I first started to daydreaming to cope with how bad my peer relationships were as a kid. I idealized friendships and other relationships and imagined scenarios where I already had close friends. That, combined with my lack of actual practice becoming friends with people, meant that I missed a lot of crucial lessons about making relationships.
As I grew older, I got a little better at developing friendships, but I didn't know how to approach other people, and I was always unsure if we were really friends.
When I went to college, I turned my friendship efforts on to 100%. I introduced myself to everyone in my dorm the first week I was in there. I asked people about their majors. I leapt on the information they gave me and kept an eye out for questions I could ask to extend the conversation. Through all the practice I got during college, I learned that I had made a lot of assumptions about friendship because of the way I had idealized it.
1. that close friendship was automatic.
Somehow, I came under the impression that being best friends was the goal of friendship and that if you were going to be best friends, it was doing to happen right away. I think it came from all the television shows I watched where everyone was already friends and stories where a really social person approached someone else and became their friend. The other person was begrudging at first or just not as active in the friendship but then came to realize that they cared a lot about the other person.
This assumption is bad not only because it made me really passive but also because it made me really critical. I was constantly asking myself "Are we friends?" (because I couldn't tell) and if they weren't calling me on the phone or wanting to come to my house all the time, I would assume that we weren't. Later, I would learn that a lot of times people won't do those sort of things unless you make a signal to let them know it's all right.
By assuming that we weren't really friends if they didn't call me, I basically forced the other person to do all the emotional work. If we were going to become friends, they would have to call me or invite me to stuff outside of school. This leads me to the next assumption I had to work through.
2. that I could make friends without being vulnerable
Thankfully, a friend of mind helped me with this mindset one day when I complained that no one hugged me when they were picked up after school. (This was the tenth grade, so only one person in my group had a car.) They told me that if I wanted hugs, I should give hugs.
That eventually lead me to realize that other person don't feel comfortable just assuming that other people will be okay with things (like hugging me without me telling them I wanted to be hugged). I had to approach other people and risk that they might not want to hug me. That friend also helped me realize another assumption I had made about friendship.
3. that good friends will know where I am when I'm upset, or they'll know what's wrong without me explaining things to them
Before my friend had told me that, I assumed that friends knew those sort of things because they really cared and paid attention. This was another thing I had gotten from television. I didn't understand that the reason that they found them was so that the plot could move forward.
As I started to hug people every time they left, they began to expect me to hug them. And after a while, if I forgot or didn't notice someone was leaving, they would most likely come hug me. It had become a habit or, at least, something they could expect I would be okay with. I realized that this is how people know when you are upset.
They get used to your habits and then when you do something different, like not show up at a certain time or place like you usually do or don't behave in the way you usually do, they realize that something is up. Knowing what's wrong requires a lot more skill with people though, so don't assume that they don't care if they have to ask what's wrong.
The next assumption I made was also based on television. I feel like there's a theme here.
4. that connecting with people requires that I go through a highly stressful situation with them
This assumption comes straight from movies where a group of teen boys have an adventure and then become really close friends because of it. Which, okay, is one way to connect with people because the easiest way to connect with people is to have things in common with them. Those boys now has that adventure in common.
One reason I made that assumption is because I thought I was too good for the problems people my age had: wanting to look nice, wanting to be popular, feeling betrayed by your friends, disliking school, disliking my parents. Because I ignored how I felt about those issues, I never talked to anyone about them and thus never got a moment where I felt really close to someone because they understood me.
5. that I could connect by just listening to someone
I also missed opportunities by always talking about whatever that person was most passionate about. I loved listening to people talk about what they liked, but a lot of the times, it was stuff I didn't really have an opinion on. I should have talked more about our common interests even if it wasn't their or my main interest. However, if I did that, I might have realized that we didn't actually have a lot of common interests, which brings me to my next assumption.
6. that we have to talk about everything to be friends
Sometimes, there are qualifiers when it comes to friendship. Someone is a work friend or a tennis friend or a college friend. I would still care about them and like them, but our interactions tended to be the nicest when we stuck to the areas we had in common. That didn't make the friendship any less good, and, really, forcing ourselves to do things in the name of Friendship probably would have ruined things.
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