Beyond Selidor

This is really lovely to hear — most people commenting here seem to share my opinion that it's hard to make friends in adulthood, so it's nice to know it can be done!

I spent quite a lot of my childhood/teens perennially terrified of shoving myself where I wasn't wanted or making a nuisance of myself, but the older I get the more confident I become that people do in fact want to be friends with me, and thus the better at actually making and taking advantage of opportunities for friendship

I relate to this a lot, although I still don't think I'm great at 'taking advantage of opportunities for friendship' in person, though I find it quite easy online.

Usually once I get a signal that someone wants to spend time with me specifically, in an active rather than a passive way -- a conversation moving from general Twitter to DM, a specific invitation to an event that they're hosting, a shift from [structured activity or context through which I first know them] to [unrelated just-for-fun activity] -- is when I start to think 'wonderful, it seems we're friends.'

This makes a lot of sense to me. I'm just terrible at being the one who sends the signal!