why am i so isolated?

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so i dont know if this will be more of a rant for myself or just another post about social skills and making friends. a little background on myself, i was a fairly happy kid with3 neighborhood friends til about age 15/16. and it was a time of changes for all of us. so i set out on my own and by the time i was 17, i had a similar size group of upper classmen bandnerds (after just starting to hang around them in band class, etc, for awhile, and not the doing the traditional hi my name is...etc) and eventually hung out with on weekends. i never got close to any of them over the next 2-3 years and with a gf by the time of my graduation, she was the only person i hung out with and i was the only person for her too. I went to college about 3 hours away and still had my gf for the first year or so. when i arrived at college, i was immediately given a rather we dont understand you or like you or particularly care for you response from my roommate and the guys in the hall who instantly became friends. i still had my gf, i went to my classes and i went home about every 3 weeks to mainly be with her and nobody else, and by that time my small group of friends had been long since forgotten, but i didnt care. i never tried or thought to introduce myself to anybody in any of my classes my entire freshman year, and when i was on campus on weekends, i spent a lot of time in my room listening to music, watching movies, going to the gym, and walking downtown to the music store and get some mcdonalds.

and in addition, i recieved a lot of ridicule, got played some pretty mean pranks by my roommate, and all the other guys in the hall. it was a living f*****g hell. but i still had my gf, so i got by with that.

a month into my sophomore year, my gf broke up with me. my new roommate was essentially a drug user and he had 2 of his life long friends reside in the room next to us. i got even more of the same treatment with physical, emotional, and mental abuse. i spent a lot of weekends much like freshman year, alone in my room, going to the dining center alone, and never having much fun. luckily, and i mean by pure random luck (which i dont remember how it came to be) a guy in the hallway somehow befriended me and he became my buddy for the year. he was different and we had very few indepth common interests other than certain movies and music. in the middle of this, with some random black guy (i am white and my racist roomie didnt like it one bit) from one of my classes who was equally strange, we were introduced to a few girls down the hall after he had this wonderful idea to make random calls. the black guy just stopped coming around after our class together and now by the end of the year, i had one guy friend and 4 girlfriends. and i tried to be their friend as since i was still single and hurting from my relationship ending, i leaned on them. BUT i guess i depended on them a little too much and i guess they felt it was becoming a little strange that this supposed straight guy wanted to hang out with 4 ladies. none of them were the standard hot college girl, most of them were overweight, nerds, or former band nerds. but by the end of the year, through mulitple occurences, they just started to not include me on anything they were doing and never came around to see how i was doing or anything.

junior year, i moved in with the guy from soph year, and it started out great but since he was still my only social contact i relied on him too much and most of the time, he didnt want to do anything unless other people were involved. he also decided to join a fraternity and by middle of the year, me and him rarely spoke or hung out anymore. i was alone still in a mass of 20.000 people. no gf, no significant social ties, no nothing after 3 years at the place.

senior year, i was done with having a roommate. i moved back into my freshman dorm hall in a single room. i didnt last very long and ended up withdrawing from the college about a month in. i had enough. no one cared for me, no one liked me, i had no good friends, and other than the academics, i hated the f*****g place. so i moved back home, started seeing a therapist, and started back at a local college in the new year. and by that point, all i cared about was to get the f*****g degree and move on. college had been nothing but misery, hopelessness, anger, and frustration and i wanted nothing more to do with it.

so i received my degree. and i continued living at home for about 3 more years and have now been on my own for almost 3 years. and in that period of time, i have had a few different jobs, lived at 3 different locations, and still have no social connections other than 1 guy who i used to work with and know through high school band, i see him maybe once every 3 to 6 months on average. and im wanting to change this and im wanting answers/guidance/ and or an absolute okay feeling that people care about me and want me to be around. but i dont know how to do it. i feel like time has been lost, opportunity has been wasted, and yet despite my best efforts, i dont know how to make and keep friends.

and another thought pops in my mind that "hey im an adult now and arent adults just supposed to be nice, mature, caring, respectful, and willing to know/learn/and be friends with others?" but i dont see that happening unless i change my entire brain, my entire set of actions/behaviors, upgrade my social skills, and learn to be as likable and normally cool as hell to get friends, to get a gf, to have a life, to have fun in life.

luckily, im seeing a therapist, but he hasnt been much help yet in this particular issue. i want to live my life full and happy. i just wish it was easier for me to do it as easy as everyone with those tons of friends outthere.

oh what to do, what to do?!?!?!

Trust me, you are not alone. Just be thankful you got a degree. I dropped out of college during my senior year. I tried to get a degree at a community college but had to abandon that too. In my case, I was too terrified to go far from home to attend college. My saving grace was that a very good university was only 20 minutes from my home so I continued to live with the parents and commuted every day (even though I barely interacted with my parents). This allowed me to basically escape any "normal" social interaction in college. It also allowed me to maintain my relationship with my gf who was a year younger than I and pretty much the only person I talked to. But, for reasons uknown to me, I couldn't handle it anymore and just stopped going. The friends I have now, I can count on one hand and have known them all since 3rd grade. I wish it was easier to make new friends but I'm really not sure how. For the most part, I have accepted this and continue on in my own little world. However, there are times when it just hits me and I feel like I am isolated from everyone else.

go places on your own be brave and talk to strangers do social things out there

its not a place like a school college or university its a place full of strangers living there lives you have to make things happen you have to push yourself out there and you will get your rewards there are alot of nice people out there you just have to go out there and find them i dont think people have alot friends out there so much but aquaintences lots of them

im a loner but i was brave i talked to a woman at a bus stop once and thats when i met my third ex-girfriend she dumped me around last october just be brave

Oh and im from the uk maybe the education thing might not make sense at college here you dont get degrees iv never got one of those iv never been to university

Honestly, compared to me, you are a social butterfly. I've never had a group of friends, and in the off chance, should I have had more than one friend at the same time (more often I simply had no friends), they usually did not like eachother.

At university I ate lunch exactly twice with another person, my lab partner both times, but my other classmates, I rarely saw outside of class. Occasionally I would run into a former classmate with whom I would have mutual recognition and we would chat, and I certainly would not have minded being friends with them, but such a thing never materialized and I never had a group of friends, even temporarily.

Unlike you, however, I did not isolate myself, and both ate, and studied in heavily populated areas. I even moved to different parts of the campus on occasion, yet still, despite my efforts I managed to be an island in a sea of people.