I have no friends: 4 ways to feel less alone

There are those who go on holiday in a herd and then there is you, who have the feeling of not having friends and of dealing with your loneliness. Our tips for being and feeling less alone.

Questioning friendship and your expectations to put your relationships into perspective

"I have no friends", you say. Perhaps this observation has stuck with you since childhood, perhaps a move and the years have reconfigured your relationships. Still, you feel little surrounded. How about questioning your image of friendship? We often tend to idealize friendly relations: between the photo slides broadcast at the wedding which show inseparable bands and our old acquaintances who expose themselves in groups on Instagram (and by the sea), we quickly come to feel "a little apart". Is it the fault of selfies and social networks? The fault, too, of what we tell ourselves. If we assume that friendship is like lively evenings and "life and death" confidences, we may be a little mistaken: in reality, we sometimes have a friend or two, and then some friends. And this “relational organization” is often sufficient to flourish. It remains to put his loneliness in perspective: isn't there, close to you, a friend who is available and ready to listen, or even a best friend to whom you can tell everything? Isn't this person important? Having friends doesn't mean having fifty friends, a band, and travel plans. Becoming aware of this helps to put the problem into perspective, but also to stop running after a vain objective. Quality suits us much better than quantity, that's for sure.

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Analyze friendships of the past to better understand the absence of friendship today

If you feel like your friendships have vanished and your loneliness is fresh, or almost fresh, perhaps you can also question your past friendships and the reasons for their disappearance. It is likely that age and individual backgrounds have kept you apart: when one gets married and the other has children, daily life is no longer the same and family often takes over. friendship. But perhaps you will also notice that some of your friends have distanced themselves for other reasons (you expected too much of them, you were complaining, partying, excess, fear of abandonment and in fact possessiveness?) or, on the contrary, that you have chosen to flee toxic friendships that did not make you happy. All of this can lead you to think about what you can work on on your side: asserting yourself more, being more attentive or sharing, and so on. Without saying that we are responsible for our sorrows of friendship (after all, the relation exists with two, even more), you know your faults. Faults that you will not have to hide or make up for in the future, but that you can better control by remembering that friendship is about finding a balance between yourself and others.

Let others lead the dance

Make way for a good resolution: meet people! And you probably know how to do it: at work, at the gym, at yoga, at pottery, and so on. Through activities, we come across people who share the same center of interest, something to rejoice in having an obvious first topic of conversation to get closer. But then ? When you consider that you don't have a friend, you have great doubts about yourself, about your ability to reach out to others. And above all, we seek to seduce while intellectualizing each of our messages, each of our proposals (a coffee?), each of our responses. It must be said that our self-confidence has become shaky, and that by wanting too much to do well and save the friendship, we sometimes become clumsy or stressed. Make the decision to let others lead the dance. That doesn't mean you shouldn't invest your whole heart in a new story, but make room for your potential friends who will "establish" a rhythm, ask you out, ask you questions about your life. Don't stay on the defensive, but rather choose to "let yourself go", it's the best way to forge links without thinking non-stop about your way of being, your gestures, your words.

Reinventing your loneliness to feel better and open up more easily

Friendships are not built in a day. Sometimes it takes time for a new encounter to transform and settle in time. In the meantime, take the gamble of reinventing your loneliness: in life, there are extroverts, those who regenerate with others, and introverts, those who find energy in loneliness. Often, we are a bit of both, although a dominant part is essential. If you are more extroverted, you may suffer from the absence of friendship, but you can already try to nourish yourself in order to open up to others with more ease. And if you're an introvert, that works too. In both cases, optimize your loneliness: what can you do for yourself, to fulfill yourself? To take care of yourself? Admittedly, when you don't have many friends, you are tempted to answer that you have already “tried everything to keep yourself busy”, but are the hobbies put in place right? Do they fill holes or do they really give you pleasure? The opportunity, therefore, to try new activities, solo. Activities which, perhaps, will lead you to group lessons... And there, as if by magic, the encounters will land.