If I Was Pygmalion I Could Make a Friend

I have no idea how to make friends.  I make acquaintances all the time, but I seem to have lost the ability to make friends that want to hang out with me.  Luckily I’ve kept hold on several friends I made back when I had the knowledge and skills, but part of me is afraid I will never make new friends again.  The other part of me wonders if I ever had those skills or if it was just dumb luck.

During my childhood there were three different ways to make friends:

1.    My parents would make friends with people that had kids.  I made the majority of my friends this way.  If your parents want to hang out with each other, you’re kind of forced to hang out with each other and since your parents are friends and you’re usually like your parents, it just stands to reason that you will have similar interests and develop a friendship (How’s that for a run-on sentence?).

2.    School (including Sunday school).  These friendships were based on mutual experiences and me trying to make people laugh because I didn’t know how else to ingratiate myself.  Most of these friendships were great at school, but didn’t go any further.  I can probably count the number of times I invited school friends over to my house on two hands.

3.    Being neighbors.  This one overlaps a bit with the first way, but not entirely.  When you’re out riding your bike, kicking a ball, catching crawdads, or whatever you do as a child, you automatically make friends with other kids doing similar things.  It just happens.  Since you live in the same neighborhood it’s easy to hang out when you’re bored.  I made some of my best friends this way (Granted, we now only communicate via Facebook, but that’s neither here nor there.  At the time, we were best friends).

In adolescence things changed a bit.  Since I was a buthhole, when my parents wanted to hang out with other families I often ignored the new kids and only paid attention to my own siblings.  I still tried to be sardonic and witty at school and church, but never really made many friends because of it.  And though we had one neighborhood friend, our closeness barely lasted through middle school – it ended about the time it wasn’t as cool to play night games like jailbreak and sardines anymore(don’t worry, I gained back my appreciation for those in college).

It was right after middle school that I made one of my first real friends, and I went about it in the most awkward and socially unacceptable way possible.

You know how everyone you ever made eye contact with in middle school writes something along the lines of “Have a great summer!  Never change!  Keep in touch!” in your yearbook?  Well.  One fine summer day I was bored out of my mind and my mother told me to call one of my friends to hang out with.  I didn’t have any “hang out” friends, but I did have my yearbook.  And one unfortunate soul had written her phone number down.  We didn’t really know each other, we just had a mutual friend.  Mum insisted though, and I called her up and asked her to come over.  I ended up leaving the house before the time her mother had arranged to pick her up (I have no idea why) and she ended up spending most of her time at my house canning with my mother.  By some act of God that day actually marked the beginning of my longest-lasting friendship.  And by some greater miracle, she welcomed me into her friendship circle, thus blessing me with several new friends.  That was my most successful attempt at making friends.

When it came time to choose a college I decided that I wanted to reinvent myself, so I went off to a school that none of my friends were going to (stupid, I know).  I made lasting friendships with many of my roommates, but that’s mainly because we lived together and got to know each other so well out of necessity.  If we had just had classes together I’m sure we would have liked each other, but I don’t think we would have ever been so close.  The only other way I made friends in college was by inviting myself over to people’s houses.  I never hung out with the friends I made in class or at church; I had no idea how to invite them over, I guess.

And now that I’m a married adult with a child, I’m totally lost.  I know that once Stormageddon’s older I’ll probably make friends at the park or something, but for now I’m floundering.  I still make acquaintances quite often, and I’ve even invited several couples over for dinner and games, but it never seems to go anywhere.  One time The Man and I even got so desperate as to try out my tried-and-true creeper method of friendship.

We were trying to sell our contract at an apartment so we could move into our current place, and we had hit it off pretty well with a couple who came to tour.  I ended up texting them, asking if they wanted to hang out some time.  They expressed interest, but the hang-out never fell through, even after several attempts of setting one up.

Now it’s to the point where The Man and I meet a couple we like and we joke about how we need to stalk them and show up at their places of employment and tell them how much we enjoy their company and how much we’d like to be best friends with them.  You know, typing that out makes it pretty clear why we don’t have friends…

I guess we’re kinda creepy.