Currently happening

Two weeks ago, I saw the loner at the table of an event. Went to go talk to them because they were alone for a while.

In less than 10 minutes, they made a offensive joke that would have insulted half the people here, and complained about their living situation unprompted.

Idk why in imagining them telling a version of the aristocrat's and then saying, "So anyway, that's my roommates."
Now I want to know the joke
- The guy made a comment about women and minorities about if I was just trying to meet a DEI quota.
  
  He said this to me, a person of color, at a tech event where according to the census, 60% of Engineers are white.

IDK man, the people with no or few friends tend to be weird but not really bad in any meaningful way: socially awkward, shy, odd interests, neurodivergent etc. Difficult to get to know, plain and simple. People with a lot of friends are often worse people, manipulative and/or have a transactional attitude to relationships

Idk man, the people with no friends and the people with a lot of friends and even the people with a middle amount of friends seem to follow a standard distribution of personalities.

Some awkward people and some charismatic people just suck. Some awkward people and some charismatic people are awesome. But most of all, people are just kinda shades of in-between.
- Yeah I don't think it's really fair for anyone to be generalizing people over the number of friends they have. There are shitty and no shitty people in both camps.
The people with no or few friends tend to be weird but not really bad in any meaningful way: socially awkward, shy, odd interests, neurodivergent etc. Difficult to get to know, plain and simple.

*Raises hand*
- awkwardly high fives raised hand
When I was in high school there was only one kid with no friends and he was racist
- At least he wasn't the popular kid
- There were probably others with no friends who just had social anxiety. You probably didn't notice because they just blended into the background and didn't stand out much.
- Same. It was in the Tennessee suburbs so there was actually a lot of racism, but dude was like, Klan level racist, and that's just rude.
- Damn, wish the racists at my high school had no friends.
Yeah I'd like to think I'm not a bad person. I just have intense social anxiety. The only way I've made friends are when chatty people tend to talk to me and invite me to things. I've always appreciated when people do this, but then I just don't retain the friendship when I or they have moved across the country or when we've moved into different life stages (ex: graduating from high school or college or changing jobs). I'm fortunate enough to have a friend now who is just nice and talks to me. Prior to that I didn't have anyone for a while outside of my online friends. Some of us are really just terrified of other human beings is all.

Part of this is that I have always an intense paranoia of appearing too clingy, so I never invite anyone else out to do things. Notice how one of the commenters said they broke off a friendship because the other person was too clingy. Well I just break it off first by never engaging because I don't want them to think I'm too clingy or weird. Even now with the one friend I have I fear that I text too much or bother them too much or things like that. I try to limit myself and leave them alone but I never know where the line is between never speaking and between speaking too much.

So I just chill alone I guess.
- Just be chill
  
  I rarely do anything with people I know. I'm not a super social person and I tend to keep to myself. I tend to hang with people that I either know very well or that I work do something with.
And when it's not any of those cases then that person has a horrible pattern of behavior. I've learned this lesson way too hard.

It’s the risk you take. I’ve met some of the most interesting people this way. If you go into it with an open mind and understand that usually it’s not going to work out, you’ll be better for it.

I think the times we befriend loners and it's goes positively are easier to forget than the times we go out of our way to try to include someone only to find out that they're toxic to be around.

not to brag, but i've graduated from not befriending friendless people to driving away friended people who try to be friends with me

less people, ~~less~~ fewer drama

*fewer
- thanks new friend! fixed
- Fewer would only be used in this case if drama was plural. Fewer dramas vs less drama

I used to be the guy that knew everyone, introducing my friends to others, and others to others.

These days, I have maybe 2 friends.

The good friends I once had believe everything they see on Facebook.

I just couldn't anymore.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. Probably childhood abandonment, abuse, and neglect.

My poor mom tried, she really did. She was abandoned, abused, and neglected too. A lot of things that would have seemed absurd to a healthy person were normal for her so she tolerated a lot and expected a lot. She suffered so much as a kid that whatever idea she had about family, she was sticking to.

I have no close friends and I LOVE it that way. I wish I didn’t.

Being alone is my favorite way to be. I can’t move in any direction in life because of it. Fortunately my wife wants me to be a stay at home dad. She isn’t crippled like I am and she loves me anyway, thank goodness.
- You are at least fortunate enough to have the type of love only your wife could give.
  
  Everyone is broken in some way.
  
  Some want to break others because of it. Some want to comfort the broken.
  
  Your life is yours to live. You have someone who, it sounds, respects that. That's more than many could ever wish to have.
Algorithmic social media just ruins everything. Once twitter and facebook started pulling out all the stops to keep us on their sites instead of letting us use them as a starting point to connect and/or simply augment our existing irl relationships.

I tried to befriend a friendless dude in college. Found out he was friendless because he went around asking women what their "cunt diameter" was. Even women professors!

What a creep! Everyone knows you're supposed to ask for the cunt circumference, or circuntference
How did he not get kicked out for that? If not for sexual harassment, at least for failing to get IRB approval!
- My college was desperate for students and couldn't afford to kick anybody out. There were people around that did worse shit than this guy and stayed.
What the shit
Post or pre coutis?
- I assume you meant "coitus". Definitely pre-coitus - he had never had sex and I'm willing to bet he still hasn't ever, 37 years later.

Happened to me a few years ago, started in a new office and one of the guys seemed cool so we talked more frequently. Ended up helping him get the apartment upstairs from me because his lease was expiring and carpooled to work. That's when the clinginess started, couldn't go half a day without him always texting or calling over stupid shit and borderline unhinged behaviors. I distanced myself real quick from him. The final straw was when he had asked what "village" my girlfriend was from in Brazil, then doubled down when I called him out for assuming she was from some uncontacted Amazonian tribe. "Well you havent been there yet so you don't know lol" yeah ok fuck you, dude. Haven't talked to him since, even though he still lives upstairs.

Anxiety sucks, or is there different reasons why I don't have irl friends?

Domain checks out
Yeah I'm deleting this. Not comfortable with what I said based off a "few people I know"

Permanently Deleted

A bit defensive? :)
- Permanently Deleted
And I'm used to only having da blue sharks as friends now lol

Met a guy at the local boardgame event. Got to talking about how he was always driven out of gaming groups and nobody invites him anymore and a lot more of "oh woe is me" stuff. I recognized a bit of my younger self in him and how used the same schtick to get sympathy and social interaction before I learned how toxic this behaviour is. I wanted to try and mentor him out of this self-defeating behaviour so I invited him to my place.

When he came in treated my family like a complete asshole. Couldn't make them suffer for one dude.

I used to be like that of wanting to mentor too. I wanted to help others get to where I'm at. Apparently a lot of these folks are serious energy vampires and I am always left mentally exhausted.

Kinda need to wake up to their own BS.

I'm copying this from a comment I made on a thread about ghosting people.

I ghosted someone I knew on Discord. They were exceptionally clingy. Like message me four times a day, every day, without me messaging in between. Message me the second I get online. It was so annoying. Constantly asking me if I was mad at them after I didn't answer them immediately. Even after I told them I wasn't mad and not to think I am if I don't answer. I told them so many times that the only thing that was annoying me was them thinking I was annoyed when I don't answer immediately. Just so so pouty all the time. I couldn't handle it.

I took a break from Discord for other reasons and when I came back I just ignored them. I couldn't handle it anymore.

From the way other people talked to them on servers and things they said, I get the feeling this is a common pattern with them. They start to make some friends, then get super clingy and sobby if you don't answer them right away and people get frustrated and stop talking to them. Which sucks, but, I'd told them so so so many times exactly what they were doing that was annoying me and they never stopped. It's so infuriating for someone to just be so sad about something and for you to try and tell them in no uncertain terms "I'm not mad at you, but when you think I am mad because I don't answer right away it makes me annoyed. Just stop that. That's all I'm upset about."

I had lots of these situations on Steam.

I played a game, liked my time with a player, and they'd send me a friend request. But then it was daily messages about what I was doing, when I would play again, and often some sap story about why I'm important to them.

This was a constant thing that kept happening.
- Yeah it's just too much.
  
  I'm trying to be more proactive about telling people exactly that, to give them a chance to adjust, before I've bottled it up out of misplaced politeness and need to cut off contract.
  
  My sister deals with it all the time since she helps refugees who often can't get work permits, and are extremely lonely on a different continent where almost no one speaks their language. So they (maybe understandably) cling to the one person that does. I admire her patience.
It's a bad habit, to revolve your world around a single person. Desperation and lack of self-confidence is hella unattractive, in any type of relationship.

A mistake that I luckily did not make, ever, not once.

There are a lot of lonely people in the world. Too many of them deserve it.

I had a brilliant idea for a app during college. It connected self-identified lonely nerds with other self-identified lonely nerds. Like "Oh you like anime, here is this other guy, and here are five events you can attend together." I was hoping for that Zuckerberg money if this app was a hit.

I ran it through a test trial with a dozen pairings of them in my college campus to see if it had value.

And yeah, a lot of the feedback was that the other person was kind of annoying/intolerable. Which was funny when both of them said that about each other.
- You created reddit.
- We don't really get scolded for bad behavior anymore, we just have people go "Okay, bye" for the last time. Especially progressives do this.
Honestly, the number of lonely people is probably far greater than you can imagine. I remember reading a statistic from a local male suicide prevention group that said a third of all men have no close friends either nearby or at all. Include people with friends that are still feeling lonely, and obviously other genders, and you're easily looking at most people being lonely.

Many of my close friends moved away for work, and I'll be doing the same soon. Most of them don't even know that I have a child now, let alone regularly speak. It's quite sad really, and it only seems to get worse when you get older.
Too many?

I'm that lonely guy. One friend, love him because he stuck around when my mental health was at its worst. Eventually I finally got a psychiatrist, my first one, who told me most of my toxic negative attitudes and behaviors were stemming from my mental illnesses. It took a couple years to get through therapy and monthly psychiatrist appointments but where I am now is... Well still pretty awful but at least I can give my best friend the space he needs, and function without the anxiety and panic attacks that were caused by overthinking every single message or lack of message. My medication regime is strict and full of pills, but hey, doing better then I was last year. I can't forgive the people who left when my mental health got out of control but I do understand why they made their choices. It hurt and made my depression a lot worse. The only thing that kept me sane was my last friend. He stuck around and helped. Im still lonely and want more friends, but it's a slow healing process. More friends might make the social anxiety worse, or it might help. Not really certain I wanna flip that coin. Taking small steps though.

Whelp that's enough oversharing with complete strangers. Have fun everyone!

yeah, I'm the person 🙈

The person going "Ewww this person is toxic" or the other side?
- the other side. the toxic or boring one or whatever it is

I'm the dude with no friends because of the BPD relationship spiral.

Meet someone new. They're cool. Like them. Hang out all the time. Start to hate everything about them. Leave/Drive them away. Meet someone new. They're cool...

Can relate; have friend who I somewhat wish I never met

Just start pretending that you don't know him. Just me like "who are you?"

Just kidding don't do that
I'm 40 and I don't even use the friend label unless they earned it now.

Facebook really damaged that word for me.

im the second picture...

I can fix him

Perhaps you might be preying upon a vulnerable person with your "friendship".

Thus far you have milked them for imaginary internet status points. What a friend.