“I’m going to assume that having close friend(s) is an important goal to you, just as I think it is important to many other people. With that assumption, I have 2 related questions – what qualities are you looking for in a close friend, and how can you find people with those qualities so that you can have a meaningful, close relationship?”
-Daisy

For the first part of this response, see: What makes a friend?

The short answer:

By chance, until I find a better way.

The long answer:

Given that I have an idea of what my perfect best friend should be like, it is now my job to find her. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task, considering that, as I described, she probably doesn’t exist, ontological arguments be damned. But a rough approximation would also do me just fine, so the question becomes, where is she?

It’s difficult to meet friends, and it’s difficult in a different way than how finding love is difficult. While a guy can go to a bar with the sole intention of meeting a woman, there’s no similar place to find a friend. While hitting on someone in a bar somehow seems reasonable, I would be pretty weirded out if some guy came up to me and said that he wanted to be friends. (“Come into the bathroom and meet my other ‘friends.’”) You can’t just post an ad on Craigslist saying that you’re looking for a best friend that meets a set of specifications. Actually, you can, but you can’t expect any responses. Actually, you can, but you can’t expect any of them not to be weirdos.

Most people meet friends naturally, that is, they meet them through social events or hobbies or work or mutual friends or the like. If you’re out doing something that you like or that you do all the time, of course you’re bound to find people similar to yourself who are prime targets for friendship. However, this strategy doesn’t really work for me, not only because I don’t like doing things with other people, but because my ideal friend isn’t me.

Sometimes I think to myself, if I weren’t me, and one day I just happened to randomly meet me, would I become friends with me? And I think the answer is maybe not. What would we do all day? If I’m sitting around doing nothing, I don’t need someone like me who is always content to sit around doing nothing also; sometimes I really want someone who will drag me out to do something. I suppose we could spend the time talking to each other, since I already spend a little more time talking to myself than I’d like to admit, but then again, I wouldn’t say anything I don’t already think or know. The truth is that my ideal friend, as I’ve described her, is not like me in a lot of ways. Frankly, I know a lot of people who superficially appear to be like me, and I’m not really interested in being friends with any of them.

It’s also especially difficult for me because many of the qualities that I’m interested in are not obvious. They are things that you can only really learn about a person if you take the time to get to know them and open up to them. And let me tell you, I’ve invested a lot of time in people that I thought could be close friends with me only to find out that things just wouldn’t work out for some irreconcilable reason. Perhaps you think that I’m too stubborn, or that my standards are too high, but it hurts to find out that you can’t trust someone like you thought you could, that they really aren’t who you thought they were, so please excuse me for being a little picky.

Sometimes I think that there’s no way I could ever hope to find this friend. Most people like her are probably not looking for friends like me, and it seems like our paths are unlikely to cross through the course of our daily lives. (In fact, if I were ever to run into someone like her and she wanted to be close friends with me, I’d almost be tempted to think, what’s wrong with her?) But people sometimes meet random other people, so I’ve not given up hope yet. Still, I’d like to think that there’s a better way.

Maybe I should try Craigslist.

Cheers,
-qm