I'm sociable and confident and I have never found it hard to make friends, in almost any context. When it comes to actually maintaining those friendships, I am simply awful at it - it often takes me months to reply to messages, and when I do, the platitudinous "We must meet up soon" never even translates to so much as my glancing at a calendar to work out when that "soon" might be.
I sometimes wonder if I would be better at maintaining friendships if initially making them didn't come to me so easily, or whether the kind of people I find it so easy to make friends with are, in fact, simply also people just like me (ie. they are awful at maintaining friendships too). Both seem quite plausible.
Guess I'm not alone who isn't good at this. But i now have realized that you have to very few set of close friends than like 20 acquaintances(i know it sounds obvious) and i never miss an opportunity to meet them no matter how busy i'm with the work.
Yes. I think having two or three very close friends whom you see often is vastly preferable to having fifteen or twenty friends you rarely see (the "see often" bit is probably the biggest challenge, especially once you have children).
Conversely, I have found in business that having an endless stream of acquaintances with whom you are on vaguely friendly terms is extremely beneficial.
I'm sociable and confident and I have never found it hard to make friends, in almost any context. When it comes to actually maintaining those friendships, I am simply awful at it - it often takes me months to reply to messages, and when I do, the platitudinous "We must meet up soon" never even translates to so much as my glancing at a calendar to work out when that "soon" might be.
I sometimes wonder if I would be better at maintaining friendships if initially making them didn't come to me so easily, or whether the kind of people I find it so easy to make friends with are, in fact, simply also people just like me (ie. they are awful at maintaining friendships too). Both seem quite plausible.