My experience with friendships is quite pathetic , lol... I've never had the best of luck. I am introverted and I was very shy during my childhood and teen years. I will say that I have always been friendly and had a sense of humour, so never been difficult or unapproachable.
Primary school -
Thought I had a best friend, but during the days of Piczo, she wrote pages/tributes about her other friends (including a girl that used to bully her), and nothing about me.
I also felt like the tag-a-long or the least important friend. A group of girls had a lunch time table rota and I always "allocated" the worst seat.
I remember once when I tried to comfort one of my classmates when she was upset, she said she didn't want help from me, and went to her other friends.
I remember once when I was playing a game of Bulldog with 2 girls and they kept picking each other and left me out.
I lost contact with everyone after I left.
Secondary school -
I was on my own, until a new girl joined halfway through Year 7 and started to tag along with me. It felt like we were only hanging out because we had no one else. She wasn't the nicest person and started to put me down a lot. We would flick through magazines and she would criticize the models' appearances. She wanted to be a glamour model but she wasn't that pretty, she just had long blonde hair and was good at photography, so she always made herself look good in pics (meow). We just didn't have much in common really.
She made friends with another girl and we all arranged to meet up to go shopping in town, but they stood me up. Their friendship was brief as the girl was a bit of a tearaway.
Another girl joined our twosome in Year 9 and they became close. Once again I was always left out and they would bitch about me by writing stuff on paper and pieces of cardboard. They once invited me to the cinema after school, but ran off together when I went to meet them at the school gates.
One of my most embarrassing moments was when I was trying to become more confident, so I tried to make conversation with a boy in the year above that volunteered in the library. I thought he would be understanding/easy to talk to, as he was popular but a bit geeky. Instead he just loudly laughed in my face and said he was shocked as he'd never heard me speak before, then went and told everyone what happened. That really crushed me.
Finally, in Year 10, I clicked with a girl that I met in one of my GCSE classes. We had the same sense of humour and would spend hours chatting and laughing together. We both had the same struggles with fitting in. She had a group of friends that used to bully and prank her all the time (getting popular boys to ask her out as a joke. etc). She would come to me upset when they were being mean. Then a few months later, she told me her dad got a job in another country and she was going to be moving there! I was upset, but I knew we'd keep in touch via MSN/webcam. On her last day at school, I didn't get to say goodbye to her properly in person, as her group of friends whisked her away for a Pizza Hut meal, lol. There wasn't time to see her again after that, as she was packing to leave. We did keep in touch for a few months on MSN, but she soon settled into her new life and moved on. Haven't spoken to her since. Last I heard, she got together with a guy from that country and moved back to the UK. Her group of friends at school were all bridesmaids at her wedding. I think we could've become best friends if she hadn't moved away, but it wasn't meant to be.
I was glad when I left school so I didn't have to see the other 2 girls ever again.
Since then I haven't had any experiences with real friendships. I'm friendly to people, but I mostly keep people at arms length as I start feeling anxious. The closest thing to a female friend was an older woman at my last job, who I used to have a laugh with and had a few things in common, but again she seemed to prefer the company other colleagues.
Also at my last job, a girl joined a year after I had, and almost immediately became close friends with an already established friendship group there, going on nights out and holidays together. I found myself feeling quite jealous of her, even though I didn't want to be friends with those people anyway.
At the moment, I'm just happy with my own company. My boyfriend is my best friend.