Michael98
March 4th, 2017, 06:01 PM
I entered college this last summer, and during the first couple months I noticed that several of my classmates liked me a lot and tried to start conversations with me, and some of them made friendly suggestions that I should show up at their weekend parties some time.
However, I have a fairly low confidence in my ability to "remain interesting" to people, and I was afraid of doing something that would make them start disliking me or something, so I ended up hesitating and becoming a bit of a loner, and hardly ever hung out with them at all.
Yes, I did follow them to a party during our first week together, but I didn't speak that much at all there either, and well, that's pretty much it.
And ever since then I started noticing that they got more and more "careful" around me to the point that they almost started to look intimidated by me.
There is also this cute girl in my class who was flirting with me a bit for a couple weeks, but I noticed that she also slowly started to act uncomfortable around me, to the point that she started to look away and look very uneasy whenever she saw me, like she was trying her best to ignore me.
I was not "unfriendly" to anyone of them or anything, I just wasn't particularly talkative and didn't really say much at all unless they tried to talk to me themselves.
Then things remained this way up until Christmas, and I was very tired of feeling this way among them all the time.
So I decided that as soon as school started after Christmas break, I would try my best to be more "open" and approach people in general a bit more often.
The funny thing here is that while I tend to see good results from people who meet me for the first time, I find it much harder to get the same reactions from my classmates.
Sure, they might react with surprise (and sometimes give me a careful smile) in the beginning, but they quickly fall back into acting intimidated around me again.
This is a bit discouraging, because it makes me feel like they don't even notice any differences, even though I am sure that I act very differently.
So how should I handle this?
I am aware that most people "get used to" people being a certain way and develop a kind of "confirmation bias" from there, so that maybe my classmates notice my possible shy behaviour much more easily than they notice my social side, but that's kind of the point - I would like to change their opinions about me, but it feels like it's much harder to convince them compared to new people.
And I do want to fix my relationship with my classmates, because I can tell that most of them would be great potential friends.
However, I have a fairly low confidence in my ability to "remain interesting" to people, and I was afraid of doing something that would make them start disliking me or something, so I ended up hesitating and becoming a bit of a loner, and hardly ever hung out with them at all.
Yes, I did follow them to a party during our first week together, but I didn't speak that much at all there either, and well, that's pretty much it.
And ever since then I started noticing that they got more and more "careful" around me to the point that they almost started to look intimidated by me.
There is also this cute girl in my class who was flirting with me a bit for a couple weeks, but I noticed that she also slowly started to act uncomfortable around me, to the point that she started to look away and look very uneasy whenever she saw me, like she was trying her best to ignore me.
I was not "unfriendly" to anyone of them or anything, I just wasn't particularly talkative and didn't really say much at all unless they tried to talk to me themselves.
Then things remained this way up until Christmas, and I was very tired of feeling this way among them all the time.
So I decided that as soon as school started after Christmas break, I would try my best to be more "open" and approach people in general a bit more often.
The funny thing here is that while I tend to see good results from people who meet me for the first time, I find it much harder to get the same reactions from my classmates.
Sure, they might react with surprise (and sometimes give me a careful smile) in the beginning, but they quickly fall back into acting intimidated around me again.
This is a bit discouraging, because it makes me feel like they don't even notice any differences, even though I am sure that I act very differently.
So how should I handle this?
I am aware that most people "get used to" people being a certain way and develop a kind of "confirmation bias" from there, so that maybe my classmates notice my possible shy behaviour much more easily than they notice my social side, but that's kind of the point - I would like to change their opinions about me, but it feels like it's much harder to convince them compared to new people.
And I do want to fix my relationship with my classmates, because I can tell that most of them would be great potential friends.