Acquaintances Are My Weakness

As best as I can determine, human relationships fall into three categories: romantic relationships, friendships, and casual acquaintances.  I've realized over the years that if anyone exists who doesn't have a weakness in creating or maintaining at least one of the three above types of relationships, I haven't met him or her yet.

Adults, even the well-adjusted ones I count as friends, seem to fall into one of the three below groups:

• Weak at romantic relationships, but good at friendships and good at casual acquaintances: This type of person has a wonderful social network but, by active decision or by simply not caring, rarely enters the world of romantic relationships.  There could be many reasons for this, but I'm not this type of person so any attempt of my own to understand this better would be conjecture and likely inaccurate.  
• Weak at friendships, good at romantic relationships and good at casual acquaintances: This is probably the least common of the three groups, but I do know a few people like this.  They can date someone seriously, they know a thousand people anywhere they go, but they only have like four people they can confide in and would meet my criteria of a true friend.  Again, I'm not this type of person so I don't want to dive too deeply into motivations, reasons, or whatnot - but I suspect trust may be the fundamental issue here.
• Weak at making casual acquaintances, good at romantic relationships and good at friendships: This is the bucket I place myself in.  Let's explore this a bit deeper...

I haven't always been this functional, but maintaining a stable and loving relationship with my wife isn't difficult at all - we have a strong, constructive relationship; we value the same things, and we love each other deeply.  Neither of us like yelling at each other (though we do this sometimes, which is a good thing).  Anything can happen in a relationship, but I feel like ours is an especially high-quality one.

Keeping close friends around isn't a challenge for me, either.  When I meet someone who I find interesting, and if the feeling is mutual, you're my friend until you decide you don't want to be my friend anymore.  I treat my friendships seriously and I count my friends as some of the most important people in my life.  In quantity as well as in quality, I feel I have more close friends than most people.  I'm going to pat myself in the back (metaphorically) for this here, because I'm about to enter a world where I'm likely to get kinda hard on myself.

Acquaintances are my weakness.  It's my critical, yet casual, observation that other adults put themselves in situations where they get to know lots of other people to a greater extent than myself.  They are also better at getting to know these people - they share a greater curiosity regarding other people, and/or are less nervous of being judged by them than I am.  I tend to keep to myself at parties, and as a result I don't get to know as many people as I otherwise could.

This is a ton of self-analysis which may or may not be interesting to anyone else, but I think it's because of each of the below factors:

1. I really, probably, am a rare type of person: I have strange interests and it's pretty clear I am of reasonable intelligence, which already turns off half of the people in the world (who are scared of quirky, smart people).
2. I am terrified of rejection: Failure bothers me, especially in a social context, and it's safer to get to know fewer people vs. more if you're worried (irrationally, of course) about not being considered "cool" or interesting.
3. I was never socialized correctly: I grew up in a really strange environment where everyone around me was either super quiet or super insanely loud, so I tend to assume the worst when I don't know someone.  The number one trait I hope not to carry on to my child, whenever he or she happens to happen, is this one.  I actively want my future child to talk to strangers.  They need to learn at a young age that virtually everyone is harmless.
4. I'm not a "joiner."  It's next to impossible to get me to join a group - it's the hardest thing in the world for me to do.  Part of it is the self-deprecating old Mark Twain saying, that I'd never want to be a part of any group which would have me as a member.  Part is the social phobia and fear of rejection thing, from above.  Another part is my latent libertarianism (I just don't really like groups of people, due to groupthink and the potential for bad things to happen when people cluster together). 

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My next question is whether having acquaintances is even important; that is, of the three types of people I've listed above, is it the case that being the third type (which I am) makes a person less happy than being either of the previous two?  I have absolutely no idea whether this is the case - I suppose someone out there researches this kind of thing, but I haven't taken any time to look it up.  Perhaps I should, at some point.

I can say that personally (not generally speaking), the feeling that I don't know lots of people is important enough to me such that I've decided to take the time out of a lovely Sunday afternoon to write this blog post, so it must be a topic of at least some importance.  It's my opinion I'd be a happier, less anxious, and more well-adjusted adult if I knew more people.  My goal for this next decade of my life, my goal for my thirties, is to somehow end the decade knowing more people than I did at the beginning.

This will be difficult to do, because I'll have to work consciously to undo some of the mental barriers I've built over the first thirty years of my life.  It'll also be difficult because of the nature of being in one's thirties, a time in life when most people turn inward and spend more time at home with their spouse and child(ren).  But I still am hopeful I can pull it off.

There's no magic bullet for something like this, but some potential solutions may include:

• Sucking it up and joining a group: Eventually, I'm going to have to do this, right?  I've thought long and hard about joining some combination of a running group or a volunteering organization.  At some point I'm just going to hit a critical mass of motivation and/or desperation toward myself, and join a group.
• Having a kid: I'm pretty sure as I get older, the percentage of people who remain childless will continue to decrease.  If I really want to get to know more people, that's a nice secondary benefit of having kids.
• Not caring so damn much: This sort of defeats the whole purpose of this article, but if it doesn't matter to you, the problem doesn't exist, right?  I'm totally grateful for my wife and my friends, shouldn't that be enough?  And, borrowing from Eastern philosophy, shouldn't not caring so much lead to what you truly want coming true?  Something like this would be very far outside my comfort zone - I've spent the last thirty years grinding to make the things I want to have happen actually happen - but it's certainly a possibility.

What about you, blog reader?  Where do you find yourself in the categorization I described above, and do you feel comfortable where you are?  Have you ever dealt with anything like this?  Have any solutions worked well for you?