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by tokyolights2
1134 days ago
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The best part about introducing your friends to each other is that then they can hang out with each other without you having to do anything at all! I definitely have some close friends I expect to see multiple times per week. Others I'm perfectly happy to see once per month. Others who have moved away and I won't see until I visit their city. Friends and community are not a zero-sum game. The more interconnected and inter-dependent people are, the more likely that everyone is going to have deep and meaningful relationships. I used to feel much more like you when I was regularly hanging out with friends almost exclusively 1:1. I thought I was doing that because I was introverted, but realistically I was doing it because I had social anxiety. Looking back, hanging mostly 1:1 made me feel like my friends were more distant because there were so many people I didn't see for months that I always felt like I didn't really know my friends. |
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I feel similarly though. Social anxiety (though I understand it more now) and hanging out exclusively 1:1. Part of it is maybe I don't put a lot of time towards friends (my best friend I see once a month, the most I will see someone is maybe twice a week) and code a lot instead. Part of it is my friends just end up pretty far flung (one online, the others in person but in a 2 hour radius). I do feel like I know most of my friends well though, even when I don't talk for months. Catching up is fun.
Sometimes I'm happy with it, other times I wish to make more friends but realize it would end up destabilizing what I already have to some extent. Communities feel nice because the don't feel like a particularly "sticky" investment, and the ratio of people to time is greater, but I get less satisfaction from it initially and it takes time to build (I think, hypothesis not well tested).