I want this question answered like I was born yesterday and know nothing, I’ve never had any facet of a social life before.
This paragraph is just background details. I’m a 20 year old male. I didn’t have any friends growing up until I was 12, I was the weird one who never got past acquaintance with anyone. Never went to another person’s house until I was 15, even now I only have two friends, and they’re the only people I’ve seen outside of school or work. I started to get more self confidence and open up more when I was 16, but then COVID happened, missed my last two years of highschool and I’m not in college, so the last time I’ve ever even been around a lot of people my age was 4 years ago. I live in a smaller town that’s mostly old and angry people.
In the last year or so, I’ve improved my mental health by leaps and bounds, and sometimes I just wish I had more people to talk to, I have two friends I never get to see and that’s about it. Recently got my first car, so I have a way to get to cities that actually have things to do in them, for the first time in my life.
But how do you meet people? Where do you go for that? Bars aren’t an option, and when I turn 21 I don’t plan to drink much anyways, and that’s the one place people always talk about meeting people at.
Location aside, when you’re in a place with a lot of people, how do you even talk to them? I’ve gotten good at small talk working in customer service, but that’s a time when I *have* to talk to people, how do you talk to someone when neither of you are forced to talk to eachother? How do you choose who to talk to when there’s hundreds of people around?
If you do somehow- in one way or another- start talking to somebody, and you hit it off and mesh well, what do you do then? When do you stop talking? Do you get their phone number or just forget they exist for the rest of your life?
I don’t have any social media either, besides the occasional Reddit scroll and a YouTube video here and there, so that probably doesn’t help.
On top of that, I’ve never had any live of, well, life I guess, outside of going to work, coming home, playing video games, and going to sleep, it’s been that way since I was 16 so I don’t really have a whole lot to talk to people about unless they’re nerds also.
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much.