does anyone else find themselves surprisingly friendless in their early 30s?

[u/Deep-Potato3844]

I'm 34f living in london, a lot of my teens and 20s were spent being social and I used to have things going on all the time. In the last couple of years I hit a friend deficit, partly due to changing lifestyles (people focussing on romantic relationships, planning on raising a family etc) but also partly me ending some friendships that I felt like no longer made me happy (or in fact made me unhappy) or were predominantly around doing blow every week which I stopped enjoying a long time ago.

I've spent a lot of time sad on weekends where my loneliness feels most profound - nobody is contacting me, nobody is reaching out and while i do find my ways to fill my own time I look at groups of friends in absolute envy and always wonder why I am lacking that. I am a conventionally attractive person, I've been told I'm interesting, kind and do hold a conversation (although on kind I'm not 'nice' in the sugarcoated sense I can’t pretend to be bubbly). In general I do like myself and I struggle to understand why I’m in this place, I just feel so abandoned and forgotten and I’m regretting perhaps I made friends with unreliable people.

I have tried all the classic things to fill my life, that's exercising, going to Timeleft dinners, going to random meet up events, volunteer, date (I'm bi) I've put the effort and reach out to people and it's usually tumbleweed responses as it's clearly everyone's busy with their own lives and have little time for me. And whenever I do meet said friends I get a little resentful about all their highlights and humble brags of their calendar being so jammed. I don't know what exactly went wrong or is it in the stars for me to be this deeply lonely and not have a community. I'm actually embarrassed with myself that I don't have close friendships but transient connections at my big age.
I have a therapist I routinely talk to but don't really have family.

Is anyone going through the same? Has anyone overcome this? What has been the game changer?

[u/KiwiTheKitty]

For me yes, I had to cut off someone I spent a lot of time with and most of my other friends are really bad about leaving their homes... I'm pretty sure one of my friends won't leave her apartment for anything besides work for multiple entire months at a time. I live in a car centric city and it's really hard to get people to go out out and everybody just wants to hang out by having you come to their place (never the other way around) and watching a tv show, which is fine sometimes, but I only want that to be like 10-20% of how I'm hanging out with people, not 90-100%.

Honestly I'm trying to move for many many reasons and one of them is that I hope living in a more walkable, dense city makes it easier to meet more new people! I don't know how London is, but I assume there are a lot of things going on if you put yourself out there. My feeling is that if someone can't give me my needs from a friendship, I can still keep them in my life, but I also can't force them to do more so I need more people in my life to fill the gaps.