Do you have friends or are you the loner type

IntervisioN said:


People will naturally assume that loners are sad, that's just how it is and when I see people proudly admitting that they have no friends IRL, I can't help but think that those people are forcing themselves to be proud of something that they're actually the exact opposite of.

Ntaig said:


How I see it the problem is that a lot of people are too extreme with things, going to either side of the spectrum and sticking there, not being able to realize you don't have to pick one of the two extremes. Things aren't that black and white, nor simple. Nothing too unexpected though, considering how we love to label things and generalize extremely afterwards. To take anime as example, a kind of example I'd normally avoid, look at how people see characters in their shows. Females for example, they're trying to fit them in these sets of rigid personalities: "tsunderes", "kanderes" and whatever they're called. Once they've decided where the person belongs, they'll get angry once the person shows a characteristic outside of their assumed personality. There's this assumption that things are this simple. So once you try to label yourself, you'll try to enforce that image to others, even if the image doesn't do your will justice.

I find this specially problematic with political sides, people want to know what side you stand on and not your actual thoughts and opinions. If you say you belong to x side and at one occasion bring up your sympathize with a question z is behind, guess what happens. The rigid label forces characteristics on people and a lot of us are afraid to be seen as some fake hybrid who can't stand behind something fully, when we then go outside this label, so we try to portray the image fully at all costs. Well, at least until we start coming to our senses and realize that this label and generalization system shouldn't mean shit, you're an individual not some robot with a rigid programmed personality and those who can't take it, shouldn't matter to you in the first place.

This together with a lot of our beloved self defense mechanisms and we got a bunch of problems. I'll list some examples we probably have encountered sometime in our life.
- The fat person who is proclaims to be proud of their body and demands acceptance, yet goes around throwing comments about "skinny people" and their life choices.

- The person who doesn't enjoy partying or drinking, for whatever reason, yet has to go around throwing comments how pathetic those who drink and party are, meanwhile also complaining about how party people are looking down on him/her because of the choice of not attending or drinking.

- The person who has no friends and when questioned about it, say they enjoy being with themselves and don't need friends, also adding one of the typical comments where the opposite of him/her is portrayed in bad light while his/her choice is "better", as he/she is a strong person etc.

There's plenty of examples, in varying severity, but this crap comes everywhere, either to lie to yourself or to others. I personally don't mind the self defense mechanism where they try to save face, as that can be worked with, lying to yourself is a bigger issue though.

It's fine to prefer being alone, you don't have to choose between being the partying animal with a bunch of friends or the guy with none. You can be the guy who parties once a year and has a couple of friends, yet still treasures the time spent by yourself. Stop trying to forcing yourself or others into some template, you're a developing individual after all and we change all the time, what you want today might be different in a week. Some generalization is needed to get by, but try to keep it at a minimum in relationships with people.

I don't know if my point got across, my head is a mess and my strong side is getting things across through direct conversation.

Maria_Sama said:
If I kiss them and grab their asses, can they still be considered friends?

Kyousuke_M said:
Having friend/s is overrated, probably most of people don't even understand the meaning.

It's really hard to make a real friend and it takes a lot of time as well ( at least that's how it's supposed to be ). Personally I am unable to interact with people, but I can say that that very few people actually have friends, it's just a word that I think is miss-used and would be best replaced with acquaintances... but the word is hard to spell I guess so yeah.

Maria_Sama said:
If I kiss them and grab their asses, can they still be considered friends?