ineptshieldmaid:

And I think part of that process of combating loneliness involves
acknowledging that close friendships aren’t necessarily easy. It’s like
exercise; some people are naturally drawn to working out all the time,
but most of us like “having exercised” but still groan as we schlep down
to the gym.

The most successful healthy people are often not the people who love
exercise, but who have accepted that the minor unpleasantness of putting
in an hour down at the gym will make their lives infinitely better.

Friendship, at least for me and my wife, is a weird balance, because
as introverts we have a natural reluctance to going out with people.
Left to our own devices, we’d rather nest in at home every evening –
we’ve spent time working, we want to relax, going out with people and
putting out more energy seems exhausting.

Yet we do it. Because we realize that if we followed our natural
instincts all the time, we’d be unhappy in the long run. We need
friends. But we can’t just call up our friends when we need them –
that’s treating them like tools. So we gotta get our duffs off the couch
and say those precious, precious words:

“Wanna hang out?”

We need to reach out and cultivate those relationships in advance,
to schedule nights out, to go to events we’re not really thrilled about
when we start out – because, like exercise, a lot of the time it
actually turns out to be pretty awesome once we’ve started. You feel
pumped, you feel jazzed, you feel glad that you went and did it.

A lot of maintaining good friendships is getting past that inertia of
“Don’t wanna.” (The other half is knowing which nights you’re
absolutely right to spend at home alone.)

Friendships are wonderful, and empowering, but they’re not a free
natural resource for most of us. And I think a lot of people wind up
lonelier than they should because they’ve got this weird, sitcom-fed
idea that friendships just happen – Joey and Monica and Chandler just
wind up on the couch at the coffee shop by magic every night.

Whereas the truth about friendships is that those “you wind up in the
same place every night” usually only happen when you’re living in the
same place, which only really happens in college. Once you’re a grownup,
your friends scatter, and you have to chase them down – Joey’s at the
cafe every Tuesday for open mic night, and Monica lives on the other
side of town but really wants to see that show at the Capitol Theater,
and Chandler’s working lots of overtime but hey do you wanna catch a
drink when he gets off work at 8?

You have to schedule. You have to go to places with people you’re not
100% comfortable with yet. You have to decide to leave your apartment.

That all takes a certain amount of labor. And you get rewarded big in
the end – there’s nothing better about walking into a room and seeing
that smile when your buddy shows up and getting that hug and knowing
that yeah, this evening was totally worth going out for because you
stuck with these people until you had a history together.

Ferrett Steinmetz, Not Being Lonely Is Hard