I’m in my late 20s. In the last years, I’ve moved a few times and tried out a bunch of things. And discovered I have a hard time getting close to people.
I used to think I just need to go out more. But I found out that most people I meet just don’t seem to “fit” with me.
Let’s say I meet some interesting people, who are funny, smart and have shared interests with me. We make a bit of small talk, hang out, and then I go home exhausted, feeling like I just came out of a work meeting that should have been an email. And given from how they rarely invite me back, I guess the feeling is mutual.
Someone told me I am quite cold towards people I don’t know well. Part of that might be that my usual way of talking is a bit emotionless. Another part could be a consequence of me basically going through the script in my head. “How is work these days? Cool. Yeah, me too. Yup.” I don’t want to be this way. But I also don’t want to go into full sales presentation mode, because that feels really wrong.
I used to think I would just become misanthropic. But there are people where I just click with. Talking to them is not a chore, but something I look forward to. And they seem to enjoy my company as well. Some events seem to have a lot more of “my people”, some less.
If you read my rambling until here, thanks. I genuinely don’t know any more. Am I becoming the old sod sitting on his porch yelling at kids? Or am I just spending time on the wrong people? Have you experienced something similar? And how could I change this?
I’m also in my late 20s, and I’m an immigrant (changed continents)
When I meet new people, ai usually have a hard time coming up with something to talk about, so I had (still have) a hard time making new friends.
What helped me was to have continuous contact with people in a focused environment, for example: with around 6 months of office attendance I started warming up to my new colleagues (which eventually became friends), even though we were usually talking about work back then, we started to talk about it less and less up to a point where we don’t even work together anymore, but keep in touch
I found another of such environments in sports practices as well: don’t want to talk about anything? Fine, let’s just keep this ball rolling back and forth" but then eventually (again after a few months of continuous contact with the same group of people) things started to warm up a little
So to sum it up I’d say: patience is key, it usually takes a while before prople start to get along well
Thanks, yeah, that sounds similar. Good for you to have the patience, a different continent (I’m assuming with a language barrier?) must be doing social life on hard mode
Not that much, really I moved from Brazil to Portugal and I was surprised by both the culture similarity and the number of brazillians around
Still, when I arrived the closest people I knew were 2000km away hhaahaha, so even small changes can be challenging at times