drifted away.

One good way to break out of the "default friend" label is to do activities with those friends in absence of the common friend who introduced you. I has worked for me.