I Don’t Have Any Friends! (Help!)

Have you ever felt like you have nobody to call, and wondered: how did I get here? Where are my people?

Maybe you’d been focusing on your career and lost touch with your friends. Maybe a big life transition has made you feel the friendships you used to have were tied to a version of you that no longer exists.

I’ve been there. I feel your pain, and I wish I could give you a big hug. But as somebody who’s been in this situation before, I can also tell you this: you might have more people in your circle than you think.

In this episode, I want to unpack this feeling and recommend a variety of episodes that might help you find the inspiration to go out and change your social landscape. (Be sure to check out the links below!)

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• The common misconception that there is something inherently wrong with individuals who struggle to make and maintain friends
• The shame spiral and negative self-talk of feeling like you have no friends and the importance of understanding how you arrived at this point
• Various circumstances and life changes that may of occurred that have made maintaining or making connections difficult
• The Wheel of Connection, which is a conclusive look at the different people you have in your life

Resources & Links

Listen to Episode 27 about loneliness; Episode 69 about learned loneliness; Episode 132 about navigating great friendship shifts; Episodes 25 and Episode 153 about friendship break-ups; Episode 101 about chronic illness; Episode 18 and Episode 35 about grief; Episode 19 about starting from scratch; Episode 100 (do the exercise!) about the wheel of connection; Episode 72 about virtual connections; Episode 128 about pararsocial relationships; Episode 129 about online friends; Episode 78 about friendship self-talk; Episode 41 about the liking gap;

This episode is sponsored by Slowly, a digital pen pal app used by over 10 million people worldwide. If you’ve been looking for a low-pressure way to connect with someone completely outside your normal friendship circle, this is it. Exchange letters at your own pace, no small talk panic required.

Download Slowly free and get 30% off Slowly Plus using my link: https://open.slowly.app/miXL/l8ei5iw6

WANT MORE?

My book, Are We Friends Yet? hits shelves June 16. Get on the waitlist for pre-order bonuses + a first look.

Dive into The Connection Reset. A 10-day private podcast to help you see the abundance of connection that already exists in your day-to-day (Yes. Really. I promise you have more than you realize). Start today. 

Transcript

Podcast Intro/Outro: 1:28

All right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship

Alex Alexander: 2:18

If you are someone where you look around and you feel like there's no one to call. Maybe you scrolled through your phone and there really weren't any contacts there that you felt like you could reach out to, or maybe something happened to you today or yesterday or last week, good or bad, and you had no one to tell then this episode is for you, and I want you to start off this episode by taking a really big deep breath, because if you have been feeling these things, then I am sure you have a lot of thoughts about what is happening, right? You probably feel like something maybe is wrong with you. Why does everyone else have people have friends? Did you just miss the memo on how to do this? Do they have some skill or personality trait that you just didn't get the honest truth is, if you are somebody who feels like making and maintaining friends is hard for you, and you are at this place of rock bottom where you feel like you truly have zero people, part of the problem is making the friends and building up your circle, but part of the problem is just how deep of a shame spiral you probably are in and like that hurts a lot, all the negative self-talk that's happening. I just want to give you a big hug. Now in today's episode, I'm not going to tell you that it's easy or that you just need to go join a club. I want to actually sit with the feeling of where you are right now. I want to unpack it. I'm also going to give you a variety of episodes that are in the catalog, because today is Episode 170. So I have a lot of episodes pertaining to different aspects of this. There's so many jumping off spots. So this episode isn't just one and done. You're not going to be left here with this feeling. There are things for you to do. But this episode alone, I really, I really want to unpack the feeling, because, like I said, I think half the battle is just battling what's going through your own head. And you probably have never thought much about it, right? How did you get here? Do you actually truly have zero some honest questions, and we're going to unpack all of that, and then you can go dig into these other episodes, whichever ones pertain to you for how to handle it. Now, this episode is not an episode on loneliness, per se. Okay, I have episodes on loneliness. I have an Episode... Episode 27 "What is loneliness?" And I have an episode. I believe it's Episode 69 called "Let's Talk About Learned Loneliness," which is kind of when loneliness becomes our normal, and how that impacts us. So if you want to talk about what loneliness is and how we got here as a society, that is different than this episode today is specifically for the person who is looking around and feels like they have no one. We're going to work through that. Now the first question we need to look at is, how did you get here? Because I think it's really easy to shame ourselves, right, to have all that negative self-talk, to be like, I'm just really bad at this. Nobody ever taught me. I just don't have what everyone else has. Obviously, it's really easy to do that when we haven't spent time analyzing how you got here. I really, truly think that when you can give some yourself some information, suddenly there are reasons. That are outside yourself, and it's not all about you. It's really not now, there are a lot of ways to arrive at zero, and none of them mean that you're broken. One of them could be that there were a lot of life transitions that happened, or maybe just one really big life transition, right? Maybe you moved and suddenly the friendships you had in your previous location just maybe weren't deep enough to keep up with, or they weren't quite right, and you feel like this is a fresh start. Maybe you got divorced, and maybe the divorce was really messy, and you lost all your friends that way, but also something that's really common is that one partner really held together the couple's social life, and one person just kind of went along with it. And so when you get divorced, suddenly you realize that all your friends were actually your partner's friends, and you didn't really do any of the work. I've heard that one time again, maybe you graduated and those friends were really great, but they just don't feel right in this new season. Maybe you had a kid or grew your family and your world restructured around you, all in all, if you are this person, the friendships that you had were tied to a context or a version of you that no longer exists, and that's okay, you can start over. Now, there are a lot of very specific things in here, like the divorce and the graduating and the moving, but I don't want to give you 9 million episodes. There's already so many listed in this episode, so a good place to start might be Episode 132 "Navigating the Great Friendship Shift with Ericka Parke" kind of covers all of those. Maybe start there. Now the next thing that might have happened is kind of that slow, invisible drift. This one is sneaky. You didn't notice it was happening. You blinked. And five years passed and the friendships just quietly dissolved, no fight, no fallout, just distance. If this is you, I talk about the slow, invisible drift in Episode 117 "The Friend Who Got Away". Now this could just be that friendship wasn't a priority for you. Could be that, you know, you graduated, you moved, something happened, and you didn't put a lot of effort into adjusting those friendships to a new normal. Another one that I've really heard is that maybe you're somebody who focused on career. The number of times I've had people, especially men, come to me and say that they really put all their energy into career, and they woke up a decade later and realized they really had no friends anymore. Is a lot of times I could be living on a nice Island at this point. That's a common one. Now, another reason you might have found yourself feeling like you're at zero is some sort of implosion. Maybe a friend group fell apart, or you found yourself on the outside of a friend group, they stayed together, and somehow you got pushed out, a falling out, a betrayal. You didn't necessarily lose a friendship. You lost the whole ecosystem at once. If this is you, I have some episodes on Friendship Breakups. That would be a great place to start Episode 25 and 153 and also, if you have some sort of situation that isn't covered in those because there are definitely lots of situations that I have not been able to cover yet, I would love to just hear about it. I'm not even saying come on the podcast and talk about it publicly. The more specific stories I can collect, the more specific episodes I can create, right? Because I haven't experienced every single scenario. So reach out however feels easiest to you, and let me know what it is. Now, another reason you might find yourself a zero is health or other circumstances, right? Maybe a chronic illness, a disability, mental health struggles, anything that made showing up harder and the lack of consistency made your friendships harder to hold on to, that is not a character flaw. One episode might be Episode 101 where I talk about chronic illness, but Episodes 18 and 35 are also about grief, and that might be another situation. There are also plenty I haven't had the chance to cover yet on the podcast, so let me know which ones you want. Another situation might be that you never really had a model to learn from friendship just wasn't something that was prioritized in your family growing up. For some people, this goes way back, like all the way to the beginning, back strong friendships were something you never saw modeled or had access to. Maybe they weren't prioritized. And now here. You are as an adult looking around, wishing that this was something you felt like you understood how to do. You're not starting over. You might be starting for the very first time, if this is you. This is actually something that I have some personal experience with, and I talk about this in Episode 19, called "The One For Little Alex." Now at the end of the day, the road that brought you here to feeling like you have zero friends. They're different roads, but they all land you in the exact same we are here destination, that particular ache of looking around and feeling like there's nobody to call. But before we go further, I want to ask you something, because I think a lot of people just say, Well, I have no friends. And when I actually start digging in and asking very specific questions, often, not always, but often we find that people actually have more connections than they realized. And I want to be honest with you about that, because what I think happens is that a lot of people come to me and they say, I have no friends. And what they mean is, I have no present friends, which is one of the sections on my Wheel of Connection. You can learn more about that in Episode 100 but my Wheel of Connection has 10 sections, so if you're just looking at one honestly, there's a lot of people out here that don't have present friends. So many people, a lot of people are surviving and thriving, honestly, for some people, by filling up the other areas of their Wheel of Connection. And I think a huge piece of that is just societal messages saying that you should have a certain type of friend, and maybe you really want present friends. But what I also find is that when I talk to a lot of people, they actually don't really want those right now in this season of their life, sometimes they're really fulfilled by community and a mix of historic friends, family, and there's nothing wrong with you. Everybody's Wheel of Connection looks different. So our Wheel of Connection includes our family of origin, our family of choice, acquaintances, formal community, and then four types of friends that I call familiar friends, defined friends, present friends and historic friends. So if you feel like you're just lacking one category, you might be surprised when you actually spend some time looking at your Wheel of Connection and you find that there are two or three people, literally anywhere on that wheel that you didn't realize or appreciate in your life, and therefore you are not starting from zero. You're starting from 10% and 10% is something. 10% is enough to take some of the panic off, because if you feel like you have no friends, like you have no one to call, let's name it what it is, there's some panic there, so that 10% it can bring the panic down just a little. And when the panic comes down, you can think a little more clearly. You can act a little more clearly, you can show up a little better. So my very first request for you, if you are listening to this episode today, if you feel like this is you, is to go listen to Episode 100 it'll be linked in the show notes. And I genuinely want you to do that exercise. And when you do that, I want you to remember that in my book, in my opinion, virtual connection counts. So if you're like, Well, what does that mean? Alex, Episode 72 might expand your mindset that one actually is about making connections in VR, but it applies to a lot of online connections. Episode 128 where I talk about using parasocial relationships to bridge your connection gap. Or Episode 129 "Are Online Friends'Real friends?'", because you might find again that we find a connection or two that feels meaningful in there. Add it to your wheel. It is something. Now, if you go and you do the Wheel of Connection exercise, you listen to that, and you're like, I came up with nothing, Alex. Or you came up with so little that it still feels like nothing. You're like, Yeah, cool. I have a couple like acquaintances that doesn't feel like enough, then this section of the episode is for you. Okay, I have talked about this a few times on the podcast, but the reason I do this work is because there was a time in my life where I truly felt like I had no one and that time in my life. Life was when I also was a kid, like, if I had to put an age, probably, like, 10 to 15 in there, and in that time frame, that is a time in your life when you definitely are, like, dependent on people for your survival, right? I wasn't an adult with autonomy. I was a kid, and so feeling like I had no one to depend on left me in a place where my lack of support, my lack of connection, truly made me feel like real, physical survival level panic on the daily so I understand what that panic feels like when you look around and you see no one that you feel like you depend on, or maybe you see some people, and on the surface to everyone else, it feels like those are your people, but you know deep down inside that those are not your people. They're not safe, they're not dependable, they are not seeing you for who you really are. This is not dramatic. If this is how you feel, this is a very, very real human experience, and you do truly feel desperate, like in your core, in your whole body. It's like vibrating around in there. I understand how panicked you can feel when you look around and you feel genuinely alone, and I want you to know that that feeling makes complete sense. It's not irrational, it's not weakness, it's human. But here's the thing that I know personally about being in that desperate place when I have been there in my life, and I've been there more than once on different levels, I have been willing to do just about anything to get out of that situation. When I talk about my work, often, I will tell people that like, the reason I think I can do this so well is because when you're that desperate, you will do anything. You will get so creative. You will think out the box. You will chuck social norms out the window. You will do whatever it takes. So I firmly believe that desperation is a fuel. It is not a sign that you have failed. It's a sign that you're ready. You're ready to try the thing that you've been putting off. You're ready to say yes to the things that feel awkward. You're ready to stop waiting. So here's what I have to ask you, and I'm asking you this with all of the love and understanding in the world of how panicked you can feel. Okay, how desperate are you? Because if you are truly desperate. If this is like survival level, then my hope for you is that you really will put yourself out there and try anything. This is actually a gift. Use it. Let that urgency be the thing that gets you out of the house, into the room, making the awkward first move. And if you're not quite as desperate if you did the Wheel of Connection exercise and you found that you had a couple people, then the good news is you have something to work with. You don't have to start from scratch. You have a place to start. Those people already exist on your wheel, and maybe they're not in that present friend category, but they are maybe connections that could move there. They are people that maybe could introduce you to people. They are people who maybe would make a room feel more comfortable while you go out there and find those people. Because the honest truth is that getting out of this place will require doing something different than you've done before, new things, awkward things, small risks, repeated effort, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Now the good news is that this podcast has so many stories of people doing the exact same thing. You're not alone when I'm over here asking you to take small risks and try new things, maybe check out Episode 78 "Checking-In on Your Friendship Self- Talk," if you need a little pep talk before you put yourself out there. Another great episode would be Episode 41 where I talk about the Liking Gap and how our brain plays tricks on us and makes us think that the people we interact with didn't actually enjoy the interaction when science shows that's not the case. We're normally just harder on ourselves than we need to be. If you have a fear of putting yourself out there, then check out Episode 145 "Reframing Rejection with Tanesha Moody." That one's a good one, that one will really throw your brain for a loop and give you something new to think about. If you want a story of hope, go check out Episode 148"The Extraordinary Ripple Effects of Small Moments of Connection." This one's a fun one. This is where, like, you might find a connection with somebody in this episode. Specifically, it's a t-shirt that completely changes your life 10 years down the line. So stay open. Those little moments of connection. And if you are someone who feels like you have gotten here because you are stuck in that guilt of not putting energy and effort into your friendships, and therefore your friendships have lapsed. Episode 115 talks about "The Friendship Guilt Spiral," and hopefully can give you a reframe. Now, the good news is that you don't have to go from zero to a best friend. You just have to go from where you are to adding a little more connection to your Wheel of Connection. And every time you add a little more connection, your wheel gets a little bit fuller. And honestly, if you take some risks, that can change pretty quickly. And I firmly believe that once you feel like you have some people on your Wheel of Connection, it makes it a lot more enticing to invest because you can start to see how things shift and change. So here's what I want you to do. I have two follow up activities. This is where I want you to go from here. One go check out the Wheel of Connection right now, not as a creative exercise, but as an honest inventory of what you have in your life. See if you can find two or three people that you can fill in on that wheel to take the edge off. And second, if you are ready to start building, and only when you're ready, go listen to some of those episodes. I say that because you can listen to me talk all day long. There are 170 episodes. But if you don't go out in the world and take some action, then nothing will change. It's kind of like how we can watch workout videos all day long, but we're not actually going to get any stronger unless we actually go to the gym. Okay, I'm talking to myself on that one, so I'm going to work on that, and you're going to work on making the connections you want. So go listen to those episodes when you feel a little bit of mindset of like, okay, whatever she says in this episode, I'm going to go give it a try. Please take action outside of the episode. So what do you think? Do you actually have zero friends? Or do you maybe have a little bit more on your wheel than you thought you did? Either way, I meant what I said. I know how this feels. I know how desperate this feeling of being alone can make you, but I also know that desperate people get themselves out of desperate places. You might be closer than you think. Your whole social landscape could look different in six months, three months, depending on how much energy you put in, and then from there, it only continues to shift. A year from now, five years from now, you can impact this area of your life, but it's going to take you doing something different than you've done before. So go dive into those other episodes. And if you feel so inclined, if you want to share report back. I would love to cheer you along on this journey with that. I'll see you next week.

Podcast Intro/Outro: 25:50

Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.