Hello party people,

I've been thinking a lot lately-- which may or may not be a good thing...

Something I've been mulling over is the idea (yet again) of: **friends.**

I cannot for the life of me keep friends anymore, &amp; I haven't really tried to make new ones. I work with people who are nice enough, but wouldn't be my friends due to different things. I go home to my wife who has 2-3 friends that she actually talks to, and a slew of people on Facebook who will like or comment on things. Neither of us count them as real friends, but they're there.

Then there's my end. Again, I've got 5 main coworkers. One is my father. I have a few family members I don't get fed-up with constantly &amp; only speak to occasionally, but other than that I have zero friends. Even online. I talked with college classmates for like a month, after THEY initiated contact. No word now for many months, even though they read my last messages *(what jerk made that feature, by the way?)*. 

I'd say that about 80% of the time, I don't even care or notice about having zero friends. But that 20% where I do notice, I just want to break down. I wonder if I'm just so horrid that it makes sense to have no friends...? Then I remember certain "friends" that I lost that were the horrible ones. (An example is a "friend" who tried to stick their hand in my pants after I said no.) So I get stuck in this awful indecisive point where I won't contact anyone, won't talk to anyone new, but I seethe about having no friends. The closest I have is a mutual friend with my wife, who she's know since they were kids...

Anyway, that was a bit of a vent-session, I think... My point is simply a question for discussion: **do you think having friends is important or even required for people? In or out of a relationship, &amp; especially on the BPD perspective if your spouse has friends...?**

Ps. The title is from an 1857 painting by a hugely important female painter: [Emily Mary Osborn](https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/victorian-art-architecture/pre-raphaelites/a/emily-mary-osborn-nameless-and-friendless).