Dear Natalie:

I would like to help you figure out why friendships haven’t worked out for you so far. I have a few questions to help me try to be helpful to you. If you’d like please answer them:

1. I understand you offer help to others, do you ever ask others for help, for anything that you need?

2. What do you talk about initially with people you hope to be friends with? What topics? Who does most of the talking?

3. Regarding your sister, were the two of you ever close? If so, when and what was the nature of that closeness?

anita

Dear Natalie:

It is possible that asking people when you meet them about their lives, their interests, those introductory questions as you called them, is not effective. Maybe they feel interrogated, or that they are filling an application of sorts and they don’t like it. Actually, you gather all that information and a friendship does not develop, so you don’t use that information. Better not gather it, then. What if when you meet people you don’t ask them questions. Instead of asking, relax and be okay with saying nothing.

It feels very good to do something for someone else, doesn’t it? Let others do for you. That will make some or many feel good, useful. When you do for others and ask for nothing or even reject offers, you reject closeness, because closeness is giving and receiving on both sides of a friendship. You have to take, not only to give. And the other has to give, not only to take.

Regarding your sister, what is a 7-8 closeness? Have you always been the giver and she, the taker? If so, where was the closeness?

anita