I’m someone who craves (and thrives) on intimacy and closeness. I’m never been afraid to be vulnerable (I’d actually had to learn that I shouldn’t be vulnerable with everyone). I love it when someone is really passionate about something, even if that thing bores me to tears. I love hearing about peoples’ hopes, fears, dreams, opinions…
But I often feel like people hold me at arm’s length. Like they say, “OP, I like you, you’re interesting, but stay right there.”
And it doesn’t seem like it’s a matter of following the “relationship journey” either. It seems like eventually I hit a wall of someone not wanting me to come any closer. And it hurts.
Being neuroatypical I do realize I have an intense personality so people may not know how to interact with me. That may be part of it.
Anyone else experience this? How do you cope?
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some people do not thrive on intimacy and closeness. for some people, maintaining more than one or two deeply emotional relationships requires more energy than they can commit.
it sounds to me like you have a habit of running headlong into other people’s boundaries without really considering their perspective. it may leave you feeling shut out, but it takes a lot of energy for people to set and enforce those boundaries and you’ll be happier if you learn to respect them.
Yes OP, try to wait for the other person to make the steps first. Don’t rush closeness, take it easy.
This is how I operate. I have ADHD and CPTSD, I already have a hard time being a good friend to my two close friends. There are several people I like enough that I think we could be good friends, and they’ve tried getting closer to me, but I know I won’t be able to be there for them. It feels best for us both that I just keep it casual until I feel that I have room in my life (which may never happen unfortunately).
True, though part of me rushing in is that I’m trying to understand their perspective. I do try to respect boundaries, but I’m not a mind-reader. I guess most people can kind of read boundaries. For me, I need to be told.
I feel like I’m the one keeping everyone else at arm’s length. No idea how to stop doing it, not even sure I want to. It’s… safe. Ish.
After being physically and emotionally abused by a talented abuser my entire youth, I haven’t been my authentic self around any other human beings since I was a child, and almost certainly never will.
With rare exception, human beings are selfish, savage monsters who will hurt you sometimes for nothing, but always when they have something to gain by it at your expense. IRL, I do my weather best to be forgotten and ignored by them as a non-threat energy vampire.
Dang, that sounds rough. Sorry to hear you went through that. Sounds like you were able to take back power, though! Good job!
People have all kinds of personal reasons for keeping their distance from others, which are all valid of course. However as a neurodivergent person myself who also experiences this freezing out from others, I can’t help but think it’s linked to the fact that they’ve clocked me as different. Often people are motivated by building social capital and I don’t have much of that so I feel like people think there’s just no real benefit to connecting with me.
Yes, it happens to me all the times. I actually have only 3 ‘real’ friends in that regard.
All the others as soon I finish business with them (a projects ends, change job, no longer frequent a place etc…) I just lose them.
Also, every time I think I found a new group of people that seems to accept me, at some point they just vanish (?) without even a reason, like it never happened. This is the thing that hurt the most.
And how I cope with it, music and just go on with whatever you are doing. But it’s never pleasant or easy.
Yeah, those “friends” that just vanish are the the most confusing. You spend like 3 days wracking your brain trying to figure out what you might have said to set them off.
But I’ve found it’s better to just move on. If they dumped me because of something I said then they weren’t interested in becoming friends in the first place (but by the same token, if they were kind enough to share with me I said something that offended them, I’d change the way I interacted with them).
I’m one of those people that holds most others at arm’s length, I’ve just learned not to let anyone get close, but mostly I’ve just always noticed that most other people do the same. The majority of the people I interact with on an average day are co-workers, so really I don’t want to be too open with any of them anyways, I try to set clear boundaries between myself and work. The other people I see on a regular basis are my kids, so it’s already a pretty open relationship there, there’s just no real middle ground between both worlds.
