Doug S. on Knowingless

I don't actually know, but something makes it really hard to make and keep friends as an adult when you're not forced into contact with people the way you are when you're going to school. I never learned any patterns of behavior that would lead me to form and maintain contact with people outside of my family without that kind of thing holding us together, and my general lack of initiative around my own life has left me with no close relationships with anyone who isn't immediate family. I have a half-serious and half-joking definition of "friend" as "someone I invite to my house to play Super Smash Bros. with" and by that standard I haven't had a friend in a little over 20 years. I lost l my high school friends when I graduated and everyone moved away to different places and colleges, I made friends again in my first year of college but lost them in my third year when they kicked me out of the dorm suite so someone else could live with them, and after college I became an unpaid family caregiver instead of an employee so I never had the opportunity to make friends at work either. It was an absolute miracle when my future wife started hitting on me online - I still didn't have any relationships outside of immediate family, but at least it was a different family, and I was very happy letting her become my whole life; if she believed that I was good enough for her, that was enough to make me feel good enough for myself, which was something I hadn't felt in ages. She died in March 2024, and now I live with my sister-in-law and her daughter instead of my parents, but I still feel like I don't have the kind of friendships I had in high school (and thought I had found again in college) with anyone at all, and I also don't feel as though I'll ever be able to find that kind of friendship ever again. (There's more to my own issues than this; I seem to be unusually bad at rousing myself to do anything outside of my default routine without being pushed, and I have a guess as to where this passivity and lack of initiative and ambition came from, but that's a story for another time.)