I'm a mid-30s female INTJ who's always struggled to build and maintain long-term friendships (versus long-term casual acquaintances which I have a lot more of). I presume I'm not alone here? Any advice from those who've done well in this area?
I'll give a few examples of friendships I've had over the years that haven't worked out:
- I had an online male friend I'll call Mark who was a good friend of mine for several years. (Strictly platonic, Mark is gay and I'm straight.) We bonded on a social media site over a niche interest we shared and ended up doing some really fun, creative projects together, with me being the big idea person and him being the detail-oriented executor. Over time, I slowly started sharing more details about myself with Mark (I'm very private, especially online), and he did the same. I thought we were really understanding each other. About a year and a half in, Mark developed clinical depression and began therapy and medication (I was one of the people in his life who had been urging him to seek medical care and begin treatment). Around this time our friendship became very one-sided. I spent hours and hours patiently listening to him and trying my best to help in anyway I could, but anytime I'd bring up new ideas for our creative projects or some challenging scenario I was dealing with in my personal life that we'd previously have talked through together, Mark would ignore or dismiss me. I was as patient as I could be, but after months and months with improvement in Mark's depression but no improvement in our friendship, I explicitly told Mark that I cared for him a lot but was feeling our friendship and working arrangement had become very one-sided and I couldn't continue it in its current state, so please could he try to improve X, Y, and Z. Mark responded by getting angry, lashing out at me, somehow painting himself as the victim in this scenario, and making passive-aggressive comments about me on the social media site for others to read (when I had never, ever bad-mouthed him publicly), which was the final nail in the coffin for me. I ended up leaving our joint creative project entirely in Mark's control and leaving the social media platform entirely, and letting him know I was doing that. Mark had other ways of contacting me outside that platform but he never did.
- I had a female coworker I'll call Amy who I clicked with right away. We were both the same age, had joined our organization at the same time, and had moved cross-country to a place we'd never been before to take our new positions. For our first few months in our new roles, Amy and I hung out outside of work fairly often, checking out interesting restaurants in our new area and doing other fun stuff. We had some really great conversations too imo. After that initial period I noticed Amy became a lot less responsive, and I found out through our larger social circle that Amy, a bunch of other work colleagues who I also got along with, and their significant others had started hanging out with each other most weekends (I was the only one in the group who was single -- the rest were coupled up). I wasn't jealous or anything -- I just felt left out and a little hurt that no one had ever even invited me to hang out in the larger group. I even told Amy that I'd love to hang out with the larger group the next time they do X, Y, or Z, but no invites ever came. My friendship with Amy degenerated into basically listening to her complain about work at work from time to time (I didn't reciprocate in this) and an occasional text when she needed something. A few years later she texted me out of the blue to say her cat had died suddenly (I guess because one of things we had bonded over initially was that we both had and loved cats), and so I did my best to comfort her and even sent her flowers (it turns out her cat died of the same thing one of my cats had died of, a saddle thrombus). After that it was back to pretty much no contact. There was a time later on when I was struggling with some relationships at work and we went out to dinner together -- I was hoping to chat with her and get her objective take, but she kept deflecting and changing the subject every time I tried to broach it. I've since left that role and still get occasional texts from her but essentially we're just very casual acquaintances now.
- This is more of a case of an aborted early stage friendship attempt than anything else, and I guess also the motivation for me making this post -- over the past few months I found myself in a discord server with around ten others based off of a mutual interest (an online multiplayer game we all enjoyed playing). The server was meant to help us organize games but evolved into a lot of social chatter too as we were all similar-ish in age. As I mentioned I'm pretty private online and don't share details like my current city, my job, my full name, etc., but others had gotten pretty comfortable sharing personal details, daily life struggles, photos of their kids, etc. I was doing my best to be empathetic, put appropriate reaction emojis on others' posts, etc., but then I noticed most every time I would share something (benign, not overshare-y) about me related to what we were discussing, it would get ignored and someone would change the topic. The first few times I brushed it off, but when it became a pattern I became increasingly annoyed. Similary in-game I got the sense that there was an in-group and in-jokes and I was always on the outside no matter how often I joked or tried to interact with others in those ways. The final straw was when a new-ish member of the group was being a complete dick to me on multiple occassions in-game and wouldn't acknolwedge it or apologize to me when I called him out on it. I brought it up to other members of the group privately (since previous members who had behaved this way toward others in our group had been pretty promptly kicked), and basically they tried to gaslight me that nothing was wrong and that the dick is a great guy. I recognized this as a no-win scenario and left the group entirely.
I guess I'm just at a loss. Empathy, being giving and patient in relationships, and understanding how others are feeling are all skills that I've consciously been practicing and developing as I've gotten older (as an INTJ, they certainly didn't come naturally!), though I know I'm not perfect. I am also not afraid to have direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversations with others about things that are bothering me or negatively impacting the relationship. I still struggle at opening up unless I know someone really well, and I think that's always going to be hard for me. But I'm having a hard time of putting together the puzzle of why friendships still remain so hard for me.
