I'm bad at maintaining friendships. Although I am good at "making" friends, I have never been able to "keep" friends. At first I began to notice that this was the case. Then I began to wonder why: What is it about me that makes people not want to remain my friend? Then I turned it around and wondered if it was something I was doing rather than something other people are doing: Is there something I do that results in people drifting away from me? Now I understand that the answer is yes, that I do not keep friends because of my attitude toward life and my goals for my life.
I am an idea-focused person. The primary motivating factor in my life, the thing that makes me want to get up in the morning, is the prospect of learning new things, new ideas, whether those ideas relate to science, psychology, philosophy, society, or something else altogether. I just love ideas. I love learning new things--not the kinds of things they teach in schools, but the kinds of things that one learns through life experience, through meeting people, doing different things with one's life, and so on.
This is why I like meeting new people and talking to people: It gives me an opportunity to learn from them. I love meeting new people because they can give me a fresh perspective by telling me their points of view and opinions on all sorts of ideas. In a sense, it's fair to say that I use people--I see people more as objects than human beings, things to be used to appease my sense of curiosity. This doesn't mean that I am heartless or cruel toward people, but I tend to interact with them as a way for me to learn rather than to get close to them. You might say that this isn't a healthy attitude with which to approach other people, and you might be right, but I'm not sure what else to do. It strikes me now that I have always been this way; I have always been more interested in people for their ideas than anything else.
Of course, what all of this eventually means is that once I get to know a person, we gradually run out of things to talk about. I may ask people their opinions about a few things, and as we get to talking, I'll usually get a decent sense of what things are important to them, and I find all these ideas interesting, but after this process has transpired--which usually takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on how complex the person is--I find that I have nothing left to say to a person, and they have nothing left to say to me. Once I've "gotten to know someone," there is not much point in me continuing to talk to them, since I already know what they think.
Usually when people get together, it is not for the sake of sharing ideas--"going out" hardly suggests political debates or philosophical inquiry--and so I've never found myself able to enjoy social gatherings very much, because I don't take any pleasure in the simple act of physically being with other people. I have long scoffed at the idea of using the word "social" to describe dance clubs, bars, and so on: People in those places aren't really getting to know one another; they're simply there to swap stories and other small talk. That kind of thing is probably necessary, on some level, to maintain a long-term friendship, but unfortunately, I find small talk entirely uninteresting. I am not interested in going out just to be with people; I don't consider that being "social." To me, being "social" implies some deeper level of intimacy than that.
I might make a psychological analogy using everyone's favorite source of psychological analogies: Sex. When a man has an orgasm, his interest in sex fades almost instantly; all the ideas about sex and physical intimacy which just a moment ago had seemed so compellingly, even urgently important suddenly become boring and uninteresting. By contrast, when a woman has an orgasm, her desire for intimacy is not completely satiated; she typically desires more of the same, and even if she is sexually "satisfied," she normally wishes to cuddle and be close with her sexual partner while "coming down" in the afterglow of orgasm. Similarly, men are usually more eager to "try new things" when it comes to sex: Men are usually more interested than women in moving on to anal sex, bondage, and other things which expand the scope of the sexual experience, but once these things have been done a few times, men likewise usually lose interest in them because there is nothing left to learn from them, no new innovations to introduce in these fields. Women, by contrast, are usually quite happy to do the same type of "vanilla" sexual acts over and over again.
My desire for ideas is somewhat "masculine." I like to learn things from all possibles sources, including media works such as books or movies, other people whom I meet, and my own life experiences, but once I have learned as much as I can from all these things, my interest in them is satisfied; I have no desire to continue them further, because they've become boring. Thus, although I am friendly to people and enjoy meeting people, I have no personal inclination to maintain long-term relationships with people just for the sake of being together with them. In contrast, the desire to be with people as an end in itself is somewhat "feminine." Women love to share company with other people and see this as an end in itself. Just as for me, learning ideas is its own end and something I love doing even if the ideas serve no further purpose than being understood, so too women find that being together with other people serves its own purpose, an act which needs no "reason why" even if people are doing nothing further than seemingly-pointlessly being together. The desire to be together and spend time together is feminine, while the desire to learn and grow is masculine. Of course, this is a generalization: It would be absurd to say that men never feel the desire to be close to other people as an end in itself, or that women do not enjoy learning things just for the sake of learning things, but nonetheless I believe that this broader idea has a kernel of truth to it.
Someone recently told me that the purpose of life lies in the things which have no purpose. Things which are "useful" or "important" only distract from life; the things which actually lend meaning to life and make life worth living are the pointless, useless things which have no purpose other than enriching our lives and giving us a reason to live. I understand this idea; intellectually, it makes sense to me and I can accept it, but I cannot feel the desire to enjoy pointless things. I do not feel compelled to be with people simply because such acts of being "social" enrich my life; I only wish to be with people if I can gain new ideas from the act of doing so.
I don't know if I will change how I live or how I think about the purpose of human friendships and relationships. Perhaps I am destined to always be this way: To meet people for a little while, familiarize myself with all their ideas, opinions, and perspectives, and then move on, making them "somebody that I used to know." I do not know if I could--or should--learn, over time, to enjoy the act of just pointlessly being with people. I probably could if I made myself do so, but I suppose the question for me, then, becomes whether I should. Have I any reason to make myself be with people more just so that I can be present with them, or am I better off simply pursuing my present nature and mostly seeing people as opportunities to learn from? I probably will always have leanings toward the latter--I am an idea-focused person, and changing that would require changing everything about how I live and think, including my very meaning of life. I don't know if I have any good reason to change myself that fundamentally, but at least now I finally understand why I have never been able to hold onto friends.
Source: http://lateblt.livejournal.com/107954.html
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