How To Make Friends

It would probably surprise people who know me personally to hear I always had a difficult time making friends growing up. After moving schools in fourth-grade a boy befriended me and we were very close until early seventh-grade when he decided to stop hanging out with me for some reason (I never found out why, but I moved again a few months into seventh-grade anyway). Although I was tall and well known as a teenager, being co-captain of the swimming team, on student council, and voted Winter Dance royalty, I was not very close with anyone in particular and bounced around friend groups and more often waited for people to befriend me rather than the other way around.

At various times I grew close to a few different boys, but each of those friendships were close for only about a year, as fear of being found out as gay while living in a conservative community was always going to be a barrier to real friendship, especially because of destructive control and coping mechanisms commonly taught in religious communities, such as lying or prioritizing materialism. Once on a retreat for student council with a school from the big city I made friends with some of their student council whom, being non religious, were more friendly to me than anyone I had ever met, and they even gave me a nickname, ‘Chief,’ which nobody had ever done before. But since I didn’t know how to make friends and had already developed a dissociative personality due to the instability of my childhood I did not even recognize their treatment of me as an invitation for friendship. I always wondered what might have come of my life if I had actually acted on those friendships.

I don’t remember where I saw it said that we often make friendships of convenience and proximity rather than of the heart and spirit. Many of us make friends that are rich because we desire the safety of money, and many people also want to be rich just so others will be attracted to us, because we all understand the attraction of wealth and success. But people who desire proximity to wealth are not good friends and merely desire the illusory relief from fear that power brings, so while rich people might appear to have many friends they are insubstantial and have nothing to do with the person. Most religious people such as the community in which I was raised think they have friendships when in reality they simply associate with others of common belief for protection and inclusion, which is the very definition of convenience and proximity and why those of us from religious communities feel lonely even with an abundance of associations.

The inability to make and maintain friendships was more perilous for me as a young man after my family abandoned me for being gay, and I was left to struggle on my own with overwhelming depression and loneliness until it became too much to bear and finally attempted suicide at the age of twenty-one. Unfortunately that incident did not come with any resolution of those problems, and later attempts to establish friendships resulted more often in volatile, unreliable, and unbalanced associations that rarely lasted more than a year. After moving to Los Angeles I found it easier to meet people my age and thought finding my group was only a matter of time. But after a few years of more continued failure thought a decisive plan to proactively join an activity group would be needed to increase my chances at friendship and romance. Through a serendipitous conversation with a coworker I found a volleyball group to join, which exposed me to a far greater number of people. Many of them took a liking to me, and they even invited me to parties and events, even to trips to New York City, and I started to feel like I had finally started finding my place in life. But several people in that group tried to date me, and when I didn’t return their interest they turned around and sex-shamed me and bad-mouthed me out of spite, and of course the group prioritized their long-term members, even those who exhibited such toxic and abusive behavior.

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Some of my fun friends ❤️

I later found some other friends and we spent quite a bit of time together and I have a lot of fond memories with them. Once on Halloween we were out “liquor-treating,” going house to house and drinking, and we had made fantastic halloween costumes together and were having a great time until a random guy decided to grab my butt without permission, shoving his hand fully up my crack. I had been leaning all my weight on the leg I injured in high school and jolted such that twisting popped my kneecap off and my legs stopped working and I fell straight down, hitting the table with cups and alcohol on my way down (someone later said they saw the chocolate Kahlúa fountain go straight up in the air and crash back onto the table). Everyone thought I was just drunk and tried to help me up but I had to pop my knee back in place, and my friends were so kind that they took me home and spent the evening with me instead of staying out. But one of them later started hitting me, in the face, when he was upset, so those friendships also ended as well.

At the age of thirty I finally met a man I wanted to move in with, and while I continued trying to find friends I mostly took refuge from the disappointing world of humanity in our relationship. Tired of so many years of failure and loneliness I was happy to escape into that brief romance. Probably most people, at least to some degree, similarly use our romantic partners as substitutes for real friendships, because the desire for sex and intimacy is so much easier fulfilled with a romantic partner, but then we end up expecting too much of one person which stresses the relationship. When it ended and he abandoned me for drugs and partying I once again found the absence of friends to be a negative consequence to my wellbeing, and slept on the couches of acquaintances while I put my life back together. Joining the recovery community I thought for sure I would finally be able to make friends since there were many people to associate with whom had similar life experiences as my own. But it turns out that former alcoholics and drug addicts are even worse friendship material without their self-medication, because recovery communities do not teach such life skills as making friends, because they also don’t know how, and nearing my forties was still left wondering how in the world my life could ever include friends.

It turns out (big surprise, I know) I had undiagnosed autism, and to most people friendship comes naturally as part of human instinctual behavior and the making of friendships is to most people as natural as breathing and eating but with conditions on the autism spectrum these instinctual human behaviors are muted because of chronic elevation in stress hormones due to the underlying causes of autism. While autism spectrum disorders do not necessarily prevent friendship, and many people who have difficulty making friends are not autistic, it certainly complicate the process, especially when also burdened with lifelong trauma and the absence of certain life skills like making and maintaining healthy relationships. My experiences trying to make friends failed so many times and so spectacularly, however, I actually began keeping a list of all the failed experiences, and from the last 8 years there are 36 entries and some are truly ridiculous like an attempt with someone that did not respond to my overtures who later texted me out of the blue because he had met a guy he wanted to go out with also named Nathan and accidentally texted me instead of him and then made an attempt to save his embarrassment by inviting me to coffee, which I knew he would not show up and so told him no.

I have also been coaching people on physical and mental health for a full decade now and have written three books on my experiences and the thing which has struck me most about making friendships is just how many Americans are fucking traumatized beyond belief and thus unavailable for truly meaningful friendship. Every single one of my friends growing up all have substantial, insane amounts of unresolved trauma which disrupt their lives in a myriad of ways. Many established friendships I observe are also between people who never really broach substantive engagement, and their mutual superficiality is actually a reason for their continued association. I noticed in my mid-thirties after getting sober that most people could not sustain eye contact with me in nearly every encounter, and that my emotional availability in fact unnerved them. It turned out that all my life my desire for friendships was not so much because of what was wrong with me, though I wasn’t good at it either, but because of what was wrong with all of us, and that somewhere over the intervening generations we have become more disconnected from each other than ever.

The root of this problem in the United States goes all the way back to the early colonies in the 1600s founded with practices like indentured servitude and slavery, and the few communities which didn’t practice slavery were abusive, orthodox religious cults which regularly practiced murder of their own members for noncompliance. Then came the genocide of the Indigenous Americans as our ancestors murdered and stole their way across this continent, then the Revolutionary War and chattel slavery of Africans, then the Civil War killed about 8% percent of American men, then came the World Wars I and II, and segregation and Jim Crow laws and lynchings, the Cold War, the Korean war, Vietnam, AIDS, and all the other horrendous events which our country has committed.

Our generations have also been artificially separated from each other due to the very way in which our infrastructure is built around the automobile. Previous generations could and would meet friends and lovers simply through proximity and random chance, but most Americans now spend the majority of our time driving cars and completely avoiding others, which is a major contributor to our problems with mental health and personal wellbeing, and many of us do not even have the opportunity to meet people, let alone befriend them.

I learned from the practice of so much inventory as discussed in my book, The Perfect Child, to have compassion for myself and how difficult it can be living in this kind of world. I am only one person, and I have always been doing the best I could, even when that was not very good at all because of limited life skills, and of course it would be difficult. Practicing inventory also helped me recognize which skills I lacked, such as even recognizing good candidates for friendship to begin with, something I had never actually considered, and because I was so lonely and just wanted to have friends I would leap at any chance which came my way. Once when new to Los Angeles I went alone to an outdoor bar one weekend afternoon and was almost immediately approached by a woman who was pretty and outgoing. We started talking and then exchanged numbers and began hanging out. I later went with her one weekend to a lesbian bar and had a great time until, on the walk to another bar, she was so drunk that she dropped her pants and pissed in the middle of the sidewalk. Later that same night she complained about her ex and got the idea that we would drive to her apartment so she could get her ex’s stuff and dump it on her ex’s lawn. I would totally do something like that for a real friend but I barely knew this person and instead got her a cab home and deleted her number.

Not long after that experience a handsome guy approached me at the same bar and asked for my number. I was excited to go out with him and we spent an afternoon together, then went back to his place and started watching the X-Men series from our childhood while cuddling on the couch. When I leaned over to kiss him he pulled away, and I immediately felt embarrassed and ashamed at the rejection. So I made my excuses and left. Over the years I occasionally ran into him and he grew to be very much loved by the community and was a genuinely good person. He later died from liver cancer, about ten years after we first met, and I realized for the first time that I had missed an opportunity for a good friendship because I had been embarrassed by rejection. After all, he had asked me to hang out, and we had gotten along really well, but the thought of friendship had not even crossed my mind, and if I had instead treated him as a friend instead of a failed romantic opportunity I probably could have made the kind of friendship I had always wanted.

Because of our separation by infrastructure many people now make friends online with people they do not live near, and it is extremely sweet and wonderful that people have access to this way of making friends. I fully believe that access to the internet and the social support it can bring is the primary cause of the reduction in crime which has occurred steadily since the 1990s (but the internet has also helped promote people’s access to employment and income, which also helps with crime). I myself have made several friends through this work with people all over the world I would not have otherwise met without the internet, yet there are many forces at work currently which are trying to censor the internet and impair our access through disguised ID-requirement and age restrictions, because access to the internet is so effective at alleviating people from their isolation.

Yet even with access to the internet many of us still have difficulty making and maintaining friendships due to the absence of effective life skills. When I was entering my late thirties realizing I had never found anyone who could actually teach me these skills I wondered where in the fucking world I could learn them? Neither my parents nor anyone in my extended family had these skills—the boomer generation was especially antisocial and terrible at life—but self-help books and media, celebrities and guides also never seemed to have the kind of meaningful life skills I knew I wanted to have. Not even my sponsor in AA had them. One day when I was feeling particularly lost and confounded I sat down to practice inventory therapy on my frustrations and suddenly had the realization that I had been teaching myself these skills without even knowing it! For instance, one of the reasons I didn’t recognize the opportunity for friendship in my friend who had rejected my romantic advances while watching X-men was because I took myself and rejection too seriously. Having inventoried rejection and embarrassment many times I knew that if such a scenario presented itself again in the future I would not be so ashamed and rash. Having found compassion for myself, my mistakes, shortcomings, and weaknesses I also began to find compassion for others in that I recognized my old friend had not been mean in rejecting me but was just not interested, or was going through things I didn’t know about at the time. I myself had rejected men for being too hot, because their beauty made me feel vulnerable and powerless. Once someone I knew messaged me on social media and literally asked to be my friend, but the way he said it was dripping with insecurity which triggered my own insecurity, recognizing in him the same vulnerabilities I despised in myself and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be my friend if they really knew me, so I ignored his message. If I acted like this out of insecurity, of course others did too, and those kind of experiences were more about them, not me.

This all demonstrates the first step in making friends is to first take care of ourself and our personal needs. Adulthood is hard enough and the last thing that adults want is to have to take care of another adult. We should take care of each other, but we also shouldn’t have to take care of each other, especially when we’re a grown ass adult completely capable of sitting down to do inventory without having to be told. As I have found myself capable of taking care of more and more of my own needs over the years, things I before thought was only possible from others, I found not only an increase in confidence but also started to get to know and like myself. I did a lot of embarrassing things as a young person which I learned as a young person to be ashamed and embarrassed, but now I realize I just had a lot of limiting life experiences and was doing the best with what I had. For a long time I was ashamed of having tried to commit suicide, but of course anyone in those kinds of life circumstances would have. But, being suicidal is also not good friendship material, and in selecting friends people do not want to have to support someone when adulthood is already so difficult, so taking care of ourselves such as by teaching ourselves new skills with inventory practice is a way that we can become a better friend or partner.

After making progress on our own mental health and personal character there is a fundamental principle about the actual act of making friends which is not always apparent, and is the key to the establishment of all relationships but most importantly friendship, is that familiarity begets friendship. This phrase and principle came to me one day while doing inventory on friendship (anyone familiar with Ray Peat’s principle that energy begets structure will recognize the similarity). I realized this principle of making friends while observing others after having done much inventory therapy which liberated much of my preoccupation and insecurity that previously prevented me from seeing it. I recognized from past experiences that we observe others from a distance but in proximity, to evaluate both consciously and unconsciously whether a person has the kind of personality we might like or find camaraderie in them. Once in eighth grade History class a small pencil hit me in the face, and I realized I had zoned out and two boys who were not exactly bullies but frequently disruptive had noticed me zoned out and thrown it. Unknown to me at the time this was also an invitation to friendship, though many might mistake it as an instance of bullying. I laughed, because it was funny, but if I had taken myself less seriously and recognized the requisite for ego abandonment required of friendships could have gone up to chat with them and start what might have been a good friendship. People do not know who you are, so when trying to make friends people have no idea if you are a crazy person who is manipulative, abusive, and not much fun to be around, and so we observe each other at a distance and must allow others that opportunity. But without an opportunity to make such an evaluation over time such as finding ourselves in the same spaces regularly then others will be unable to make this determination.

After my suicide attempt while still in my early twenties before moving to Los Angeles I had been frequenting a large, popular coffee shop which had couches and plants and was a third space in which people often gathered. I often went alone but had started recognizing some of the regulars which also frequented the place. One of them always had his laptop and worked modeling 3D industrial equipment, it was one of my first introductions to 3D design which I would soon also take up for work, but I often talked to him and others and had started this process of befriending. If I had stayed there and not moved to Los Angeles I would have likely become real friends with those people since the way in which we met had been organic and genuine. But of course, I did not recognize the opportunity for friendship and so kept moving around as I would do for the next many years.

Once in my late twenties I became friends with a guy who was in a long term relationship, and I thought he might be a good possibility for friendship since he was already taken. He was also beautiful and athletic and fun to be around, but one day he volunteered me, without asking my consent, to do for free the graphics for his YouTube show that he was making with one of his collaborators. He had invited me to go to a concert with his partner (that his partner paid for) as if that obligated me to do work for him for free. At first I did not make it clear this was inappropriate because I was afraid of it not working out, and he took that as permission to continue trying to exploit me. One day he called to get me started on the graphics package and so I finally explained to him that what he was asking would take months and normally made me thousands of dollars and would cut into my regular work. He shouted at me and I never spoke to him again.

If we do not have the ability to discern appropriate candidates for friendship because of an abundance of unresolved trauma and absence of effective life skills then we will, like younger me, make unhelpful fundamental choices in trying to make friends in the first place. When I joined the volleyball group the person who introduced me to it was vapid, flighty, and gossipy, and there is no way the group would have let him in unless they were also like him, so going there I never found anyone who shared my same interests or standards. Going to the bar to find friends was an absolutely terrible place to find friends, though I thought it might be a good place to meet other gay men, gay men are also romantic options and romantic feelings create imbalanced, ultimately one-sided friendships. Nearly all of the short friendships I had as an adult were with other gay men that were attracted to me, and I willingly mistook their attraction for friendship because I lacked the confidence to be on my own. Sometimes I made friends at my places of work but work made me stressed out (it didn’t help that my lower back pain killed me for years), so I associated coworkers for professional relationships when in fact most people go to work to make friends (and people who don’t go to work to make friends are seriously mentally unwell).

Our coping mechanisms therefore inform the choices we make, so if our decision making process is not fundamentally helpful due to unresolved control and coping mechanisms then we make the wrong choices of where to find friends in the first place, and so of course we won’t be successful. This problem is the same for romantic relationships, in that we cannot find the kind of romantic partners we want because we do not even structure our lives to meet them in the first place, as the man or woman or n-b of your dreams does not even go to the places you do because they do not have the trauma and coping mechanisms which underly the choice to go to those places or do those things. At the end of my old relationship I realized I didn’t like any of his friends and never had, and that it was a reflection on who he was and how I had settled in my desperation to avoid loneliness for people who behaved far below my standards. The same is true of friends, and if we want to make friends with whom we actually develop real friendships then we first must resolve our control and coping mechanisms so that our life reflects our true nature. After that our life will be structured such that we come into contact with persons whom then, through the virtue of familiarity, may become our friend because of shared interests and life experiences. Friendships also require maintenance and equal give and take, and other important interrelationship skills like being able to amend wrongs and mistakes are required to maintain friendships, as further discussed in The Perfect Child.

One truth about all relationships, but most especially friendships, is that each of us are an individual and so we are all ultimately alone in the world. This is not a bad thing but many of us have such unresolved trauma that the stark loneliness we feel when alone makes us deeply resent it, even fearful of it. Especially because of childhood where most of us grow up thinking it is a near impossibility to be alone we are taken by surprise when loneliness comes out of nowhere as we lose relationships or find trouble later in life. Fear of being alone is also a fear that life isn’t concerned about us individually, and that we are the only ones looking out for our best interests. Understanding that we are not capable of bending fate we then feel impotent and frightened by the onerous responsibility of the impossible and instead seek distraction and comfort in the presence of others. But, as discussed in my new book Under A Libra God, the Universe is demonstrably aware of each of us, and we are only truly alone when we do not understand this principle and do not like ourselves. As a young man I felt great despair each time an activity with friends would come to an end, no matter how often I hung out with them because I fundamentally did not understand that the Universe cared about me. Feeling a fear of missing out from friendships, especially at the end of having socialized, is symptom of needing to discover deeper truths about life we have yet to learn.

As discussed earlier, the built environment and lack of third-spaces are the Infrastructure Origins of Psychological and Metabolic Disease. The hateful and psychotic political climate is also not helpful for the social climate of our country and needs to be fixed, so read How to Change Politics. Or work on your psychological health which impairs making friendships by reading Which Karpman Type Are You?Academic astrology can also be used to help us understand life cycles like the making of friendships and romance as discussed in Astrology, Really?