For most of my adult life, I’ve had a clear explanation for why I don’t have many close friends.
High standards.
I’ve said it enough times that it stopped feeling like a defense and started feeling like a personality trait.
I know what real friendship looks like.
I’ve lived long enough to stop accepting the imitation.
I’d rather have one person I can truly count on than a dozen who are inconsistently there.
It sounds, when I say it out loud, like wisdom.
But a few months ago, a friend—one of the handful I’ve actually let through—said something that made the whole explanation fall apart.
We were talking about something else, some drama going on with people we knew from college, when she said, “I think you leave before you can be left. I don’t think it’s standards. I think you’re just trying to protect yourself.”
I changed the subject immediately and went back to the drama.
But the sentence has been sitting with me ever since. I’ve been sitting with it for months now.
I’ve been turning it over and over again. I’ve been testing it against the version of myself I’ve been carrying around.
The version that has high standards. The version that has learned from experience.
The version who, if I’m being honest, has been so busy protecting herself from disappointment that she forgot to notice what the protection was costing.
The difference between discernment and armor
I didn’t build the wall from nothing. There were real disappointments. There were real people who weren’t careful with what I gave them. There were real moments of reaching for someone and finding them unavailable in the specific moment it mattered.
You learn from those. You should learn from those. The problem is, I kept learning past the lesson. Every disappointment added another requirement. Another thing to watch for. Another quality someone had to demonstrate before I’d let them close enough to matter.
By my forties, the requirements had gotten so specific, so layered, that almost nobody qualified. Not because the people were bad. Because I’d quietly set the bar at a height that made failure inevitable and kept me safe from ever having to find out.
That’s not discernment. That’s armor. And the armor looks so much like wisdom from the inside that I didn’t know the difference for years.
What chosen loneliness actually costs
There is a version of solitude that is genuine preference. I know people who live there—who have found their own company sufficient and don’t experience the absence of closeness as a loss. I’ve wondered for a long time whether I’m one of them.
I’m not sure I am.
Most of the time, the aloneness is manageable. I have my work, my routines, and the few people I’ve let stay. I don’t walk around in obvious pain.
But there are moments—at a table where other people have the easy shorthand of long friendships, at a party where someone laughs with the warmth of someone who is truly known—where I feel the outline of what’s missing. Not acutely. Just clearly. The way you feel a tooth when it’s gone.
I’ve been calling that outline my standards. I’ve been telling myself it’s the price of quality. What I haven’t been willing to say out loud is that it might just be the price of the protection. That I’m not paying less by keeping people out. I’m just paying differently. And the bill has been accumulating for a long time without my quite noticing.
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The specific fear underneath all of it
It’s not the big betrayals I’m afraid of. Those have a shape. They have a narrative. There’s something to point to.
What I’m most afraid of is the small kind. The forgot-to-call kind. The didn’t-show-up-to-the-thing kind. The slow accumulation of small evidence that I mattered less to someone than I thought I did.
That specific pain has a particular quality. Not grief—more like recalibration. The quiet process of revising downward your understanding of your own value in someone’s world.
I’ve gotten very good at not having to do that. I’ve kept the contacts sparse enough that there aren’t many people in a position to revise me downward.
The prevention works. That’s the honest answer. I have almost entirely eliminated the possibility of that specific recalibration. I have also almost entirely eliminated the possibility of the thing that would require it—someone who mattered enough to revise me in the first place.
That’s what I’ve actually been protecting myself from. Not the disappointment. The mattering.
What my friend was actually telling me
She’s known me for fifteen years. Long enough to have watched me manage the distance from close up, which is its own kind of proximity.
What she said—the longer version, once I stopped deflecting—was that she thought I used the language of discernment to do the work of avoidance. That I had real standards in some areas of my life, and I’d borrowed the vocabulary of those areas to explain something that was actually just fear dressed in a sensible coat.
She said she’d watched me pull back from people who were genuinely good. Not perfect—nobody is—but people who would have shown up if I’d let them. And that every time, I’d found a reason that sounded like a standard but functioned like an exit.
I didn’t have a response. I still don’t, really.
What I have is the uncomfortable recognition that she’s right, and the more uncomfortable recognition that knowing she’s right doesn’t automatically tell me what to do with it. The armor doesn’t just come off because you’ve identified it. You’ve been inside it a long time. It’s gotten hard to tell where it ends and you begin.
That’s the part nobody tells you about building a wall that works. It becomes load-bearing. You can’t just take it down because someone pointed at it.
What I’m actually trying
Not to trust everyone. I’m not interested in the overcorrection, and I’m too old to perform it convincingly.
But maybe to stay a little longer before I go. Maybe to let someone matter before I know for certain they’ll stay. Maybe to experience the forgotten call as a data point rather than a verdict. Maybe to hold the risk of being let down without requiring the guarantee of not being let down in advance.
That version of me isn’t far away.
The distance between us is mostly the willingness to test the thing I’ve been protecting.
To find out—finally, after all these years of prevention—whether the thing I’ve been afraid of is actually as bad as I’ve been treating it.
My friend was right. I’ve been leaving before I can be left.
I’m fifty-something. I don’t have unlimited time to keep doing that.
So I’m trying to figure out how to stay.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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