Why You Don’t Have Friends

Welcome to Tuesday’s Tips, the one-day a week when I dispense useful, actionable and empowering tips!

Some days call for brutal honesty and I feel myself compelled to embrace it this Tuesday. If you find yourself consistently losing friends, or worse, consistently without friends, this post is for you. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. You’re welcome in advance.

1. You’re a well of neediness. Your expectations of others are beyond unrealistic. You’re never satisfied – you’re constantly disappointed. No one wants to feel like a failure and so they avoid you like the plague.

2. You’re miserable. All you do is complain. You have nothing positive to say. The only people who will stay in your life are as unhappy as you are ~ and instead of being grateful for them, you complain about them.

3. You’re narcissistic-light (at best). You come first, second, third and fourth. Other people exist for your amusement. You monopolize every conversation by launching into monologues about yourself. You rarely ask others about how they are doing and when you do, it comes across as insincere. It’s all about your comfort, your needs, and your convenience. What’s worse, you lack the self-awareness to recognize this in yourself.

4. You lose yourself in relationships. The minute someone interesting comes along, your friends and family fade into a distant memory. When you bring your partner out with your tribe, they feel as though they are voyeurs crashing a date. You have no concept of how to balance a relationship with friendships. And when those relationships end, as they invariably do, you have the audacity to try and pick up where you left off in your platonic relationships.

5. You’re a drama queen. Your life is a series of highs and lows. Newsflash: Our lives could be as well, but we choose to minimize our drama. Avoiding trouble is a skill that most people learn in adulthood and we do this because drama is exhausting. Because you lack this skill, people don’t like you.

6. You’re odd. It was cute in middle school. Maybe even in high school. But as an adult, people no longer find you pleasantly unique. You’re simply strange. And you make others feel awkward. You lack social graces and people can’t take the tension when they’re around you. They have enough of that in their day jobs.

7. You talk shit. No one likes a gossip, yet you feel the need to share everyone’s business as though it was your business. We know that if you talk about others to us, you’ll talk about us the minute we leave the room, and for that reason, we don’t like you.

8. You’re a bitch. You’re just not nice. Similar to some of the above-referenced traits, it was tolerable in middle school but in adulthood it’s unacceptable.

9. You’re cheap.  Most of us don’t like to talk about money – and your obsession with hoarding it causes you to bring attention to it at every social gathering. You’re not even content to split a bill in thirds: You will calculate and pay for what you ate, no more, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes others, and for that reason we socialize with you as infrequently as possible.