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> > Er, how DO you go about making friends with people who are only > > interested in stuff you aren't interested in, though? > > Maybe a list of suitable pastimews (the positive version of Berne's > GAMES PEOPLE PLAY). > Complaining about mutual annoyances: the weather, the > teacher, the textbooks > Praising mutual pleasures: flowers, blue sky, artwork, > a local winning sports team, fireworks > Compliments: the other person's hair, clothing , I always feel socially crippled in enviroments where I'm communicating with aquaintences/strangers and there isn't a self-evident subject of mutual interest to disscuss. What I CAN do is swap "kid stories" til doomsday, and tell stories of my family 'til doomsday, and so forth. But personaly I don't find such interaction really satisfying. I always wonder if the people I'm talking to are as bored as I am --they don't SEEM to be. It's when I tried to carry on an *interesting* disscussion (like anyalizing books, or discussing songwriting, or etc) that I notice the glazed looks. But I don't feel connected to someone just becuase I've been bored silly spending an hour and a half exchanging life histories and other trivia. If something they told me was actually interesting I will remember that three years later, but I won't remember who it was who told me that story. I'm bad at the compliments and mutual pleasures thingy, and would like to get better, but what I would REALLY like to be able to do social skill/conversational adeptness wise, is figure out how get past the "you tell a story about your kids, and I'll tell a story about my kids" and find another topic of interest to the person I am talking with, that I would actually find interesting too. My mother seems to be able to do this, and I'm no good at it. I usually don't find out anything interesting about anyone until I've been "casually aquainted" with them for YEARS. And when I DO know something interesting, I tend to not be very good at KEEPING the conversation going in that direction, it always seems to either veer back into my own pet subjects (and they start getting glazed looks again), and/or fall back on inanities. I tell myself it just takes practice, but I never seem to remember all the useful advice I give myself when I'm in a social situation, and afterward when I think of all the things I should have been saying, (and all the times when I probably shouldn't have been saying anything) I get terribly annoyed with myself. <sigh> > > I've got fairly high standards for "friend," but this is the way > you stay on good terms with acquaintances. And I can do it fairly > well with adults. I couldn't do it well as a child. I don't know > why really. Partly it was because I didn't have glasses back then > and so couldn't recognize people well and so didn't know their > names, and they felt insulted by this. I recognize people very well, (assuming I have glasses on) and I STILL don't know anyone's name. The most delightful thing for me about going to Chicon 2000, and hanging out in the Filk area, was I already knew bunches and bunches of names, and all I had to do was connect faces. It was wonderful! It was liberating! I would really like to have that sort of experience more often. Of course, for me those names weren't those of "casual aquaintences" exactly, either. I do have a "cyber friend" who I consider to be a friend just as much as I do Wendy, whom I spend several hours a week with, and there are a number of people I've met via internet who I consider only "casual aquaintences", but I rate most of the regulars on filk as somewhere in-between those two levels. > > My mother says I make friends like a man, and that I'm supposed to be > > interested in the people themselves, and not care whether we have > > anything in common. But I can't even conjure up an interest in the > > day-to-day trivia of my own family, let alone that of the people to whom > > I am only connect by merit of happening to own a house next to theirs. > > The stereotypical man doesn't make friends. He makes alliances with > people he's thrown together with, and drops them when he moves on > to another class or job or project. This is obviously NOT true of > all men, and fans are, as always, rather different than non-fans. So I don't make friends, I make alliances? That may be true. <blink> I guess it depends on how you define "friend" and how you define "alliances." In my own mental rating, past "friends" rate much higher on my "conectedness" scale than casual aquaintences, even local casual aquaintances, but I don't tend to attempt to remain in communication with people with whom I no longer come in contact. I always thought this was because I did friendship differently, not because I didn't do friendship at all. I don't think I need to be communicating with someone to care about them. I tend to think that if I hadn't heard from a "friend" for decades and they came to me with a problem, I would respond to them the same way I would have responded if I had heard from them yesterday. I definately don't have to communicate to feel "connected" and I find that communicating JUST to "stay in touch" does NOT fill any emotional need for me, so although I intellectually know that other people seem to go for that kind of thing, I have a hard time internalizing that. For me, what seems to count is total hours I have spent interacting with them on a level beyond social chit-chat. (And I also seem to have a sense of family ties, too.) > Barry was surprised when I explained to him that his parents would be > glad to hear each time he got a promotion or commendation at work. Yeah, well in our family it gets really bad, because *I* don't realize these things either. You should have heard the kickup when his family discovered I was five months pregnant and we hadn't informed them of it. I wasn't trying to "leave them out" I just didn't see that there was anything worth announcing until we had baby in hand so to speak. > > And is knowlege of basic psych actually useful in making friends? > > For those of us who have to approach things from first principles or > they don't make sense, yes, it probably is. But I can explain and explain to my son Ben why he gets along so badly with his sister Azure, and what he would need to do differently, and 99 times out of 100 he just can't *do* it. I suppose by explaining I empower him to make that 100th time, but I don't think he'll GET 100 chances at school. > I do wish people would stop yammering about "friends" though and > start explaining about how to be on pleasant terms with casual > acquaintances which is what school kids need. I don't know. I don't think that the term "casual acquaintances" makes much sense when applied to children, the perspective is wrong. Nothing seems to be "casual" to my kids. People are either my friends, not my friends, or strangers. Add to that the group, "people who pick on me" and you've really covered the ground pretty thuroughly. Being able to get along with "not my friends" doesn't seem to help in protecting you from "people who pick on me". For that I really think you need friends. Haven't you ever seen the situation where two children are playing nicely, and a third comes in, starts picking on one of those two, and the other child suddenly turns on his former playmate? I have. Michelle Bottorff Lady Lavender -- Family webpage: http://home.sprintmail.com/~mbottorff/index.html Lady Lavender's Filksongs: http://www.freemars.org/lavender/index.html 25r:2a:1p