[meric]

I emphasise your situation - being alone and creative can exacerbate being alone and creative. Being with a social group makes us worry we'll lose our individuality. I'll offer some tips.

People relate to those they perceive as similar. When you meet someone, there's two stages to making friends. 1. Attraction, demonstrating you are valuable, which is easy for you thanks to your business success, and 2. Rapport, where you must show the other person you're similar and am OK with making yourself vulnerable to them, and in trusting them, you earn their trust. I think you're OK with 1, not OK with 2. Tell stories, being completely emotionally honest, and in ways where you show, at times, you're just like they are. In the rapport stage where you're trading stories, use the word "we", avoid "you". "We" can make someone think you're already together, "I" can be used as an attempt to bring others to emphasise your situation, while "you" makes the other person compare differences with yourself. "You" can be useful for the attraction stage, but I don't find it useful for the "Rapport" stage. And make sure to listen, and synchronise your emotions with them - if they're happy be happy, if they're upset about something, be concerned.

If you're looking to find a romantic partner there's one more stage but I'll leave that up to you.

[wemysh]

Your assessment is right. Triggering attraction is easy for me. And creating rapport is hard. Unbelievably hard. I read about it many times. And I understand it on a logical level. But my brain always snaps back into the loop "1: Demonstrate Value 2: Goto 1".

Lately I try to simply keep quiet more. Because usually I talk a lot. I always have so much ideas to talk about. It helps a bit. But not to the extend that people and I become friends.

Will try to use "we" and see if that helps.