Want to retreat but know that wouldn't be helpful

I always want to make new friends, the issue I have is I suffer from time blindness and if I go through a very busy patch, even long standing friends can expect to get just a short check in at most every 3 weeks - 3 months, so maintaining friendships with people who expect a lot more or erroneously take it personally as some kind of rejection has often been a breaking point of those friendships. The plus side I suppose is I'm low maintenance and only expect the ocassional prod in return, I don't expect friends to put their own stuff on hold for me, it's just pick up the chat whenever you get time kinda deal.

I always want to make new friends, the issue I have is I suffer from time blindness and if I go through a very busy patch, even long standing friends can expect to get just a short check in at most every 3 weeks - 3 months, so maintaining friendships with people who expect a lot more or erroneously take it personally as some kind of rejection has often been a breaking point of those friendships. The plus side I suppose is I'm low maintenance and only expect the ocassional prod in return, I don't expect friends to put their own stuff on hold for me, it's just pick up the chat whenever you get time kinda deal.

Hi!  Totally agree with you but didn't realise it was a problem before!  I'm the sort of person that once I'm friends with you, you'll always be in my heart even if we don't speak that often.  I think the problem is that everyone has different expectations and in a friendship you sort of have to figure it out amongst you what you expect from the other person and what works for the friendship.  I don't feel like many other people are willing to work on a friendship in this way and most of my friends once they moved to different towns just seemed to make other more local friends!  If a friend really needed me I would be there for them but other than that your time scale of between 3 weeks and 3 months (and sometimes even longer!) sounds reasonable.  I've no idea what other people think of this.  I hope that my consistency is that I always will reply no matter how long it is and when I do reply I put a lot of thought into it!

I can relate to this- I can be very bad at responding to messages and can go for periods where I just don't feel up to seeing anyone. Luckily a lot of my friends are similar or are just quite understanding. The downside of that is though that if I do want to see someone, that means that there is often no-one available as I barely have any friends and they are all either very busy or need a lot of downtime too... I don't think I could cope with a friendship where there is too much pressure to give etc. I like friendships to feel natural, not forced, those are the ones that last and there are a few special people that I can go for months not seeing but then when we do see each other, it feels like we've been in touch every day.