I'm pretty much truly alone. I'm 44 years old, no wife or family of my own. My dad and 2 siblings live 300 miles away so I don't get to interact with them very often. I don't really have any good friends. I have a few buddies that I'm able to do stuff with a couple of times a month, but that's it. They're all married and have kids so they don't have time to spend with me. Unless I need to go to the store or something, I'm pretty much home, by myself. Once summer gets here it'll be nice because at least I'll be able to go fishing after work and on weekends.
Another problem is that I'm a high functioning autistic person. Most people probably wouldn't notice anything odd about me once they get to know me, but it definitely makes this area of life very hard. It's extremely difficult to meet people as my social norms are backward. I need to already know someone before I want to talk to them. I usually do this by interacting with them in some kind of activity and I learn whether or not they're someone I want to know better which makes me want to talk to them and gives me something to talk to them about. If someone's a complete stranger, I have no idea what to talk to them about. For me, unless I'm talking to someone I already care about in some way, the purpose of talking is the exchange of information. If I don't know someone, I don't know if they know anything I need to ask them about, nor do I know if I know something I should inform them about which makes talking pointless.
I remember someone suggesting I should ask someone what kind of work they do as a conversation starter. For most people, this is probably a good opener, but the way my brain works, it's not. If this person is a stranger, why do I want to know where they work? How will that information be useful for anything in and of itself? Interrupting someone to ask them for a useless, meaningless bit of information is just . . . . . . . . I can't even describe how wrong and stressful that is. My church doesn't have any kind of social activities so there's no viable way for me to meet anyone.
Now if it's a person I know and care about in some way, it's completely different. I just need to find a way to get to know something about them before actually trying to converse with them.
Someone above mentioned prayer and while I do pray (probably not as often as I should), it doesn't help at all. If anything, it makes me feel worse as it will lead me to believe that God may help and when nothing changes or even gets worse, I obviously feel worse than before. Praying feels like calling someone you consider a friend who never answers their phone anymore. You leave them a voicemail and they never call you back.