Are you supposed to get depressed if you can't make friends?

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I have another theory as to why I seem to have an inability to make friends. It's a tad counterintuitive.

It's because it doesn't make me all that sad.

Sure, it makes me a little sad and lonely, but I don't cry myself to sleep. I think that the average person would be a total basket case in my position, but I'm secure with it and used to it.

I think people detect this and don't like the vibes from someone who isn't insecure about not having any friends because people are supposed to have an instinct that upsets them greatly if they don't have friends but to me it is only a moderate annoyance. But the social convention is you're supposed to think your life is over if you're utterly friendless.

Pretty irritating when your problem is caused by being moderately annoyed by something you should be extremely depressed about leaving you in a state of perpetual moderate annoyance that can only be cured with ultra depression.

I can't change the way I feel intrinsically, but maybe I could change others perceptions about me by pretending to be more upset and insecure than I really am.

Maybe I should start wearing all black, cut myself, write crappy poetry, and turn into a drama queen.

Agh! I think I understand why the emo movement started now. *facepalm*

I love your sarcasm about the "emo movement!"

It's really funny. There were no "emos" when I was in school. They just came about in recent years.

At any rate, I was hurt very much at first by not being able to make friends and having no one to sit with at lunch. Then, I got used to it, like an everyday thing.

In middle school, the pain hit all over again like a freight train, due to puberty. But again, I adjusted. In High School, I was able to eat lunch alone without any problems or irritations.

When I first got to high school I was super moody and wanted to be left alone more than anything. I sat alone at lunch every day. This was before I was diagnosed with Asperger's too, so I had no 'excuse' for being anti-social.

Then a bunch of annoying classmates started pestering me about how I shouldn't be alone all the time and they were just gonna follow me around even if I moved and being all pleasant in conversation and such.

I wouldn't trade them for the world. I learned a lot from those guys.

I learned that the important thing isn't making lots of friends and bending over just to be liked. It's about caring. I should be hanging out with people because I honestly care about them. I call them up because I like their company. Between these guys and a few other friends I managed to transform my sulking, lonely outlook into a hopeful love for all people. And I've never been truly lonely since.

I'm with you, sure I don't have any real friends but I can easily live with it and I already have for years. I have lived a life of solitude for quite a while anyways so getting any friends in the future to me would be like a bonus. I understand that to some people, friends are everything but to me, not so much. My social status doesn't mean a thing to me and I'll do whatever I want. Since I've been out of high school for two years already, it doesn't have to mean anything.

haha! I'm new here, undiagnosed and still just wondering if I'm aspie, but one of the things that makes me think Yes is that so many aspies (at least compared to almost zero NTs) seem to be natural solitaries. Like me! I have actually approached my diocese (Catholic) about becoming a consecrated hermit (some social ratification of an otherwise socially unacceptable preference?). It seems to be something like introversion (in the Jungian, MBTI sense) but goes beyond. I have gotten good at social interaction (42 years old), I'm not insecure interacting with people, but I just really LOVE solitude. I feel freer, I can think more clearly, I guess at some level I am still putting on an act with people even though it's not a conscious effort any longer, but it's a constant strain. Being alone lifts that strain. I lived in the city for years, and after I moved to the safer suburbs, I realized that I had been unconsciously stressed all the time by having to be hyper-vigilant to avoid being robbed or mugged. It's kind of like that ... I don't even realize any more that I'm stressed out around people, until I get somewhere where there is NO ONE ELSE and I relax.

All that said, I know I'm missing something. I get lonely sometimes, but I love solitude so much that I haven't built the foundation of friendships, to be able to just call on them in a low moment. Also I've got strengths and weaknesses, like everyone else, and when you go through life alone you don't have someone else's strengths to complement your own -- I suck at keeping a budget, for example, and I'm not handy with making and fixing things. If I could stand to be a nun in community, instead of a hermit, well, that would relieve a different undercurrent of stress: someone else could worry about the budget, take that off my shoulders and let me focus on music or something, or at least mentor-supervise-guide me in it so it's not such a heavy responsibility on me alone. The same is true of friends ... they are someone to lean on, someone to call on when you need a helping hand. They're not only that, and you have to nurture such a relationship, but it's a trade-off, and worth it as long as you still honor your own nature and preference for solitude. I guess ... saying it as someone who's not managing it well.