I’m in my early 20’s (F), and during my whole life I have never had any close friendships but I don’t know why. I’ve always been an introvert without many friends and have a lot of difficulty showing my emotions other than anger and annoyance. Despite this I’ve always managed to make a couple of friends but the moment that I feel like we’re getting too close I kinda get a weird feeling about it and push them away which eventually leads to not being friends with them anymore (obviously). This is actually happening right now and I’m trying to figure out how I can stop before pushing this person away as well and others I might meet in the future.
Current situation:
I recently moved to a new country to finish my studies and have made a nice group of friends from school who I’m always with throughout the day and hang out with every now and then. There’s one person in the group who I really get along with, our personalities match up perfectly and we always have the most interesting convos. However, the friendship has reached that point where I’m getting weirded out by how close we’re getting and every time she asks me to hang out I always say no without a having any valid reason and it’s annoying the shit out of me bc I can’t figure out why. Does anyone else do this and/or knows what might be the reason behind it?
5 comments
Are you close to your mother?
That weird feeling might be vulnerability.
Can you explain further what do you mean by “weirded out how close we’re getting”? What is the reason you cannot just bite the bullet, say yes to hanging out with her, and just see how it goes?
That totally sounds like avoidant personality. Two types fearful and dismissive. Since you said you are annoyed or angered easily, that’s dismissive.
I too have the exact same problem where if I get too close to someone I have to back away. You fear being vulnerable and exposing yourself.
This is rooted in a childhood experience or trauma. It can be the way you were raised.
Hey,
I can only say I have the same type of fear.
I guess it all depends on what we want. As a person above said, that is called vulnerability.
Sometimes when I dont know the answer for something social like this, one thing that helps me is to test it out. Sometimes by doing that I realise that the fear I had of interacting and getting close was only in my head.