Hi!! So I’m currently a freshman in college on winter break right now and I’m just coming off of cutting it off with a now old “best friend”. Now, I put quotation marks around that because while she was a really close friend I guess, she’d do a lot of things and exhibit certain tendencies that would always fault or disadvantage me and she’d have zero regard for my feelings like ever. Calling it abusive would be dramatic but it felt like that a little bit at times. That’s only really the short of it but the nature of that friendship isn’t really the focus of this post. Ever since college started I’ve been trying to make friends but looking back at things and at how things are for me right now, I haven’t really been doing too good of a job at it. Like I have a lot of “friends” like people I know and talk to sometimes and I even have the numbers of some of these people but like with how long it takes themto text back usually. I don’t think they consider me that much of a friend. Or at least that good of one? Idk. And it’s usually me texting first, sometimes I get texted first but it’s usually me. I’ve hung out and done stuff with a couple of these potential friends too and I’d like to do more with them. I do realize that a lot of my struggle here comes from me spending so much time with this old best friend, especially since she’d ask to hangout like a lot and would even get genuinely pissed at me when I didn’t want to or if I was busy doing something with someone else. This coupled with the fact that I’ve found out that a lot of my struggle with making friends also comes from the fact that I’m too much of a people pleaser in a sense,e definitely makes things harder. I now realize that a lot of the conversations I’ve had with people are primarily made up of variations of “how are you”’s and me agreeing with and affirming someone’s feelings about things rather than me expressing much personality or opinion or anything about me really. Like from what I’ve heard and read I’m starting to think pretty strongly that a lot of people probably just view me as “nice to have around” but nothing more. The people who I’ve made somewhat closer friendships with are the people that I think I’ve expressed my personality with but they still aren’t like at the point where they wanna text me and stuff like that. I think a lot of it comes from me overstressing about trying to come off as likeable to everybody as I entered college because I was worried about making friends so much as well. It also doesn’t help that I feel like I “missed it” with prime friend-making time at the start of the term. Like I can’t stand the sight of everyone with big friend groups enjoying their college experience anymore because I don’t have that and I’m honestly miserable. I don’t ever really show that sadness to these new friends so I know that in of itself isn’t what it is. I always express myself as happy to all of my “friends” and stuff but I can’t help but just feel sad. I’m especially upset that I’m feeling this way right by Christmas, it just made me cry like an hour ago because I just remembered how I happy I’d be around this time and I hate that I’m so sad.
I say all of that to say, I just want to know what I should be doing to make these people into actual friends or at least just deeper friendships than they are now. What should I say to them when i wanna start a conversation? Any advice on texting? How should I express my personality? How do I get someone to “like” me? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also if anyone has advice on making new friends out of ppl you don’t know in college and getting into/making friend groups in my situation that would be a tremendous help.
If anyone needs extra details to better help here I’ll be happy to give more context in the replies if needed!!
Oh also one random extra thing I’m in a group chat (-ish, its a really small discord server for a friend group) and I’m trying to figure out how I should be trying to get involved with them more.