Off-Topic: I have mission, an amazing life, but still no friends. Fiancee starting to notice

IamJacksFailedRep · 2023-08-17T10:07:21+00:00

How much time do you have for friends? A job and an education and 3x a week in the gym (good luck getting me to go out and socialise after a hard deadlift day)

>I have 1 or 2 dudes which I talk to once in a while. They are nice, it's good to talk with them.

If you want these 2 dudes to become better friends - then - when was the last time YOU took the lead and organised an interaction with them?

Acquaintances = people you do 1 thing with, college/work/single hobby

'friends' = people you do 2 things with, work and do a hobby together or even just go for socialising/drinks with after work regularly

good friends = people you do many things with

Defined autistically, just do more things with the guys that you think you enjoy their company.

Also a close female relative of mine is married to a guy who has no friends, she loves him dealy but ultimately he is a fat, beta loser behind her husband goggles.

However, I only know he has no friends because he literally says it out loud, otherwise how would I know his social life. It is sad because he clearly wants more friends or blames other circumstances (work, the city itself, the people) for not having them.

Point being if you STFU and do what you want you will be fine. Maybe you only want 2 friends that are close or you want 10 close ones and 20 semi close ones. It depends on you.

Edit: I just saw you are literally saying its getting difficult to hide this from fiancee. You are 'hiding the badness' from someone else (fiancee) making her the judge of you and making her have higher status than you - according to you and your behaviour.

You are in her frame completely.

KagedRageius · 2023-08-17T09:49:03+00:00

How to win friends and influence people

_RPeed · 2023-08-17T15:00:03+00:00

I relocate every year or so - usually internationally - have lots of old friends and make new ones easily.

Most important: say “awesome, we should hang out” at the end of pretty much every conversation.

Sounds like you have more than enough of a base already. Arrange drinks with you and one or two others from unrelated groups I.e. introduce people. So text guys from college, tell them to meet you and your bro from work and vice versa. Help people move house. Join a BJJ class or whatever has guys in your demographic.

Then you keep it alive: join or create a WhatsApp group and send memes to these dumbasses to keep everyone connected. Check in individually.

Invest in and cultivate the ones that click and reciprocate.

Btw you have your fiancé’s motives wrong: marriage kills bromances so she’s just figuring out how much work she has to do to isolate you.

MoonLandingHoaxer · 2023-08-17T10:17:36+00:00

Be more interested in people.

Fiancee starting to notice

Why do you care?

You have to genuinely WANT a friend for it to work. If you are after a group of friends because of what she thinks, you are missing the point.

If your motives are to gain something to change her, you will never be a good friend and always come off as an autistic loser.

I suggest you get rid of your phone and struggle through life without it for a good amount of time.

The men of your generation have become social midgets because they have been staring into tiny screens during the time in their life when they would have been forced to practice this skill. Conversation.

Environmental-Top346 · 2023-08-17T14:59:53+00:00

I say this with the utmost love...

Lift, STFU, and Sidebar.

Yes it's a lot of work.

All your answers are there.

Nothing worth doing in life is easy.

nikfury69 · 2023-08-17T11:15:10+00:00

Got a hobby or a non-work thing that you do? Others prolly do it too.

Got other family? Cousins can be friends as well.

Been thru a life trial? Survivors of an ordeal bond. Bootcamp anyone?

Work Harder at it.

JagRabid · 2023-08-17T12:17:54+00:00

Bro you are overthinking this shit. Just make it clear you don’t have time to socialize like you used to… Studies, fam, gym, hobby, and your fiancée is your life. Lots of grown men become distant when they branch into this chapter of their lives. It’s normal. Being autistic during your childhood wasn’t, but at this point it’s definitely OK.

Also I’d like to add, if you’re actually going out doing shit you will make at least ONE friend unless something is wrong with you.

deerstfu · 2023-08-17T20:48:26+00:00

Making friends to not look weird to your girl is the worst fucking reason. If you don't know why, you haven't read enough of the sidebar yet.

Echo reading a book about making friends if that's what you really want. "How to win friends and influence people", sure. If it hasn't clicked yet, you're probably not going to figure out "solid friendship" from reddit comments.

Edit: also, i just realized this is the premise of the movie: "I love you man". So go watch that.

BecomingABetterMan1 · 2023-08-17T09:35:07+00:00

I read a lot of redpill theory about non-dating-strategy (like NMMNG, articles about mission, manliness and stuff).

What did you learn from reading these books? Can you summarize each in a sentence?

PoohTao · 2023-08-17T09:24:31+00:00

Sydney Fife will hang out with you…

(If you’re happy as is then you’re living in her frame by giving a shit).

ughhhhwhocares · 2023-08-17T11:46:25+00:00

If she wants you to spend more time with other people, you are spending too much time up her ass. Put some plates in the air. Work on an old car. Start riding bikes. Get serious about lifting. Join a militia. Just get out of her fucking frame.

ur_fault · 2023-08-17T15:23:28+00:00

It sounds like your fiancé might be the main thing you have going on in your life.

If she leaves you, will your life crumble? Is your life built around her? This is probably why you're so afraid of what she thinks.

A possible side effect of this is that you're needy, since she's all you have socially. Which is going to put a lot of weight on her and make her time with you feel like work.

Another thing that tends to happen when she's the main focus in your life and you're terrified of losing her is that you become controlling, like this fuckin guy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askMRP/comments/15t3wdf/whats_the_alternative_to_acting_butthurt_when_she/

Gotta hold onto it at all costs. Squeeze and smother until she can't stand it anymore.

Build out your life so that you have more options. It won't be as devastating when something falls thorough and you won't feel scared all the time.

iluvsexyfun · 2023-08-17T17:57:51+00:00

OP,

There is nothing wrong with being selective. From your post I gather that you are a busy man. School, work, gym, fiancé.

Unless your GF is using you to gain access to your social circle, she is unlikely to care how large your social group is.

My concern is that you want friends to gain the approval,of your GF. This is a dangerous mindset. Do things because they bring you joy, or because they are the right thing to do. You are not running for election. A good life is not a prize given for winning a popularity contest.

Hold your head up and enjoy the things you do well. Be smart. Be a gentleman. Don’t worry about social groups.

mdjfodiepcklrn2 · 2023-08-17T14:05:06+00:00

If YOU want friends for your own sake, not your fiancée’s… Invite people to things. Be the organizer. Movie night is at your place, so is the poker party, etc

Smuggler-Tuek · 2023-08-17T17:02:30+00:00

A lot of good advice here but I’ll throw in my 2 cents. Guys are doers, girls are talkers. You want to make friends then invite some guys to go hang out and do something you are both interested in. My friends and I are always doing shit, that’s just how guys hang out. Find something you want to do and invite another dude along.

CaptJackedSparrow · 2023-08-17T19:19:23+00:00

Do you even want friends?
Had your fiancé not said anything, would you be seeking them out?
Now that your fiancé has said something, is seeking out friends a response to what you see as something that would be meaningful in your life, OR is it something that is a reaction to look a certain way to your fiancé?
This is my opinion: floundering at her comments about not having friends is worse than not having friends. You can frame this situation however you like. Also, I believe you can’t really “make” friends. It has to happen naturally and organically through you just living your life. The harder you work to make friends the worse of a friend they tend to be.

Arkonian_Monk · 2023-08-17T22:16:34+00:00

Fiancee starting to notice

Getting a little hard to hide this from fiancee.

Part of the problem was that I was too worried about other people opinion.

I never let this "0 friends" side of myself show off

I'm afraid in the future she'll notice she married a fucking autistic dude.

I highlighted these statements for a reason. Before continuing, take a look at them and see if you notice a recurring theme, a theme that I imagine completely dominates your life.

I'm afraid

Fear is the theme. You're afraid of other people's opinions of you, afraid that your fiance might discover you're a fraud who has been pretending to be a really sociable guy, and afraid that other people will negatively evaluate you. You're probably afraid of the people here and what they might say, too, and my bet is that the fear goes significantly deeper than anything you've shown us in this post. You're afraid of being known, of being seen as you actually are.

You said that you don't put the "0 friends side" of yourself on display. Why? Why would you hide a legitimate aspect of yourself from others? Because you're afraid of what having no friends says about who you are as a human being. The fact of the matter is that you have no friends. Does the meaning of this fact change when other people become aware of it, or does its meaning stay the same regardless of other people's knowledge of it?

There's a reason you're able to "get along with everybody" but still lack meaningful relationships: it's easy to engage people in casual conversation and small talk. There's almost no risk in talking to someone about the weather, an upcoming exam for one of your classes, or how much you and your co-workers hate your boss. You don't have to reveal the core parts of who you are in those types of interactions because those types of conversations are only surface-level. The problem is that you're afraid of being known, of exposing to others the things which lurk below the surface, so the interactions you have with others never go deeper. How do you expect to form deep, meaningful relationships with other people if you never show them the deep, meaningful aspects of who you are?

There's a movie definitely not at all worth watching called Free Guy. Don't worry if you haven't seen it since I'll mention the relevant parts to you. The plot is that there an NPC in a video game who becomes self-aware and deviates from his previous, scripted behavior. There's a scene where Ryan Reynolds walks into a coffee shop and tries to order a cappuccino instead of his usual order, and the other NPCs freak out and stare at him because everyone always orders a coffee with cream and two sugars. They're used to the same thing every single day, and they can't seem to understand why a fellow NPC would try to do something different. The NPCs walk around the world repeating the same, scripted lines and never do anything spontaneous, exciting, or interesting.

Can you imagine trying to form a friendship with an NPC like those I described? All they do is repeat scripted lines and do the exact same thing every day. They're completely disinteresting, and their entire function is to serve as props for the people in the real world who play the game. In other words, they lack depth. There's nothing beneath the surface worth spending time getting to know. And this is exactly how you're behaving in your interactions. Completely lacking in depth, repeating the same, surface-level stuff that you normally do because you're afraid of what it might say about you if you show your true colors and then get rejected for it.

I get it, man. It's not fun to be afraid. It sucks. But what sucks so much more is letting fear dominate you to the point where you allow it to dictate the conditions of your life, like being friendless. I guarantee that if you don't learn to act in spite of your fear, then there will be a lot of inconveniences and heartaches on your path in the future. So what's the solution? What's the cure for fear?

It's courage. It's doing what you want or need to do in spite of how afraid you are of doing it. Fear is a precondition for courage. By that, I mean that you cannot be brave if you're not already afraid. Fear is what screams at the soldier to run away and abandon the fight even though one of his buddies needs his help. Courage is the fuel he uses to push through that terror and run to his friend's aid regardless of the risk involved. Come what may. And that's the attitude you have to take with this.

What I'm telling you man is that you're afraid of being authentically you. You're probably dishonest and manipulative. If you don't lie directly, you likely bend the truth and lie by omission. And you do all that to protect your core, because your core is weak and easily injured. It's a lot easier to hide behind a protective wall of lies than it is to let someone walk past the wall and risk them hitting you where you're weak. The problem with that approach is that you end up alone, with nobody who actually knows what the core of you looks like.

Posting here for help was a good start. I imagine that the thought of posting here made you feel somewhere between very nervous to completely terrified, but it's good that you did it anyway. That's the courage that I'm talking about. Yeah, it's a tiny piece of courage in the grand scheme of things. You didn't have to run through a minefield, dodge bullets, or jump into turbulent waters to save someone who was drowning. But you'll build up to being capable of doing that if you practice being brave on a smaller scale.

Strengthening your mental attributes is identical to strengthening your physical ones. If you've never lifted a day in your life and try to squat 600 pounds the first time you go into the gym, then you're going to get crushed underneath the bar. Instead, it's better to start with an appropriate amount of weight and then do your reps. Over time, you'll work your way up to squatting heavier. In the same way, practicing small pieces of courage, like sharing one of your interests, hobbies, or minor failures is a good place to start. Over time, you'll be able to share the deeper stuff too.

You need to re-read NMMNG. It focuses on the problem that I've outlined above. Internalize it and make its lessons a part of who you are. Start posting in OYS. Don't delete your post and make a new account because you get scared that you shared too much about yourself or you didn't like the feedback that people gave you. The things that we feed get larger over time, and you don't need to feed your fear any more than you already have.

TheNattyJew · 2023-08-18T00:09:07+00:00

Who cares how many friends you have? Life is not a popularity contest. Be your own man. If you don't need any friends then don't have any and be proud of it. If she needs a bunch of friends, then tease her about how weak she is that she can't live on her own accord. Why should you be bothered that she is "concerned" that you don't have a lot of friends? Women have concerns all the damn time. Most of them are meaningless. They love us because we don't get all bent out of shape over every little thing that happens.

anm767 · 2023-08-18T04:04:54+00:00

Pick up two new hobbies every 6 months. you will meet people there who are also interested in those hobbies, you'll be able to talk to them about it and form friendships.

you can't have friends if your life is about sleep 8 hours, work 8 hours, sit with GF 8 hours. doesn't matter what hobbies are, go hunting, learn knitting, as long as you are getting knew skills under your belt.

businessstravel · 2023-08-18T06:41:31+00:00

I have never had any issues making new friends. This is coming from a guy that has lived on five different continents over the last 5/6 years.

It's really simple... Are you an attractive person to be around? Do you make plans? To you go out and do the things you want to do; therefore, meeting people at these activities/events/socials? It all comes down to you. Also, there is so much work on the sidebar around building a better 'social' life. Have you bothered to look there?

Title	Off-Topic: I have mission, an amazing life, but still no friends. Fiancee starting to notice
Author	Imaginary-Cloud-7721
Upvotes	11
Comments	25
Date	August 17, 2023 8:52 AM UTC (2 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askMRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/askMRP/comments/15thoun/offtopic_i_have_mission_an_amazing_life_but_still/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askMRP/off-topic-i-have-mission-an-amazing-life-but-still.1228783 https://theredarchive.com/post/1228783

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