Most of us want to have friends and we want to be part of a network of people we enjoy being with.
Once in a while you will encounter somebody who seems to be a loner, and who has very few friends.
Why do some people end up being alone and not having many friends?There are several reasons.
If a person actually prefers to be alone, it may be because they are very introverted.
Being an introvert means they prefer their own company instead of the company of others.
Introverts can be very happy just spending time by themselves.
Being an introvert does not mean that these people are shy, or that they dislike others.
Being an introvert just means they have the type of character makeup where they don't really need to seek out the company of others.
Some people end up being loners and not having many friends because they are very shy.
Shy people often want to make friends, but they may be very overwhelmed by the stress of trying to make conversation with people that they don't know.
Shy people may frequently become tongue tied and embarrassed, and may feel that escaping from others at least keeps them from feeling so humiliated.
Still, this pattern of avoiding other means that many shy people end up very lonely.
For all their social awkwardness, most shy people want to have a good social life, and they often wish they had more friends.
In some cases, shy people can make more friends by simply trying harder.
That means, that if they talk to more people more often, this can help them improve their social interactions.
There is another group of people who end up having very few friends.
These are people who have very unfriendly personalities.
I was thinking back through my life and trying to remember some of the people I knew who ended up having no friends because they were actually very unpleasant to get along with.
I tried to remember just what it was about these people that made it so difficult for anyone to like them.
In most cases, it turned out that these people had very sour personalities.
They were never pleasant, and they always looked for the negative in every situation.
They often went out of their way to be mean to the people around them.
Some of the other people I can remember as being very unpopular had other problems.
Sometimes the problem was that they were very self centered.
They could not stop talking about themselves.
They always had to be better or more important than everybody around them.
Some of the unpleasant people were the opposite.
They acted as if life was a contest that they could only win if they could prove they had the worst luck of any one around them.
Everything that happened to them was terrible.
They could never win.
Everything was someone else's fault.
Most of these unpleasant people didn't think they were unpleasant.
They thought they were always right and everyone else was always wrong.
They seemed to have no sense of empathy or respect for anyone else.
Another characteristic I noticed about many of these unpleasant people was that many of them were very proud of the fact that nobody liked them.
They decided to believe that the fact nobody liked them was some kind of proof that they were superior to everyone else.
So, if you have noticed that you don't have a lot of friends, or that making friends seems to be difficult for you, ask yourself why.
If you examine some of the reasons given above for why some people don't have many friends, is it because you are shy? Are you introverted? Do you simply lack social skills? Are you too negative? Do you show contempt for everybody else? Have you stopped caring for anybody else except yourself? You can't really start to fix a problem until you acknowledge what that problem is.
Then you need to take the right steps that will solve the problem for you and start on your road to improving your friendships.