I swear, every time I try to make friends, it doesn’t go how I expect to and I lose all the effort I put in as they leave for circumstances outside my control, and i’m damn tired tbh :(
The key is repeated interaction. Better to join a group that meets regularly and let friendships with other attendees build naturally than to try to make friends with an individual you don’t have a reason to see frequently.
I try to do that yeah, but problem is that every friendship that I try that with basically has always died out the instant I leave that environment, like when I lost basically all my friends graduating from high school. It’s not that they don’t care about other people as well, just me it feels like… That’s also why I’ve been DMing a group for D&D though.
That’s really tough, I’m sorry. I guess the solution in that case is to try to find a sustainable environment that you don’t have to leave. High school and other educational environments are inherently time limited. What might be better is some kind of club or group outside of a school or work context that you might need to move on from. Idk what you’re into - examples of that kind of thing for me have been the DSA, Less Wrong meetup groups, weekly ultimate frisbee meetups, that sort of thing. Meetup.com is a good resource if you want to browse options. A regular D&D group would certainly be a good idea, the difficulty is just getting that going in the first place - especially hard if you’re not coming to it with a deep friend bench.
naturally…
Sir… (said I, “or Madam truly-”)
I believe you have identified the issue exactly. How does a person do this “natural” thing or, if it does somehow happen, how does a person avoid interfering with its progress?I use he/sir pronouns.
Keep hanging out with the same people and it just happens. Or maybe you’re not compatible and you’ll never be friends with those people. Without knowing you better I can’t give you any particular recommendations on how to make yourself compatible with more people beyond trying to be an enjoyable person to be around. Could be good to just try out a few of this sort of meetups and stick with whichever it feels like you’re getting along with people best at.
in school, im friends with the ones that i can relate with most, which means more possible interactions. we would also interact online. in the internet, i find quite a lot of people that i can chat with, could say a lot of friends made along the journey. but unfortunately for me, the friendship doesn’t last long, not quite, as most of the time they are just playmates. i wouldn’t say i don’t have any friends on the net, we just rarely chat. on the other hand, i chat with my irl school friends at the very least once every 2 weeks, normally a few times a week. oh yea i don’t make friends, we just happen to talk/chat, and at some point found our similarities and become friends. but sometimes you just gotta strike a convo to get started btw when you say ‘they leave for circumstances outside my control’, most of the time, like me, they probably just got hooked to a new game, addicted to consooming content and just straight up forget about what fun they had a little before. also be careful with the word control as you dont wanna use that directly on anyone, seriously, no one likes micromanagers ight thanks