Friend breakup after friend breakup has left me with trust issues, insecurity and most notably, with a lot less friends. Life is so busy that it’s difficult to even get a solid thirty minutes of quality time with the few friends I have. It’s becoming more overwhelming but I am struggling to find a solid relief from all the stress.
Lately, I’m spending more time with myself, going out less and feeling more and more isolated. I am lonely, and with feelings of loneliness comes feeling insecure. After every social interaction I question if I acted too weird or talked too much or talked too little. Maybe they found me annoying? A few days ago, I went to Google, as you do, to see if such deep feelings of inadequacy were normal or if I really and truly needed therapy. After my search I’ve come to a few conclusions: these feelings are extremely normal, everyone is struggling to find friends and I do indeed still need therapy.
It did give me some solace knowing that I wasn’t alone in my loneliness but if we’re all lonely, why are we all struggling to find friends? Are we too self critical to the point where we’re blocking our own ability to connect with others? We are literally in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, even before COVID-19 forced us into pure isolation. Experts have noticed that there is a pattern of people lacking social skills due to the isolating nature of the things we value most in society, especially in America.
We over schedule ourselves and we make our occupations our entire identity, even students. Within the first few minutes of conversation with a new person someone is bound to whip out the question: “So, what do you do?” And regardless of how you answer, there’s a predetermined association made and we all think this way, not just especially judgmental people. And, of course, this kind of thinking makes it more difficult to make friends. But I also think it goes a bit deeper. In a conversation about trust, someone mentioned how we are all yearning for trust. The bridges are collapsing under us, banks are leaking our information, the government continues to expose their own ulterior motives and reasons to distrust, Tinder matches don’t look the way they did in their pictures. It’s increasingly harder to trust, but trust is becoming more and more crucial.
Getting older doesn’t make it much easier either. As we get older, we become more individualized. It’s more about our own success, our own families’ well-being, getting married, having babies, making money. Gone are the days of making a friend because they have the same light-up shoes as you. The unavoidable truth is that it’s just harder to make organic connections as you get further and further away from childhood. According to experts, friendships are made by continuous unplanned interactions and shared vulnerability. But what’s more scary than relying on luck and trust, the two things we’ve been lacking lately. As an adult, you face adversity, people reveal their true colors for better or for worse, you get mistreated. We are so jaded that we spend our time in isolation building walls so strong that they fortify us in our own solitude. We are so aware of the risk of being judged or rejected or hurt that we shut ourselves off.
So, just like when you struggle to find a romantic partner, people are turning to apps to find friends. Apps like Bumble BFF, Meetup, Yubo and Wink have been able to capitalize off of the loneliness epidemic. However, people have expressed issues with finding friends through these apps. Whether they found themselves subconsciously trying to create a “pretty girl gang” or the people on there didn’t have pure intentions, or the users just aren’t active enough. It seems that even trying to go out and create a space for finding friends, it’s a failure. I guess that with dating apps, there’s a more immediate feeling being satisfied, the sexual drive. With friendships, that same immediacy isn’t there, so there’s not as much motivation to stay active.
I think we all need to break free of the imaginary barriers the devil on our shoulder creates. We are holding ourselves back from finding true, fulfilling friendships by building walls. We are all seeking tangible, human connection – even in this digital age, so maybe we should be agents of change in our own lives and release ourselves from this cycle of loneliness.
