Hard time keeping people close as an adult

[nethergirl]

As a child I always had a lot of friends and had no problem making and maintaining friends. I always had a strong personality in those relationships. I was good at keeping up those relationships and also I could bring people together and find common bonds between them so we could all spend time together.

However my relationship with my parents was always lacking - both of them worked multiple jobs and left me alone a lot, I tended to spend time with my friends and their parents even spending several days a week at other people's homes, where I was welcomed and loved rather than being alone in my home.

As a teenager something changed. My first close boyfriend (first love!) created a slight that caused me to have a mental breakdown around 15 - specifically we had just had a breakup and he went and slept with one of my best female friends a couple weeks later. As a result I lost many friends who couldn't/didn't want to deal with the pain i was experiencing.

Despite that happening I did get through it, and moved on to make more friends in college and when I moved to a new city. However I find myself in a horrible pattern where someone gets very close to me, and I start cutting them out. I get really annoyed spending time with them but bottle it, instead of say something before it's too late. A guy I dated made a joke about how i picked people like my parents, who would neglect me, and therefore I wasn't having healthy relationships. I have no clue how true this is. I DID notice this with a man I fell in deeply for once, who didnt end up loving me in return - the pain of that denial was far too much to bear/one of the hardest things i'd been through as an adult. So i have this constant cycle of losing people close to me whether i cut it off, or they do.

Currently i am married and my marriage is actually going amazingly well. We have built trust - and he's certainly done things that have felt like a letdown but for some reason it doesn't matter with him. To know I have this one working relationship makes me realize i CAN do it, i just don't know what the difference is between him and everyone else in my life (in my mind).

But he is the only person in the world I want to spend time with. When I go to work, I drag my heels getting there because I don't want to interact with people. Ive been at the job over 3 years and do it very well. I just don't want to talk to anyone and have no real friends at work. I pushed out all of the friends i have outside of my husband who got close to me. typically i had chosen to be close to people who valued the friendship less than I did (or at least that was my perception), so I would become frustrated by someone not trying, or giving at all, and just give up on them and literally cut all contact. I have kept several friends who were never close at all and am only comfortable keeping people at that level around at this point.

The thing is I dont have the urge to try to make a good friend right now, because I feel like I've been hurt or let down too many times to go through it over and over again. But I fully realize my intolerance or high expectations are facilitating a lot of this.

I also openly fear interacting with people, in the sense that when I am home I don't want to leave to run errands because someone might talk to me on the sidewalk or try to strike up a conversation at the grocery store. It's not that i am scared of people or shy, it is more not seeing the point of faking a conversation and especially not seeing the point of getting to know people any more.

I realize it's negative and that there's fault in my feelings, but I'm having a hard time getting over it.

Edited May 18, 2012 by nethergirl