I'm thinking it's hermit season

[adventdragon]

So in a nutshell guys and friends alike have been for the most part disappointing.  People I thought I established solid friendships with have all but kicked me to the curb.  Out of sight out of mind?  Am I just not that interesting to spend time with?  Am I exuding some anti-friend vibes?  I don't know.  In the dating scene, guys have all been

Comments

[chorale]

Speaking as someone who lived for years in isolation, one of the difficulties with "going hermit" is that with other people, it really seems to be a case of "out of sight, out of mind." If they don't see you or hear from you regularly, they won't give you attention. Some of that is due to others thinking that if you're not out in public, you don't want to be bothered. In addition, for most of us, in our daily lives we don't have a lot of time to maintain a social circle so interacting with others often comes down to matters of who has contacted me regularly and how much time do I have available to spend with them. How to make a relationship grow and develop is something I am very far from being an expert at, but I m clear that it depends in part on how much I initiate contact. How to do this without crossing over into being a pest is the tricky part.

My partner and I maintain our social circle with our gaming groups, but that means there are people we only see once a month, or less. I would like to see or hear from all of our contacts more often, so I keep us tenuously connected by Facebook, predominantly, since most of our friends have left LJ for FB. The only way we hear about the day-to-day events of most of our friends is through my daily reading of FB, which I then relay to Bill. He won't even contemplate joining, but I have "drunk the Kool-Aid." We don't actually hang with most of them, either, (as I am sure you have noticed, since we don't manage to hang with you) which makes me kind of sad, but then both of us are busy with work and school, so we just don't have the time to grab a coffee and chat for an hour regularly. Email, phone chats, and texts would be nice, but I don't initiate those, myself, so I don't want to throw criticism back on others. Besides, it seems awkward to send a text out of the blue saying, "Hi, I was thinking about you."

The last big thing that has brought some of us back into each others' orbits was Tim's death. That's a horrible reason to renew social contacts. Unfortunately, Stacy isn't responding to her email and she usually doesn't pick up her phone when it rings. The last has been going on for years, so her silence is not entirely due to Tim's death. Stacy is relying on Carisa to keep her connected with her friends, and that means going to Facebook for info.

Obviously I haven't developed my friendship skills, either, so I can't give advice to you, but the "out of sight, out of mind" principle is something I have observed.