I want to talk to people but I also don't want to talk to people DO YOU SEE MY PROBLEM HERE??

I thought about posting this in General Chatter, but I ended up writing a lot about myself so I moved it here.
Basically, I want to have people who want to talk to me. "Friends", one might even say. "Close friends", even. People who I can genuinely feel comfortable talking with...
Yet I don't want to actually talk to people. I'm friends with like 7 or 8 people from Tumblr or the MSPA forums, and I never talk to them. I just don't know what to talk about, or when people talk to me I feel like I don't know what to say or don't care, not to mention that I feel awful every time I disagree with them on something because I'm worried that my opinion might drive them away... And most of the time I simply don't want to put in the effort for a friendship.

Knowing these forums, I imagine that's not an uncommon thing, yet most people here seem to actually have close friendships with at least one person. As in, someone you actually want to talk to and do so at least once a week. How do you do it?

 

Haha are you me? And nope, not a single close friend here :p I too would like to know the secrets of being friends with people, but also mostly I'm too exhausted to keep up the effort for long.

So I have no advice or anything I think, but *sympathy fistbumps*

 

the only person i talk to everyday and can call a friend is my boyfriendhusbandthing, and it did involve a fair amount of him initiating contact. I literally don't talk to anyone else outside what i post on tumblr/kintsugi, and have drifted apart from all the friends i had, so i feel you. But I do understand what you mean by not knowing what to talk about. I mostly end up talking about fandom stuff? shared interests.

and, it leads me to asking: how's your mental health? Depression, social anxiety.... it does seem to me that some of the stuff you describe is social anxiety and depression-ish. Sometimes if you get that sorted out your will to socialize starts showing up.

Mostly i'm witnessing this.

 

Yeah, social anxiety, possible mild depression, all that fun stuff, but that's pretty normal around here I guess. (I follow like a hundred people on Tumblr. I can think of maybe 3 who don't experience that stuff regularly). But most people still have at least one or two pretty close friends.

 

I have a really hard time with online relationships to be honest. I have met people online that I trust are good people, some of which there is a mutual trust, but I still can't do the friend talk thing. I seem to be only able to do the friend talk to people I have met in fleshland. I also totally get the desire cuz there was a point when I didn't have fleshland friends and I was incredibly lonely. Trying to form internet friendships left me feeling frustrated and dysfunctional. I know my social anxiety and depression don't help with that at all.

I have one and a half "internet friends" and it is more of a awkward dance of "I know you, you know me, but we don't really talk. We both think eachother are cool people and like to do nice things for each other".

Edit: pfft. So a day or two after writing this, I spent the whole day having normal regular chatting with said internet friends. I've known them both for over a year now, but this is the first time I have been able to comfortably do the friend talk thing. I also happen to be coming out of my depression and my social anxiety has become more manageable as of late. So some anecdata if it helps.

 

I get that. I like talking to people but also it exhausts me to initiate one-on-one contact like emails or chat (phone calls are right out). And most of my friends are the same, I think, so....

It's been easier for me to maintain contact with someone I see occasionally IRL - for some reason it takes less energy for me to dress up and drive for hours and hang out than it does for me to send a simple "hi, what's up" message. It helps that in a physical meeting, I don't necessarily have to talk the whole time - we can just hang out in silence if we want, especially if we're doing some kind of activity together. And it's less stressful to start a conversation online, possibly because I can think of it as a continuation of something we were talking about earlier.

I don't know if it would be like this for you, but your experience sounds really similar to mine (as in, your third paragraph could have come right out of my head) so.... If you have any interests/hobbies that can be done in company, perhaps you could look for local groups and attend an event? You might find someone in the group you get along with. Or you might find something that both you and a friend like, that's a reasonable distance from both of you, and suggest a meet-up. My closest friend and I met up at Ren Faires, and there are things like writing groups or knitting circles or concerts - anything you can do together that's not "let's go to a restaurant and stare awkwardly over a table at each other for two hours". I mean, unless that's your kind of thing, of course.

 

The problem is none of my online friends live anywhere near me (as in, not even the same continent - I live in Argentina, which is in South America.)
When I was in high school I had a friend who I talked to, and we had common interests and talked to each other that was nice, but now he moved to the US. We also stopped talking online because we sort of didn't have a lot of things to talk about.
...Come to think of it, that same thing happened to me 3 times already. It's weird.

Thanks for the offer, but I don't feel like the "hey let's be friends" thing really works for actually being friends. I was more looking for...
Honestly, I have no idea. I am looking for friends, but I want those friendships to just sort of pop up based on mutual interests, not because I'm actually looking for them. And I want them to actually stay friends with me.

I guess what I'm more looking for is advice. Like, what do I do?

Do I try to make more friends? Do I try to talk more with my, as rorleuaisen put it, "awkward dance internet friends"?
Do look for people I know on Tumblr? Facebook? Youtube?

I just wish I could just be really good friends with someone.

 

I only had friends exclusively IRL for a long time. I'm also not good at online relationships, I tend to 'forget' about people when I'm not going to see them irl, they move out of my sphere of..influence? Recently I've got two friends that bug me a lot, and I have fun talking to them (ok, one of them is more a chore than another, but I've got to maintain that relationship)
@evilas I've seen you around for years now on tumblr and mspa forums. With the forums down I've got no one in my life to dissect homestuck updates with atm, we could talk about that over facebook or gchat. Message me if you're interested.

 

Yeah, I'd like that! I'll message you on Tumblr and we can keep talking on FB or GChat